How come this site does so well?
-
Hi Guys,
It's bugging the crap out of me why this site does so well http://www.stagedinburgh.com/ when I look at it's link profile its so weak and terrible plus many links comes from the sites they own. Somehow the site out ranks many sites for search terms like edinburgh stag party, edinburgh stag do, edinburgh stag weekends. Am I missing something? They seem to only have links from 13 domains and they aint great.
What am I missing?
-
Sorry for slow response kids school holidays have started! Yeah Doug i thought their on-page was well stuffy, almost spammy but some how they still get away with it.
What i have noticed on a few tests we have done in May / June is how quickly I can get a new site to rank for 2 or 3 keywords and stick in a matter of weeks.
Bang goes my theory of building one great website and it's back to building micro sites specific and not have all eggs in one basket.
Tom I know I should not get wound up by it, but when you spend 10 years on a brand / site to be beaten by some crappy sites it's hard to swallow, like anchovies
Dan yeah the site has ranked high for a while, and I see his other sites doing well, I may wake up one day and he gets hit across his network but to date that's not happened and I am not sure he is actually breaking any Google rules.
-
Hey There
This is an odd one for sure, and a really crowded space with a ton of EMDs and PMDs so a lot of noise. But I have a few hunches just after looking around a bit.
1. Their site is visually blazingly fast compared to chillisauce.
2. Their site is one of the few I could find, where the entire domain is hyper-focused on "stag in edinburgh" - and has the benefit of the homepage being the page to rank or match topically for those types of keywords. Whereas chillisause and some others are broader focused in what the site is about - and so architecturally, or linking, perhaps not as easy for Google to rank/credit those types of pages within the site, in this case, and as Doug pointed out perhaps their on-site is not so strong.
3. User metrics could be playing a role - CTR in serps etc. They actually stand out as being the least spammy of most other results, and have a shorter domain name (less spammy looking).
But yeah, there's plenty of anomalies - all exact match anchors for linking, less links, a borderline spammy/keyword-stuffed website. Has this site done well for a really long time?
-Dan
-
"Now, it's a guess, but I'm wondering whether the website is using the .htaccess file to block some crawlers, such as OSE and Majestic, from looking at its link profile. So there could be a bunch of links that are not being seen."
Tom, surely this would only block such crawlers from identifying outbound and internal links from their site - not the inbound ones. OSE is showing the inbound links so it doesn't appear to be blocked. The spiders.txt file is used to help identify bots rather than block them.
Looks like lots of on-page optimisation there! Compare it to this one which has better PA/DA but just look at the on-page:
-
Hi Mark
The site-wide links from those domains you mentioned would probably be giving a lot of juice, plus the on-page optimisation is certainly geared to those keywords (perhaps more so).
However, there might be something more to this. In the robots.txt file, they are disallowing a file called: Disallow: /spiders.txt. In the spiders.txt file, you've got a list of a whole bunch of web crawlers on the net.
Now, it's a guess, but I'm wondering whether the website is using the .htaccess file to block some crawlers, such as OSE and Majestic, from looking at its link profile. So there could be a bunch of links that are not being seen.
The thing is, this is all speculation - which is why I always advocate not to spend too much time focusing on competitors. It's definitely frustrating and sometimes more frustrating than helpful. Looking at competitors can provide some takeaways and quick wins, but if there are none on display, as in this case, accept defeat and move on.
Not much help I know, but hope it does somewhat.
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
-
What to do with PDFs that rank well?
Looking at some reports, I found that a client's site has PDFs that are ranking well for niche terms and getting some traffic. What can I do to get more out of them from a marketing standpoint? The obvious issue is that a PDF doesn't have the interactivity of a site visit, where we have analytics and CTAs. Someone has to follow a link back from the PDF to the site for us to even register a visit, let alone try to get their email or have them otherwise convert. My first guess is to make landing page summaries of the PDF content that link to the PDF, and canonical the PDF to the respective landing page. Has anyone tried this, or done something else that they would recommend again in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFA0 -
Big problems with site traffic
Hello! I have big problems with website promotion. It's been 7 months and the attendance on the site is 1-5 people a day. I do not understand the reason. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? Site: www.azartlist.com Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bobic1 -
A single page from site not ranking
Hello, We have a new site launched in March, that is ranking well in search for all of the pages, except one and we don't know why. This page it is optimised exactly the same way like the others, but still doesn't rank in Google. We have verified robots.txt for noffollow, noindex tags, we have verified if it was penalized by Google, but still didn't find nothing. Initially we had another site and was on the topic of this page, but we have redirected it to the new one. In case this old site was anytime in the past penalized by Google, could it be possible that the new page be influenced by this? Also, we have another site that ranks on the first position, that targets the same keywords like the page that does not rank. It was the first site we launched, so it is pretty much old, but we do not have duplicate content on them. Maybe Google doesn't like the fact that both target the same keywords and chooses to display only the old site? Please help us if you have any ideas or have been through such thing. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniela.pirlogea0 -
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
301 entire site
Is there a good 301 code snippet to change just the root domain but keep the ending extensions? I just bid on a domain that I think would be much better for me moving forward, but do not want to have to try going through thousands of pages to do their 301 individually My site is almost 4 yrs old. Well established and has a large fanbase. Several of our social networks are under the name of the new branded domain, hence part of the desire to switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
How to see which site Google views as a scraper site?
If we have content on our site that is found on another site, what is the best way to know which site Google views as the original source? If you search for a line of the content such as "xyz abc etc" and the other site shows before yours in search results, does that mean that Google views that site as the original source?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Multiple sitemaps for one site?
Excuse my sitemap ignorance here. I've got a site and it's got a blog in a sub-folder. The blog gets updated frequently, the main site does not. Is it best to; a) Have 2 sitemaps.. one in the root and one in the /blog folder. b) Have 1 sitemap that is regularly updated The reason being, I know there's various plugins that create blog sitemaps on the fly, so that would be much easier than updating the main sitemap every time a change was made. If the answer is 2 sitemaps; Would you stop the root sitemap from detailing the contents of the blog folder or just update it every so often with the contents of the blog folder?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0