How is this site ranking so well? Their link profile is awful and website is messy and difficult to use?
-
Hi folks,
This question has been baffling me for some time now and I'm still struggling to get to the bottom of it. www.sterlingbuild.co.uk is the website of choice for Google when it comes to searches relating to roof windows, velux windows, fakro windows etc. I can't understand why?
Their link profile is atrocious. I'm struggling to find one 'high quality' link in their profile at all. Most of their links are guest blog posts which Google is apparently now treating as spam, or links from other sites that they own - also spam.
The design of the site is incredibly messy and confusing. But one of the biggest flaws of the site (which I am suspicious may also be what is helping them) is they list every single different size of window as a different product. So whereas with most websites in this market, you search for the type of window you want e.g. a VELUX GGL 3050 window, and then choose the size you need from a drop-down menu, Sterlingbuild list every size as a different product. So you have to scroll through reams of product listings to find the window type in the right size before you get to any information about the product itself. Not to mention, their site is riddled with duplicate content because 12 different sizes of product are not different products, they are the same product, just a different size, so they have the identical product description for numerous separate pages basically selling the same product.
How on earth has Google decided this is the best website in the marketplace when it comes to roof windows?
-
sterlingbuild.co.uk has a poor quality backlink profile with anchor text heavily weighted towards [velux windows]. But links are still the most important factor for ranking well. Despite Penguin, crackdowns on link networks, etc., old school link building still works and this is just one of many examples of it. It's definitely not a good long-term idea, but if you need sales quick it works.
-
We have a similar problem with one of our competitors. If anyone can enlighten us, please do!
-
I wouldn't mind knowing the answer to this as well.
Going on Moz's data our website is far better than our competitors. Their site has a great design and is easy to use, but that's where it stops, but they are in position #1 and have come up very quickly.
They don't have many links, they don't appear to produce very much content either, so what other metrics should I be looking at to try and get ahead of them because I'm coming up blank!
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
-
Using one robots.txt for two websites
I have two websites that are hosted in the same CMS. Rather than having two separate robots.txt files (one for each domain), my web agency has created one which lists the sitemaps for both websites, like this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: https://www.siteA.org/sitemap Sitemap: https://www.siteB.com/sitemap Is this ok? I thought you needed one robots.txt per website which provides the URL for the sitemap. Will having both sitemap URLs listed in one robots.txt confuse the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
Disavow links old links
We have built a lot of sites and there a few sites we no longer manage or want any association with. When I have looked at webmasters I can see 20 to 200+ odd links back to our site. The page however at source has no reference to our website. I have searched the code but there isn't anything. Is it safe to disavow these or just leave them?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Hi Mozers, is the AMP project is supposed to be an SEO factor on mobile platforms? Also, can it be used on ecommerce sites such as Magento or Shopify as well? Thanks!
It stands to reason that Google will favor early adopters of Accelerated Mobile Pages, but it seems heavily geared toward news publishers so far. What about regular Wordpress sites, or ecommerce sites like Shopify, should AMP be pursued on that type of CMS?
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane771 -
Using Product Page Content from an Offline Website
Hi all, We have two websites. One of the website's no longer sells product range A. However, on the second website, we would like to sell range A. We paid a copywriter to write some really good content for these ranges and we were wondering if we would get stung for duplicate content if we took these descriptions from website 1 and placed them on website 2. The products / descriptions are live anymore and haven't been for about 6 weeks. We're ranking for some great keywords at the moment and we don't want to spoil that. Thanks in advance! D
Technical SEO | | 10dales0 -
Unnatural links from your site
Hi, 24 February got this penalty message in Google webmaster tool. Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Already removed all the link on the blog and sent reconsideration request to Google spam team. But request is rejected. Please help me on this or share link with me on same case. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Explain me the SEO impact when a website has more internal link compared to less internal links
A website that I am working on has more than 200 internal links (Its because of the design and various kind of service that we offer). I want to know its SEO impact. I also want to know the SEO impact when a website has less internal links compared to more internal links
Technical SEO | | BoniSatani0 -
My seo company has a footer link that links to my site by keyword will this effect my rankings
My old SEo company has a footer link by keyword to my site so it acts like a site wide link will this effect my rankings. My site was in the top 5 for many keywords now page 2 and 3 so I am trying to see what has effected it as we havent changed what we do
Technical SEO | | Casefun0 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0