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
-
Strange strategy from a competitor. Is this "Google Friendly"?
Hi all,We have a client from a very competitive industry (car insurance) that ranks first for almost every important and relevant keyword related to car insurance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sixam
But they could always be doing a good job. A few days ago i found this: http://logo.force.com/ The competitor website is: http://www.logo.pt/ The competitor name is: Logo What I found strange is the fact that both websites are the same, except the fact that the first is in a sub-domain and have important links pointing to the original website (www.logo.pt) So my question is, is this a "google friendly" (and fair) technique? why this competitor has such good results? Thanks in advance!! I look forward to hearing from you guys0 -
Blogger relationship - One Off VS periodic monthly blogging (which is best)
Good day all, I am interested in building relationships with my bloggers (i.e...people that are interested in my website and blog about it regularly). I would also propose to them the idea of blogging about our page regularly, perhaps recurring monthly. If the strategy is in place, could receiving links from the same bloggers each month cause any negative SEO effects? Thanks for your input.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
Competitors Building Bad Back Links
Hi there, I recently checked the back links for my site using Open Site Explorer, and I noticed a huge number of bad back links which I believe a competitor might be building to help lower my ranking for a number of highly competitive keywords. Besides spending time disavowing these links, what else can be done? Has anyone else been faced with the same problem? Any help would be appreciated. cXT0lvd.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bamcreative0 -
I think competitors are trying to remove my links! Have you ever seen this?
Here is the email my sales rep received today (what can we do to combat this?): From: Jaqueline carol [mailto:jaqueline-carol@hotmail.com]
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pbhatt
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2013 12:57 AM
To:
Subject: I NEED your help - PLEASE Hi, Due to the latest GoogIe update we are working on cleaning up the links to our website . There fore we would like to kindly ask you to remove our link from your page. link details: URL: We believe that it would help both sides to rank up higher in Google and not get penalized during the future Google updates.
Please remove my link at the earliest and notify me about the same. Thank you for your cooperation. Best Regards, Jaquelinecarol1 -
Is this a clear sign that one of our competitors is doing some serious black-hat SEO?
One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to? They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related? Wh10b97
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kibin0 -
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
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Virage0 -
Competitors and Duplicate Content
I'm curious to get people's opinion on this. One of our clients (Company A) has a competitor that's using duplicate sites to rank. They're using "www.companyA.com" and "www.CompanyAIndustryTown.com" (actually, several of the variations). It's basically duplicate content, with maybe a town name inserted or changed somewhere on the page. I was always told that this is not a wise idea. They started doing this in the past month or so when they had a site redesign. So far, it's working pretty well for them. So, here's my questions: -Would you address this directly (report to Google, etc.)? -Would you ignore this? -Do you think it's going to backfire soon? There's another company (Company B) that's using another practice- using separate pages on their domain to address different towns, and using those as landing pages. Similar, in that a lot of the content is the same, just some town names and minor details changed. All on the same domain though. Would the same apply to that? Thanks for your insight!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DeliaAssociates0 -
What can i do with it? Black hat in my competitors.
Hi, Here we go, i have a site that is is in first page but in last positon, and i got a competitor that is in first place but his is just duplicate content for every page. He just chage the keyword but still the same content. Really, what can i do, do the same thing, i dont want black hat my site. Do i have to keepping doing my on-page and link building and do not care about him?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ex20