Social Media - big ranks it seems from it

[pauledwards]

Hi there, one of our big competitors is ranking first for a huge key term.

We were wondering how they did it, so i went through normal processes:

• Age of domain - reasonable.

• Unique content - a little but the ranking page has pretty much none - meaning panda update isn't applying here,

• Back-links - nothing special really, not enough to be above everyone in my opinion.

Then i had a look at social media shares, over 2,000 mainly as facebook shares.

So i went on their facebook profile and it does not seem like they are spamming content on there. Are these shares from users sharing the link? if so can i find out how many per post? i imagine there is a team setup to share this content when it is published on their facebook page?

It just seems so very unfair they are ranking number one like this, the content in their site is poor, it's not a relevant domain either. So much for panda update eh?

Any thoughts appreciated.

[EGOL]

It just seems so very unfair they are ranking number one like this,

How do you know that is what is responsible for their rankings?

...one of our big competitors...

That's what my money is on.

[Jay.Neely]

Hi Paul,

Assuming you're checking through Open Site Explorer, the "Facebook Shares" count you're seeing is the number of times someone has posted a link to the domain on Facebook, not how many times people are sharing posts from the company's Facebook page. You may know this, but you mentioned "shares per post", which doesn't apply based on what's being measured here. If they're getting any shares of their posts you should be able to see a number count for on their page itself.

Try using Open Site Explorer's "Compare Link Metrics" tab to see exactly where your competitor's page has advantages of yours. Also check to see if more of your competitors links have exact-match or near-exact-match anchor text.