Am I missing something?
-
Hey guys,
First of all, a big thanks to SEOmoz and the community. I've been an avid reader for about a year now and have seen some great improvements.
I'm always focusing my efforts on strategies that work well for my niche. Although I've come accross one of my competitors that doesn't seem to have much going for him, although he ranks very well. His root domain is ****E and the URL where (seemingly) spammed links point to is ***. If you do a site: command he has 1000+ pages although most consist of "events calendar" (empty). Also, I ran some of his content through copyscape and there seems to be multiple versions of it throughout the web.
After all this, he ranks very well for money keywords in our niche, although his on-page is horrible so there are many opporunities I've capitalized on.
Is there something I'm missing? I'm trying to find the value in his website but its not very clear to me since his backlink profile is (seemingly) junk and his on-page goes against all I was told to implement.
-
You are not the only one that is frsustated with this, please post url i can only guess without it.
-
Several things play here. They could have great anchor text, more followed links from stronger sites, or better on-age (although you discredit this) . Without seeing the actual site, it is hard to say what is going on.
-
I disagree with removing the links. How can we do any DD for you?
-
I didn't mean it like that......but honestly i'm stumped......
-
I don't really appreciate the condescending talk but it's 59% and 55%. Understand, I'm not an SEO by trade and its really a small part of my daily duties.
-
unrelated anchor text in places with lots of oubound links = NO rankings........so there's something else ranking him that OSE missed??? The only factor OSE doesn't count is domain age.
Also, tell us the seomoz keyword difficulty of the keywords this guy is ranking for that are the 'money' keywords.
-
I decided to edit the question since Barry raises a good point. I only wanted to bring something to the light and didn't intend on "calling" anyone out- my apoligies if it came off like that. I only wanted to explain that I've done some due dilligence on this website and have found very little reason for this website to be ranking for high traffic keywords (yes personalized search is off..). In his backlink profile there are around 8 local directories listed, and then about 1200 forum spammed post with some weird anchor text not at all related to our niche ("cheap viagra" "cheap auto insurance"). His website isn't alone, it's listed among 30-50 other websites on each post. These forums are often in foreign languages so that just seemed really odd. Majestic SEO shows these links started aroun 2008 and continued through 2009.
-
I dunno if a mod will stop by but I imagine there will be a lot of requests to 'out' other sites (not saying I've found anything dodgy); are there any guidelines on reporting competitors dodgy tactics as I know mostly seoMoz and other big sites usually avoid public outings and would there be any liability should the site complain?
Just thinking aloud.
-
Good catch. Or you could try adding &pws=0 to the end of the URL string for your search, and that should eliminate the personalized results from being delivered to you.
-
It seems like when I run into this same scenario, I'm dealing with a mature URL that has simply positioned itself in a market and been able to hold. It's not that they are technically doing things "right", but apparently are not doing enough wrong to affect the gravity of their age and backlinks.
I think the original registration on that domain was 2003. Are there any other sites ranking around some of your key phrases that are less than 1-2 yrs registered? Age could be a factor.
-
I'm not sure what the money keywords in your industry are, but the guy doesn't have any link anchor text to speak of in the OSE profile, and his few backlinks are not high quality so its doubtful he is ranking for anything. Also, he's nowhere to be found on SEMrush.
Most likely what's happening is you've clicked on his site so many times, google has personalized your search and pushed his site to the top of the results for YOU ONLY. Try logging in with a different browser or running the seomoz keyword difficulty tool for the keyword that you think he ranks highly and see if he shows up.
-
First you might want to post the non shortened version of the URLs. I know many people do not trust shortened links from sources they don't know well enough.
Your competitor may be buying links en masse with customized anchor text for the links. I see it daily with the competitors of my client's sites. If you aren't in an overly competitive keyterm space, a few thousand bought - anchor text optimizied - low quality links can easily be enough to get someone ranking for terms even though the rest of their SEO is abysmal.
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
-
Why Product pages are throwing Missing field "image" and Missing field "price" in Wordpress Woocommerce
I have a wordpress wocommerce website where I have uploaded 100s of products but it's giving me error in GSC under merchant listing tab. When I tested it show missing field image and missing field price. I have done everything according to https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/product#merchant-listing-experiences and applied fixed i.e. images are 800x800 and price range is also there. What else can be done here?!merchant listing.jpg
Technical SEO | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document
Error: Missing Canonical Tag
Technical SEO | | ahmadmdahshan
But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable?0 -
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
Fetch and Render misses middle chunk of page
Hey folks, I was checking out a site with the Search Console's "Fetch and Render" function and found something potentially worrisome. A big chunk of the middle of the page (the homepage) shows up as empty space in the preview render window. The site isn't doing so hot in terms of rankings, and I'm wondering if this issue is causing it (since it could indicate that 80% of the copy on the homepage is invisible to Google) A few other details: The specific content isn't showing in either view. Both the "What Google sees" and "What the visitor sees" are missing this chunk of the page The content IS visible in cached versions of the page The html for the content seems to be in the The "Fetch" part returns "Complete" as opposed to "Partial" so I don't THINK it's a matter of javascript stuff getting blocked by robots.txt This website was built using the Wordpress theme "Suco" and the parts of the page that aren't rendering are all built with the Themify Builder tool Not ALL of the Themify Builder elements are showing up as blank. There's a slider element that's rendering just fine Any ideas on what could cause whole portions of a page not to show up in Fetch and Render? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert780 -
Issue Missing Meta Description Tag
Hello Friends, Today I found missing meta description tag when Seomoz update my website crawl diagnostics. I recovered other type missing meta description tag but I don't understand how can I recover this type page. Here is the examples. http://www.example.com/blog/page/2/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/3/ http://www.example.com/blog/page/4/ Links continue...... Thanks KLLC
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Am I missing something if I absorb one site into another?
We are absorbing one of our sites into another and I want to make sure I am not missing anything. The site that is being absorbed will no longer exist as all the content has been replicated/duplicated on the main site. About a month ago we added canonicals to all the duplicate content to point to the new site it will be a part of. That went very well and organic traffic continued to flow to those pages on the new site. We recently (yesterday) used 301s on all the pages using mod_rewrites and redirected the domain name from the old site name to the new one. Using mod_rewrites we redirect any other page linking to that domain to www.newsite.com?ref=oldsite.com. So far I dont see anything coming in on an unexpected link. I still need to tell Google via Webmaster Tools that the oldsite is now on newsite.com correct? Is there anything else I might bump into that we havent thought of? Thanks
Technical SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Re-Platforming our ecommerce site. What am I missing?
Hello, We're going to be moving our niche ecommerce site with a catalog of over 4,000 products over to a new ecommerce platform (magento). All url structure will be changing although about 70% of the content will be staying the same such as meta info and product page content. We'll be doing 301 redirects of all old url's to new url's and we'll have a new google sitemap submitted immediatly. So my question is.. What MORE can I do to keep our site from dropping in the search engines while our site is being re-crawled? Does anyone have any experience regarding what normally happens during a website replatform such as this? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | DannyQR0 -
I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out.
I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out. In Google http://www.google.nl/#hl=nl&q=internet. The number 3 result is a big telecom provider in the Netherland called Ziggo. The ranking URL is https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/. However if you click on it you'll be directed to https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/ HttpFox in FF however is not showing any redirects. Just a 200 status code. The URL https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/ contains a hash, so the canonical URL should be https://www.ziggo.nl/. I can understand that. But why is Google showing the title and description of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/, when the canonical URL clearly is https://www.ziggo.nl/? Can anyone confirm my guess that Google is using the bulk SEO value (link juice/authority) of the homepage at https://www.ziggo.nl/ because of the hash, but it's using the relevant content of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/ resulting in a top position for the keyword "internet".
Technical SEO | | NEWCRAFT0