Competitor Inverse Relationship
-
Please take a look at the attached images which show the apparently inverse relationship between one of our top competitors (purple trace) and us (blue trace). There seems to be a fairly clear correlation, we're just left wondering what could have happened to cause this.
It seems clear that the 'purple' team was termporarily able to beat us out on the keywords we were working on, but a few questions arise:
-
Did the purple team beat us out, or did we screw something up?
-
If they beat us out, what on earth did they do because it clearly wasn't content creation (they have a skimpy site with no blog and their Alexa score is almost identical to ours
-
We took some steps to fix our situation including:
-
Page optimization
-
website speed improvement
-
Blog review and update
-
You can see from the second graph (rankings) that our keyword rankings slid starting may/2018 along with our traffic, but we regained our footing a year later (now).
-
I guess the big questions are:
-
were there black hat tactics at play here?
-
If so, what were they likely to be?
-
did the problem go away because the purple team stopped paying someone for these results?
-
Was it our fault but we fixed it?
-
what is the most likely reason for this problem?
-
Could it have been a Google algorithm update? Which one?
Anyway, any insight that you can give would be appreciated.
-- PeteR
-
-
Wouldn't be possible to draw any kinds of conclusions with such top-line data. From this post, we don't know what the keywords are or which websites were involved in these movements. We'd want to be looking at actual keywords, looking in the WayBack machine to see how content on both sites changed, looking in Ahrefs to see if there are any matching link trends for either site
Alexa score is ancient I wouldn't be looking at it any more to be honest. Regardless, it's not possible to check for black-hat attacks on "purple line" or "blue line", we need domains here!
If you want a comprehensive audit of exactly what happened, no one can supply it for 'mystery' websites based on a couple of charts
You're also looking at things in a very binary way. How do you know they didn't do something good **when **you screwed something up? Why does it have to be one or the other? In SEO usually there are a convergence of factors surrounding such large movements!
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
-
Competitor Drops 10,000 links since last index. Lets play detective.
One of the intriguing things about SEO is being able to reverse engineer your competitors rankings because all the technical information is available for those who know where to look. I recently looked at my Dashboard and saw that one of my competitors had dropped 10,000 links. The questions is why? Google algorthm change? Blackhat Penalty? Something else.? Here are the numbers, I am going to lieave my own clients site out because his numbers are pathetic. www.Leafly(dot)com 50.4k Links Down 10k www.thcfinder(dot)com 1,530 links Down 71 www.weedmaps(dot)com 64,000k links Up 1.5K Is it just me or is that a lot of links to loose over one indexing period?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidMeshah0 -
Competitor Black Hat Link Building?
Hello big-brained Moz folks, We recently used Open Site Explorer to compile a list of inbound linking domains to one of our clients, alongside domains linking to a major competitor. This competitor, APBSpeakers.com, is dominating the search results with many #1 rankings for highly competitive phrases, even though their onsite SEO is downright weak. This competitor also has exponentially more links(602k vs. 2.4k) and way more content(indexed pages) reported than any of their competitors, which seems physically impossible to me. Linking root domains are shown as 667 compared to 170 for our client, who has been in business for 10+ years. Taking matters a step further, linking domains for this competitor include such authoritative domains as: Cnn.com TheGuardian.com PBS.org HuffingtonPost.com LATimes.com Time.com CBSNews.com NBCNews.com Princeton.edu People.com Sure, I can see getting a few high profile linking domains but the above seems HIGHLY suspicious to me. Upon further review, I searched CNN, The Guardian and PBS for all variations of this competitors name and domain name and found no immediate mentions of their name. I smell a rat and I suspect APB is using some sort behind-the-scenes programming to make these "links" happen, but I have no idea how. If this isn't the case, they must have a dedicated PR person with EXTREMELY strong connections to secure this links, but even this seems like a stretch. It's conceivable that APB is posting comments on all of the above sites, along with links, however, I was under the impression that all such posts were NoFollow and carried no link juice. Also, paid advertisements on the above sites should be NoFollow as well, right? Anyway, we're trying to get to the bottom of this issue and determine what's going on. If you have any thoughts or words of wisdom to help us compete with these seemingly Black Hat SEO tactics, I'd sure love to hear from you. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it very much. Eric
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish0 -
Competitor ranking well with duplicate content—what are my options?
A competitor is ranking #1 and #3 for a search term (see attached) by publishing two separate sites with the same content. They've modified the title of the page, and serve it in a different design, but are using their branded domain and a keyword-rich domain to gain multiple rankings. This has been going on for years, and I've always told myself that Google would eventually catch it with an algorithm update, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Does anyone know of other options? It doesn't seem like this falls under any of the categories that Google lists on their web spam report page—is there any other way to get bring this up with the powers that be, or is it something that I just have to live with and hope that Google figures out some day? Any advice would help. Thanks! how_to_become_a_home_inspector_-_Google_Search_2015-01-15_18-45-06.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inxilpro0 -
Competitor link profile shocking - yet still out ranking!
Howdy fellow Mozzer's,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TimHolmes
I have been doing some background seo checking on a competitor in my small "insurance niche" to try and see why they have recently shot up the listings and are now consistently out ranking us.
We have quality content on our site and have always taken an approach of trying to be whiter than white when it comes to developing out SEO plans. The site in question has recently moved ahead of us (along with some aggregators e.g. confused.com) possibly due to shifting patterns from possible algorithm changes favouring brand or could it be a case that Google has dropped a ball when it comes to checking back links as the competitors site is 99% linked to link farms, link submission sites, directories and lots of other spammy/poor quality sites. We do not feel they are doing anything from a content stand to justify their sudden propulsion up the ranks. I am reluctant to pursue dodgy tactics to help get out site back in position as I feel it could then contribute and hurt us down the line. Does anyone know how I can combat against their poor QUANTITY over QUALITY banklink profile that is surely helping them at the minute? At a bit of a loss so any help would be greatly appreciated. aRTu4cT0 -
A site is using their competitors names in their Meta Keywords and Descriptions
I can't imagine this is a White Hat SEO technique, but they don't seem to be punished for it by Google - yet. How does Google treat the use of your competitors names in your meta keywords/descriptions? Is it a good idea?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterConnor0 -
SERP dropping along with competitors - Google algorithm mix up?
I am hoping someone will have some insight as our recent ranking drop has been driving me crazy trying to figure out what happened. Our site is www.dgrlegal.com. We've been building links by creating quality content and getting others to link to it. We've seen our rankings rise to 3 for a number of keywords. Suddenly around March we saw a pretty drastic drop but only for certain keywords (maybe a Penguin hit?). For example, "new jersey process service" still has us ranked 3rd but "new jersey process server" sees us much lower around 19. I've noticed several competitors have dropped while one has risen so is this negative SEO? Probably not as our backlink profile doesn't seem suspicious but it has me very confused. We've received no warnings or notices from Google. The only thing I see is that our indexed pages went from 13 to 98 in January and have been now steadily increasing to 129, although I thought this would be a positive. Any suggestions or thoughts? I thought maybe things would shake out but it hasn't happened as of yet - we just keep dropping.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | amandadgr0 -
Link Farms and The Relationship between 2 domain with a 301 Redirect
I have an interesting scenario: Domain A was worked on by a disreputable SEO company off shore. The owner of Domain A came to me for my assistance and evaluation on how the off shore company was doing. I concluded that he should terminate the relationship immediately. One of the bad things they did was register Domain A with a LOT of link farms. I started working on a new site that eventually we decided to go with Domain B (a better, but totally related domain name to Domain A). I added a nice new site and had my client write clean, relevant information for it. We've done all legitimate, above ground by-google's-recommendation SEO for Domain B. I have a series of 301 redirects from Domain A to Domain B. Since April 24th, organic search results have plummeted. I see many incoming links via Webmaster Tools as the massive link farms, but those link farms have Domain A in their databases, not Domain B. My question: is Domain B inheriting the link juice from Domain A insofar as the incoming links are showing up in Webmaster Tools as directly related to Domain A? Should I sever the ties with Domain A altogether? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KateZDCA1 -
Reviewing a competitors links
Using Open Site Explorer I was reviewing a sites links. This site happens to appear at position 2 in Google for a key-term that I am targeting for one of my sites. Most, if not all of the links appear to be coming from some very questionable sources that have absolutely nothing to do with their sites content or business. Some of the page titles are : Free Music - Free Music Tampa Bay Florida Fishing Guide Free BDSM and Bondage Sex, BDSM XXX, Fetish Por... LAX Car Rental Reciprical Links Page - Add Your Link Casino More Links Is this practice going to end up hurting their site and catch up to them at some point? From what I have read, these are not the type of links that you want to be going after.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrandonC-2698870