Why does my competitor rank so well with so many paid/traded links?
-
Greetings everyone!
I've really been enjoying my Moz membership these past few weeks after studying my data and comparing it with my competitors I think it's high time I started asking some questions.
The website I manage has a very good ranking history but over the past year we've seen a slight decline in our SERP positions. I don't think this has anything to do with on-page optimization but rather with our link profile. We have only about 10k links total while they have 175k - our mozranks are nearly identical, but his moztrust is 4.46 and our's is 3.51.
I am guessing, on our end, I need to remove some of these low-quality nofollow links (though I'll be honest I have no idea how we obtained them to begin with) but what I don't understand is how our competitor is ranking so well because when I browse their link profile, it is filled with paid link and traded link directories that don't appear to be penalized for what they are. I was under the impression that this was bad SEO, but now I am thinking I should just play his own game and submit to these sites too.
Looking for any advice or ideas on a better way to compete...
Jennifer
-
Visage, those stats seem to say their site is much larger than yours, based on internal links. Your link count from others is small. If some of those are site-wide, then perhaps the number of domains pointing to you is much smaller
How does your domain count compare to theirs?
-
Thank you so much for the tip Jason!
I will be sure to use the reporting tool more liberally, since you say it actually works! I've tried it a number of times in the past but I've never quite knew if anyone at google ever actually acted on it or just put it there for our peace of mind
-
Thank you for your response!
I think your sentiments echo my mentality on the subject. The last thing I want to do is play our competitor's game because I feel like my website is of a high quality and we've done well so far without using these sorts of link-building practices.
And to clarify, our total links (including internal linking) are 10k, external are only 1.2k (his are 175k total and 4.1k external).
I appreciate the advice on not wasting my time on hunting down to no-follow links. I'll spend it more wisely finding new high-quality links instead!
-
I understand the frustration and in most of the cases it's the way you are painting it but you are also subjective and also with that amount of links it is very hard to fully understand the link profile of your competitors and yours.
What I think it's important to understand, in general, is that the quality matters over quantity. Maybe 80% of your competitor links are not even consider and there is a small set of powerful links in his profile that is actually making the difference but again it's hard to really assess the situation.
You can however go his route and hunt his link but if you do so and get low quality links you might end up in the future in a hard corner and start sessions to remove those - especially with Googles crusade on links. You might get some short or even medium term advantage and get heads on with your competitor but dose it pay on a long run ? I think not.
I would rather go for only a few really powerful links, smart ones, to increase your visibility then going fishing with TNT.
As for you going on a crusade to hunt your low quality no follow links, in my opinion, is a waste of time.
Those links by having the no follow won't affect, positively or negatively your link profile and equity in general. The anchor text of those links are indeed taken in consideration by google to understand better your website, product and brand but you will need to balance very wise (if those anchor text are bad) if it's going to help you hunting them down. ( to be honest I think even if the anchors are bad it dosen't make sense to waste time on them).
Just a thought .. or several
Hope it helps.
-
Hi Jennifer,
I know I might catch some flak for even talking about this, but I have to keep a close watch on our competitors because they are constantly rocketing up in the SERPs from paid/spam links. For some reason it seems to take Google a while to catch them even with the new Penguin update.
I have no problems with using tricks of the trade to get advantageous results in rankings, but it irritates me to get outranked by competitors who are blatantly just buying thousands of junk links.
In each situation I use OSE to get several examples and then use:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport to report them. It seems to take a week or so but each time I've reported I've seen the spammers URL tank about 50 positions.
In many situations however Google will just remove value from the junk links without penalty and you can still lose your position to the competitor if overall they have more good links than you do. Also take into consideration your onsite SEO, content quality and social signals.
Best of luck,
Jason
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to find if a website has paid or spammy back-links? Latest ways to investigate.
Hi all, I would like to investigate about our website back-links if something is wrong. If there are any paid or spammy back-links. How to proceed on this exercise? We have been using ahrefs and seems like it's quite enough. Is there any way we can pull out the fishy back-links? Do we have any helpful data from webmasters about this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Linking Websites/ Plagiarized Content Ranking Above Original Content
Hey friends! Sooo this article was originally published in December 2016: https://www.realwealthnetwork.com/learn/best-places-to-buy-rental-property-2017/ It has been consistently ranking in positions 2-3 for long tail keyword "best places to buy rental property 2017" (and related keywords) since January-ish. It's been getting about 2000-2,500 unique views per week, until last week when it completely dropped off the internet (it's now ranking 51+). We just did a site redesign and changed some URL structures, but I created a redirect, so I don't understand why that would affect our ranking so much. Plus all of our other top pages have held their rankings -- in fact, our top organic article actually moved up from position 3 to 2 for much more competitive keywords (1031 exchange). What's even weirder is when I copy the sections of my article & paste into Google with quotes, our websites doesn't show up anywhere. Other websites that have plagiarized my article (some have included links back to the article, and some haven't) are ranking, but mine is nowhere to be found. Here are some examples: https://www.dawgsinc.com/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ http://b2blabs.com/2017/08/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-places-buy-rental-property-year-2017-missy-lawwill/?trk=mp-reader-card http://news.sys-con.com/node/4136506 Is it possible that Google thinks my article is newer than the copycat articles, because of the new URL, and now I'm being flagged as spam? Does it think these are spam websites we've created to link back to our own content? Also, clearly my article is higher quality than the ranking articles. Why are they showing up? I double checked the redirect. It's good. The page is indexed... Ahhh what is going on?! Thanks for your help in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jessica7110 -
Ranking without SEO?
We have a client that we've been doing white-hat SEO for for over 3 years and they've always been number 1 in Google for all their targeted keywords. This year, their competition has been ranking above them and our client has been pushed towards the bottom of the first page. After thorough research, we discovered that this competitor is doing no SEO at all, just regular PR which our client is also doing. Our client is even spending money in Adwords and their competition isn't. Can anyone explain how a website that does zero SEO can magically be ranked at the top now and above our competitor who we're doing everything possible for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOhughesm0 -
Main keyword decline in SERPs ranking :-(
Hi Moz, My very humble attempts at SEO has been doing very well for over a year with the keyword phrase 'vintage chanel bags'. Recently, about 3-4 months ago I noticed it dropped from rank 1 to rank 5. I've slowly but steadily been building up more social marketing interaction (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram mostly), brand awareness in company is increasing more searches for 'Vintage Heirloom', great in-links from reputable companies & bloggers. What I'm confused about is that one of our competitors Rewindvintage now appears as no.1 for this keyword but tracking with Moz every metric we outperform them on, namely domain authority & Page Authority. I have noticed they have 4 anchor text links (dubious quality wordpress comments), with the anchor term vintage chanel bags and we have none despite ranking no. 1 for so long?? I'm trying to use the Moz science here, just a bit confused. Any help, insights, similar experience would be much appreciated. I engage only in white hat and look for slow & honest SEO growth (as far as I'm aware ! ). Thanks for looking Kevin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich0 -
Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smckenzie750 -
Too many links... OOPS
So I made a big mistake. I know it was dumb. I took a chance and got screwed. I've been researching one of my competitions back links and found that about 7000 of their 12000 links came from one site. Upon further investigation that site is a page rank 7 and the link looked bought. My competitions page rank is 6 which I thought was largely because of this one link. I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and they bought the link pretty cheap. So I thought... Hey!? Why not! About two weeks later, today, google webmaster tools finally found the link and my links went from 100 to 7100. Now that I really think about it, I know it was a stupid move. I just figured if they got away with it, I could. I'm a white hat seo'er from now on. I've learned my lesson. Wake up today and find that all 400 keywords I am attempting to rank for, which 60% used to be in the top 3, are now not in the top 100. Luckily I am still indexed in Google though, I'm just not ranking for anything significant. Now I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and had him remove the links. He was pretty quick about putting them up, so I figure they'll be down today. Is it just a matter of Google realizing that they're gone until I'm back in the SERPS? Or am I screwed for good? This is a little scary, I depend on Google for my entire livelihood. Yeah, I know not something I should be gambling with then. I only spent $125 on the links, but every month of traffic is worth about $3k to me. Ouch. If I lose a few months I'm at least looking at a $10k hit. Please give me some good news 😞
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjenkins240 -
Ranking questions
We have questions about our ranking and would like some advice.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whiteflash0