Competitor Rockets to #1 and I'm looking at keyword stuffing. Will Google catch up with it?
-
We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign. They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position.
In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term. I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven
tags on said page.
Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc. Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven
tags, and possibly adjust their rank? Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?
-
Now that I can see the real reason that our competitor is number one for one of our key search terms, it's because they bought hundreds of links from spam blogs. This just occurred in the past 30 days. Here's the big question: Do you report them or see if Google will catch up? I don't use black hat link building, but I would rather not draw attention to this issue if there is a chance for any "blowback" coming our way. I would use my secondary Gmail account to do the reporting, but I worry that Google would do something more than just look at that site for that term, and that rank. Any thoughts?
-
They moved all key items on their home page to top-left, and their content updates are better optimized to rank for the key search term. The older version of their site focused more on their company name, less about the product. As for their previous rank, they would never get above page three. I didn't even track them from week to week, becuase they were not worth my time. After reading what you said, and now looking at it with that information, they just figured it out.
-
A couple questions...
Was this competitor homepage optimized for this term before the redesign? Where did they rank for this term?
You say that this site is pretty well branded... often a site like that can decide to use the homepage to go after a term and.... BAM... they will be there the next day. Also, powerful sites can add a new page an.... BAM... be at TopSERPs for a brand new term the next morning.
Sites like Amazon can do a lot of damage when their sellers move into a product line.
About the
and KW stuffing. I don't think that will hurt them. Lots of people use
for design reasons so I don't think that google will whack them for it. A year ago one of the strongest sites in the "hosting" niche had their persistent navigation links all as
... the dominated with that and when they removed it in a redesign their rankings didn't change.
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
-
'Security error' for links accessed via Facebook on Android phones
Hi, This is not strictly a SEO/inbound marketing question, so please excuse me for that--- but I think this awesome community could certainly help 🙂 We recently migrated a client website to https (SSL from Godaddy; the hosting provider is a different one). All that went fine. The problem though is that when a link from the website is shared on Facebook or sent via Whatsapp, and a user tries to open the page on any Android device, it throws up a Security Error. On the Facebook app, it doesn't allow the user to go any further. It seems that this problem is not unique and many others have raised it in various forums -- we've tried many of the options mentioned; have tried to work with Godaddy support as well ---- but the problem persists. Any solution(s)/fixes will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Manoj
Web Design | | ontarget-media0 -
Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)
Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
Web Design | | cpawsgo
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents? Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page. The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside. However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen. The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied. Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper? Thank you!0 -
Google pagespeed / lazy image load
Hi, we are using the apache module of google pagespeed. It works really great, helps a lot. But today I've asked me one question: Does the "lazy load" feature for images harm the ranking? The module reworks the page to load the images only if the are visible at the screen. Is this behavior also triggered by the google bot? Or are the images invisible for google? Any expirience about that? Best wishes, Georg.
Web Design | | GeorgFranz0 -
Best Approach to Rank For Multiple Locations With Similar Targeted Keywords
I'm trying to determine the best way to set up a website to rank for a similar set of keyword phrases in three different cities. The keyword phrases I want to rank for are all pretty much the same with the only difference being the city associated with the keyword phrase. For example, "Austin water restoration" vs "San Antonio water restoration" vs "Houston water restoration". Each city needs about 7 or 8 pages of unique content to accurately target the group of keywords I'm trying to rank for. My initial thought was to write up unique content for each city and have each city act a site within the main site. For example, the main navigation for xyz.com/austin would be Austin specific, so when you land on xyz.com/austin and go to Services - Water Restoration, it would be all Austin specific content. The same would be true for San Antonio and Houston. The only problem with this approach is that I have to build up the page authority for a lot of different pages. It would be much easier to build up the page authority for one Water Restoration page and just insert a little "Areas we serve" on the page that includes "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" and maybe work the coverage area in again at the bottom of the page somewhere. However, it would be much more difficult to work "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" into the title tags and H1s though, and I couldn't logically work the cities into the content as much either. That would be a downside to this approach. Any thoughts on this? Wondering how large companies with hundreds of locations typically approach this? I'd really appreciate your input.
Web Design | | shaycw0 -
Without Keyword Info From Google - How do we re-do a site not knowing what to keep?
Bit of a riddle I am trying to figure out here... I have a client that receives some visits via organic searches (around 700). Most of which are to the homepage. The client isn't actively targeting any keywords yet (on purpose) and the homepage doesn't have much on it. I've been hired to do keyword research and re-develop the site but this is the first site I've done since google really put the hurt on keyword information. My worry is that without knowing what keywords people are using currently to search and find the site, I will be potentially deleting information that is bringing in traffic. Looking at the traffic and other keywords I can view I think the keywords are branded which makes it a bit easier but again, it is a bit worrisome, not so much for this client but for future work. Anyone have any ideas other than looking at webmaster tools and landing pages?
Web Design | | JoshBowers20120 -
Will changing our URL's to MVC friendly URL's have a positive or negative affect on our rankings and link juice?
We've recently changed our site over to a new hosting system, we've got similar pages and are now looking at changing the URL's to ensure we do not loose our link juice from our previous site. My question is regarding the URL's, is it worth us changing our URL's to MVC friendly URL have a good or bad affect on our rankings and or link juice? Thanks
Web Design | | SimonDixon0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0 -
Google News we were dropped and need help finding ot why
Hi i have a site called in2town lifestyle magazine http://www.in2town.co.uk/ and up until two months ago we were with google news and for a long time. But then all of a sudden we were dropped which left us with no confidence about our site and led us to make changes to the site, some good and some bad to try and find out what was wrong with our site and why we were dropped. We have now been concentrating on sorting the site out which has led in a drop in traffic due to not updating it as we should because we are more concerned in trying to make it a quality lifestyle magazine and get back in google as well as making it a good experience for our readers.. I would like your help and finding out what you feel is wrong with our site so we can then work on it and change it and try and find out what went wrong with google news. we have spent years on the site but now we have gone in the wrong direction because we were more worried about google news. If you can advise us on how we should change the site and sort the site out and make it into the professional site it was once more then that would be great.
Web Design | | ClaireH-1848860
