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
-
Site appears then disappears from Google
Hi, This is my first post to the Moz community. I hope someone can help me, as I'm at my wits end 🙂 Since mid to late April, my client's home page keeps dropping from Google rankings on and off on the desktop in incognito and non-incognito browsing. It seems to always be visible on mobile phones though. One day it's on page 4, the next day it's not anywhere to be found (even though some of her other pages rank). The site is here: evgeniaribinik.com I have done some blog writing (just text) for this client over the last few months, and recently she asked for some SEO help. After looking at her website, I noticed that she had a plugin called WordPress SEO on her site. She wasn't using this for the blogs, however. I don't think she did much of anything with SEO, but she did say that for the last few years, she was always on page 3 or 4 of Google. In mid/late April, she saw that she wasn't ranking at all for the keyword "boudoir photography nyc" anymore, despite a few years of ranking for it. I told her Yoast would be good to use. However, after she installed it, the same issues keep happening. Right now, she has Yoast and WordPress SEO plugins installed (I'm not sure if this is causing an issue as well). But I really can't figure out why she keeps going on and off page 4. She also asked me to optimize older blogs that she wrote herself for SEO. When I look at them, they don't have meta descriptions, good titles or good keywords. I realize this is hurting her, but why would her site be fine for years and all of a sudden not now? Thank you in advance for any help you can give me! Jill
Web Design | | lobeng770 -
2 or more wordpress installs on 1 domain
Hi ....I need to know if anyone has any concerns of running 2 or more WordPress installs on one domain and if so what would the concerns be. The situation is that we have a static html site that has a WordPress blog....and it is installed in example.com/blog/ . We will upgrade the static site to WordPress and this WordPress install will be in example.com/monkeys/ and then we will point its address to the root and make all other needed changes when ready to go live...but the install will stay in its own directory. So bottom-line is we have one domain with two WordPress installs that are each installed in their own sub directory and run from their own independent databases. There are quite a number of reasons for us to want to do this but I wont get into that......I just want to know if anyone has any concerns with this setup? The research we have done says its OK as well as our hosting provider....but before we get cracking we thought maybe one more "educated" input would make us feel more comfortable. Thanks
Web Design | | nomad-2023230 -
Is it worth keeping .html even if 301'ing
We're going from static to a wordpress based ecommerce site. While we can append .html to urls the directory structure will change so that www.oursite.com/productname.html goes to www.oursite.com/product/productname.html My question is: Is it worth the trouble (from an seo perspective) of using a plugin to append new urls with .html when we're going to have to use 301 redirects anyway? If not should the urls have a trailing slash?
Web Design | | jbk3650 -
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 -
Keywords in the page url for best SEO
Hello all, I am working in the keywors structure of a web and I have the following doubt: If I want to target these keywords: great food madrid and my website is: http://www.madridlive.com I do not know if I should keep either: OPTION 1: page url: www.madridlive.com/great-food-madrid or OPTION 2: page url www.madridlive.com/great-food I do not know if the search engines "understands" madrid in "madridlive", therefore I can avoid the "madrid" keyword, dicarding option 1 and going for option 2. Additionally I avoid duplication of the madrid keyword that can be seen as redundancy and also have a shorter page url. Thank you very much and sorry for such a question but I am new in this SEO field...just the excellent SEOMOZ's SEO Guide for beginners! Best regards, Antonio
Web Design | | aalcocer20030 -
How will engines deal with duplicate head elements e.g. title or canonicals?
Obviously duplicate content is never a good thing...on separate URL's. Question is, how will the engines deal with duplicate meta tags on the same page. Example Head Tag: <title>Example Title - #1</title> <title>Example Title - #2</title> My assumption is that Google (and others) will take the first instance of the tag, such that "Example Title - #1" and canonical = "http://www.example.com" would be considered for ranking purposes while the others are disregarded. My assumption is based on how SE's deal with duplicate links on a page. Is this a correct assumption? We're building a CMS-like service that will allow our SEO team to change head tag content on the fly. The easiest solution, from a dev perspective, is to simply place new/updated content above the preexisting elements. I'm trying to validate/invalidate the approach. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PCampolo0 -
Does listing my customer's address, phone number, and a contact form on "every page" count as duplicate content that they'd be penalized for?
I work with small local businesses (like Tree Farms, Feed Stores, Counselors, etc) doing web design, seo, etc. I encourage them to have their contact information visible at all times on their websites. I'm also delving into the world of contact forms. I want to have this info on every page - is this detrimental? Here's an example: http://www.trinityescape.net/marriage-couples-counselors-therapy-clermont-florida/ Thank you!
Web Design | | mikjgens1 -
Will opening in a New Window pass all link juice?
Hey guys, We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things. Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site. The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder. My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link? Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated! Thanks
Web Design | | CodyWheeler0
