Low quality websites with spammy EMDs still ranking higher than genuine websites?
-
Hey guys,
I've just been doing some searching and couldn't quite contemplate how heavily low-quality and spammy EMDs are still running some Google searches.
Just take "cheap kitchens", for instance.
Here are a list of URLs that appeared;
http://kitchenunitsdoors.co.uk/
http://www.kitchenunits9.co.uk/
http://www.aboutkitchenunits.co.uk/
http://www.cheapkitchenunits1.co.uk/
http://www.cheapkitchensonline.com/
http://www.buycheapkitchens.com/
http://www.cheapkitchenscheapkitchen.co.uk/
http://www.cheapkitchensforsale1.co.uk/
http://cheapkitchensaberdeen.co.uk/
http://www.kitchensderby1.co.uk/
http://www.cheapcheapkitchens.co.uk/
http://www.cheapestkitchensinbritain.co.uk/
http://www.cheapkitchenss.co.uk/
http://www.cheaperthanmfi.com/
As you can see, none of them appear to be genuine retailers and are setup purely to influence Google rankings. I'm amazed that Google is still giving so much weight to these types of sites - especially considering how search is meant to be better than it ever was before!
Any insights into why this is?
-
Backed by quite a bit of real-life experience on EGOL's part.
-
Hi Matthew,
If there are so many problems and so obvious, why don't you submit a report to Google. They clearly state this in their quality guidelines for webmasters:
If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please let us know by filing a spam report. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. While we may not take manual action in response to every report, spam reports are prioritized based on user impact, and in some cases may lead to complete removal of a spammy site from Google's search results. Not all manual actions result in removal, however. Even in cases where we take action on a reported site, the effects of these actions may not be obvious.
More details here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769
Why not do it? You got nothing to loose!
-
No offence but that is a proper generic answer.
-
From what I have seen, these types of website are only successful when competition is really easy. So working to boost the strength of your site will usually get you above these bottom fishers.
-
I agree matthew, but the intention with these sites is not just to rank for that one keyword.
Many black hats will bombard them with 100's if not 1000's of backlinks with varied anchor texts covering all the long tail words \ phrases which helps rank those sites for a whole range of things.
In fact there are tools out there that will find all the longtails, and even though adwords may show zero search volume, collectively they will bring in alot of long tail traffic that no-one has optimised for.
-
No, I definitely wouldn't say that. If I wanted a kitchen and I wanted it cheap then I'd say there's a good chance I'd be searching "cheap kitchens".
-
It's as though Google's saying "Let's leave the low quality queries to be filled by the low quality sites." I mean really... the only people who take a search like that seriously are the marketers who are trying to get their sites to rank for them-- people actually looking for kitchen remodeling contractors are searching with other terms. Wouldn't you say?
-
Just found this...
-
After a bit of research I've discovered that all but four of those domains are owned by the same person.
Incredible.
-
Yep, no. 1 in one of my niche is a one page EMD with 7000 backlinks (low quality comment spam), of which 98% are nofollow.
Its stupid.
-
I see the same pattern in Google. Are these sites scraping RSS feeds and publishing another person's content?
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Steps to Improve Page Rank and Domain Authority
Hi If the quality of web pages is very good I believe rankings should reflect this. My domain is at least 3 years old.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy1
What steps would you recommend short term and long term in terms of how to improve page rank and domain authority? Thanks.0 -
Dfferent domains on same ip address ranking for the same keywords, is it possible?
Hello, I want to ask if two domains which r hosted on the same server and have the same ip ( usually happens with shared hosts ) tries to rank for the same keywords in google, does the same ip affects them or not.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RizwanAkbar0 -
4 websites - meta titles and descriptions
I manage four separate websites/brands that all focus on the same topics and have the same achitecture. I am trying to improve each site's meta title and description, page by page, that I inherited from another before me. My question is, how different should each title/description be from one another for the same page type? Do the search engines consider this heavily in their decision process of who to show on SERPs? Am i able to simply swap out the brand name in the metas and call it done or should each meta be unique? if unique, how unique? As you can imagine, since each page is essentially the same with the same overall content and layout targeting the same keywords, it is very difficult to rewrite metas four unique ways. I greatly appreciate any advice on how you would approach this project.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
Competitor website, how come they get away with it?
Hi we have been looking at competitors websites do see how we can improve, this website jumped out at me straight away as spammy gateway pages where 3 words was the only difference on all of the pages. Why does google give them so much weight still and rank them so highly? I thought this is what G was trying to avoid? Am I missing something here in terms of great SEO opportunity? A checked for noindex or canonical and I cannot see any. Love to hear some feedback. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Do I need to use meta noindex for my new website before migration?
I just want to know your thoughts if it is necessary to add meta noindex nofollow tag in each page of my new website before migrating the old pages to new pages under a new domain? Would it be better if I'll just add a blockage in my robots.txt then remove it once we launch the new website? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Does Backlinks from User Profile Page Still Matter
Though, lot of algorithmic changes, updates have happened. However, backlinks from quality source or trusted sites has hardly lost its importance and thats why Open SIte Explorer or Majestic seo is still there to find quality of backlinks, trust factor and authority factor of the backlinks. I need to know does having backlink (dofollow) from Profile Page - still matters and if yes - will a do follow backlink from Moz Profile Page or any authority site or forum page, having dofollow link from user profile page - does it still count as a mark to authority of your site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0