Why does my competitor rank so well with so many paid/traded links?
-
Greetings everyone!
I've really been enjoying my Moz membership these past few weeks after studying my data and comparing it with my competitors I think it's high time I started asking some questions.
The website I manage has a very good ranking history but over the past year we've seen a slight decline in our SERP positions. I don't think this has anything to do with on-page optimization but rather with our link profile. We have only about 10k links total while they have 175k - our mozranks are nearly identical, but his moztrust is 4.46 and our's is 3.51.
I am guessing, on our end, I need to remove some of these low-quality nofollow links (though I'll be honest I have no idea how we obtained them to begin with) but what I don't understand is how our competitor is ranking so well because when I browse their link profile, it is filled with paid link and traded link directories that don't appear to be penalized for what they are. I was under the impression that this was bad SEO, but now I am thinking I should just play his own game and submit to these sites too.
Looking for any advice or ideas on a better way to compete...
Jennifer
-
Visage, those stats seem to say their site is much larger than yours, based on internal links. Your link count from others is small. If some of those are site-wide, then perhaps the number of domains pointing to you is much smaller
How does your domain count compare to theirs?
-
Thank you so much for the tip Jason!
I will be sure to use the reporting tool more liberally, since you say it actually works! I've tried it a number of times in the past but I've never quite knew if anyone at google ever actually acted on it or just put it there for our peace of mind
-
Thank you for your response!
I think your sentiments echo my mentality on the subject. The last thing I want to do is play our competitor's game because I feel like my website is of a high quality and we've done well so far without using these sorts of link-building practices.
And to clarify, our total links (including internal linking) are 10k, external are only 1.2k (his are 175k total and 4.1k external).
I appreciate the advice on not wasting my time on hunting down to no-follow links. I'll spend it more wisely finding new high-quality links instead!
-
I understand the frustration and in most of the cases it's the way you are painting it but you are also subjective and also with that amount of links it is very hard to fully understand the link profile of your competitors and yours.
What I think it's important to understand, in general, is that the quality matters over quantity. Maybe 80% of your competitor links are not even consider and there is a small set of powerful links in his profile that is actually making the difference but again it's hard to really assess the situation.
You can however go his route and hunt his link but if you do so and get low quality links you might end up in the future in a hard corner and start sessions to remove those - especially with Googles crusade on links. You might get some short or even medium term advantage and get heads on with your competitor but dose it pay on a long run ? I think not.
I would rather go for only a few really powerful links, smart ones, to increase your visibility then going fishing with TNT.
As for you going on a crusade to hunt your low quality no follow links, in my opinion, is a waste of time.
Those links by having the no follow won't affect, positively or negatively your link profile and equity in general. The anchor text of those links are indeed taken in consideration by google to understand better your website, product and brand but you will need to balance very wise (if those anchor text are bad) if it's going to help you hunting them down. ( to be honest I think even if the anchors are bad it dosen't make sense to waste time on them).
Just a thought .. or several
Hope it helps.
-
Hi Jennifer,
I know I might catch some flak for even talking about this, but I have to keep a close watch on our competitors because they are constantly rocketing up in the SERPs from paid/spam links. For some reason it seems to take Google a while to catch them even with the new Penguin update.
I have no problems with using tricks of the trade to get advantageous results in rankings, but it irritates me to get outranked by competitors who are blatantly just buying thousands of junk links.
In each situation I use OSE to get several examples and then use:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport to report them. It seems to take a week or so but each time I've reported I've seen the spammers URL tank about 50 positions.
In many situations however Google will just remove value from the junk links without penalty and you can still lose your position to the competitor if overall they have more good links than you do. Also take into consideration your onsite SEO, content quality and social signals.
Best of luck,
Jason
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
-
Key word Ranking are going down
Hi, my website's Keywords Ranking are going down, I am very new to SEO, I don't know what's the reason please help me out....my website is www.tourspackagedubai.com. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tariqsalam0 -
Substantial drop in organic traffic and keyword rankings
My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information. KDc8dMp fyVtrYo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kheberger0 -
Do Wikipedia links add value?
Do Wikipedia pages/links add any value to your website and SEO? We are not an advertiser or seller of products, whereas we help people with planning so say I add an external link from an established page relevant to our service, will we get penalised by Wikipedia? Or is it worth setting up a page about our company, similar to say - the BBC with an external link? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jaybeamer0 -
Website that lost ranking and now starting to recovery
Hello guys,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WayneRooney
About a month ago we got in the webmaster tool a message that saying that we have unnatural links to the website.
We got drop from 200 keys that was in page 1-2 to pages 5-8.
We check our links and notice that someone links more then 1000 links to our site. We apply for reconsideration request plus we send the file with the links to Google to ask to remove. Yesterday we got message from Google that say : Manual spam action revoked.
We check today the ranking and we saw that from 3 keys that was in the first page, now we are with 24 in the first page. Very good improvement but still very far from the 130 keys that was in the first page a month ago. I wanted to ask, what can we expect ?
Are we gonna get the lost ranking now ?
Is this happen overnight ?Maybe the big change will be in the next penguin update ? Bottom Line, what is the chance to get back the ranking as we had before ?
This is the most important thing right now... Thank you0 -
Do inbound links from forums hurt our traffic?
We have a manual action against us on Google webmaster tools for unnatural links. While evaluating our back links, I noticed that forums with low page rank/domain authority are linking to us. Is this hurting us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imlovinseo0 -
Domain authority - Low quality links
I have a question I hope people can help me on. it is my intention for my next project to focus on domain authority, and a small number of high quality links. I have a couple of scenarios I would appreciate some advice on: 1. Can lower quality links lower domain authority? 2. Would you avoid links from low quality sites no matter what \ what domain authority levels should you avoid links from. 3. Should I be looking at link profiles of the sites I get links from. Does it matter if a site I get a link from has 1000's of spammy links (i.e. something to look out for when doing guest blogging). 4. Should I avoid directories no matter what, or is high pr \ domain authority directories ok to use, if I end up on a page of other relevant directory submissions related to my niche. Essentially, my aim is to have high quality links, but equally, there are some decent sites on the fringes that I will need to consider (based on a competitors link profile I researches).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan19790 -
Can't figure out how my competitor has so many links
I suspect something possibly black-hat is going on with the amount of inbound links for www.pacificlifestylehomes.com ( http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.pacificlifestylehomes.com ) mainly because they have such a large volume of links (for my industry) with their exact targeted keyword. Can anyone help clear this up for me?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theChris0 -
Redirects/What to do with multi domains for the same company?
What is the correct way to "redirect" a domain if you have multi domain names for the same site? For example if a company has www.mysite.com www.mysite.info www.mysite.tv www.mysite+location.com Say my website lived at this location www.mysite.com would I then just forward the other domains to the same place? Do search engines penilize for this? Do search engines view this as duplicated content? Is it even worth having these domains and making the active? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule0