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
-
Anything I'm missing as my page just donst seem to rank
I am wandering if anyone can offer any suggestions, we have a page on our site https://www.wilsonfield.co.uk/insolvency-advice/liquidation/ this page is optimised to rank for liquidation however no matter how many links or how optimised the page is it just will not show in the SERPS. Moz gives it a page score of A we have built relevant links directly to the page using appropriate anchor text, have social likes and concentrated of getting more google+ likes. We run a detailed Moz SERP report comparing the above url to the top 10 ranked pages and we are looking competitive if not better on all ranking factors. This is now really frustrating that we arnt even in the top 100 and cant understand why. we have the https version of the site also submitted to webmaster tools and www is set to be the prefered. Has anyone got any ideas as to why google just dosnt like our site, we have no crawl errors we use all best practices.
Technical SEO | | Wilson_Field0 -
Google Indexing - what did I missed??
Hello, all SEOers~ I just renewed my web site about 3 weeks ago, and in order to preserve SEO values as much as possible, I did 301 redirect, XML Sitemap and so on for minimize the possible data losses. But the problem is that about week later from site renewal, my team some how made mistake and removed all 301 redirects. So now my old site URLs are all gone from Google Indexing and my new site is not getting any index from Google. My traffic and rankings are also gone....OMG I checked Google Webmaster Tool, but it didn't say any special message other than Google bot founds increase of 404 error which is obvious. Also I used "fetch as google bot" from webmaster tool to increase chance to index but it seems like not working much. I am re-doing 301 redirect within today, but I am not sure it means anything anymore. Any advise or opinion?? Thanks in advance~!
Technical SEO | | Yunhee.Choi0 -
Crawl completed but still says meta description missing
Before the last crawl I went through and made sure all meta descriptions were not missing. However, from the last crawl on the 26th July, it still has the same pages on the list and showed they were crawled as well? Any ideas on why they may still be showing as missing?
Technical SEO | | HamiltonIsland0 -
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 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Missing page titles
Does anyone know why my SeoMoz crawl reads my page titles differen't to what they truly are on my active site? I changed my pages titles and optimised them several months ago. Is my old page titles still been crawled rather than the new ones how do i fix this is?
Technical SEO | | gimes0 -
I know I'm missing pages with my page level 301 re-directs. What can I do?
I am implementing page level re-directs for a large site but I know that I will inevitably miss some pages. Is there an additional safety net root level re-direct that I can use to catch these pages and send them to the homepage?
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
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