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
-
Schema Markup Warning "Missing field "url" (optional)"
Hello Moz Team, I hope everyone is doing well & good, I need bit help regarding Schema Markup, I am facing issue in my schema markup specifically with my blog posts, In my majority of the posts I find error "Missing field "url" (optional)"
Technical SEO | | JoeySolicitor
As this schema is generated by Yoast plugin, I haven't applied any custom steps. Recently I published a post https://dailycontributors.com/kisscartoon-alternatives-and-complete-review/ and I tested it at two platforms of schema test 1, Validator.Schema.org
2. Search.google.com/test/rich-results So the validator generate results as follows and shows no error
Schema without error.PNG It shows no error But where as Schema with error.PNG in search central results it gives me a warning "Missing field "url" (optional)". So is this really be going to issue for my ranking ? Please help thanks!6 -
Missing 301 redirects
I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch! So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected? Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Pages with Title Missing or Empty
When I crawl my site MOZ gave me 275 Pages with Title Missing or Empty within the High Priority Issues. So I went I reviewed it and the pages are Tag's that I use in my Blog posts. For example: https://www.cuencacigars.com/blog/tag/+cuenca+cigars https://www.cuencacigars.com/blog/tag/+florida https://www.cuencacigars.com/blog/tag/+Mobile How do I fix this? Is that a real error or is just MOZ been MOZZY? The pages have Authority 11, may I put some content on those pages since they had a decent rank? Maybe I can use this to my advantage? Or maybe I should choose my tags better? Is there anything to learn to tag?
Technical SEO | | mcuenca24100 -
Missing meta descriptions from Google SERPs
Hullo all, I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully. Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given. I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs. Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap! Thank you in advance! aE9RKXJ
Technical SEO | | suchde0 -
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 -
Google places address missing
I have a google places acct that used to rank fairly well. Then i changed addresses and updated the places account. It stopped ranking and whats worse is that the address will not show up in the listing. I have gone back in and edited it, verified it, done everything, but the address does not show on the places page or google results. It shows the city but not the actual address. Ideas?
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
How do you add a description to the Meta Description area to Tag Pages in Wordpress? This way I do not get the errors: "Missing Meta Description Tag" from SEOMoz Bot? Thanks!
I tried to add descriptions to my tags in Wordpress (well actually one to test), but I still keep getting the "Missing Meta Description Tag" error. Any suggestions on how to fix this in Wordpress? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jhblogger0 -
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