Cross-linking domains dominate SERP?
-
Hi,
I have been doing some keyword research and noticed two domains properly linking back to each other for almost every piece of content. I thought this was not working any longer but it looks like it works for them. For many competitive keywords, they rank in top 10, and even for some keywords, they rank #1 and #2. PA and DA not more than 36-38. With 3-4 linking root domains, these pages manage to rank in top 10.
And the second strategy they have, is to create alternative text to rank for a number of different long-tail-keywords. Seperate pages targeting seperate keywords and the only difference between them is slightly modified text and images.
Third is possibly the best, their second domain is an exact match domain name for most keywords linked to this industry. On some SERP's, they have 8-10 results in top 30.
SEMRUSH shows %500 growth for both of these domains.
So, I guess I should just sit and admire them.
-
It all makes sense, sir. And I have to admit you are spot on with the way they have distracted me. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
-
I wasn't implying that he should make a network of sites, i meant the links he gets should be better. - My bad.
-
....do it even better.
Right... as a gamer you know the power of the superior weapon.
-
Just to add to that, These websites have shown you their strategy, instead of admiring them, replicate what they have done, but do it even better.
Original content like EGOL suggests, and even more relevant and stronger links, no doubt you'll be a strong competitor.
Greg
-
I have been doing some keyword research and noticed two domains properly linking back to each other for almost every piece of content.
I would not worry about this being too effective. It is only one unique linking root.
I thought this was not working any longer but it looks like it works for them.
It seems to be distracting competitors
And the second strategy they have, is to create alternative text to rank for a number of different long-tail-keywords. Seperate pages targeting seperate keywords and the only difference between them is slightly modified text and images.
If you create unique content for all of those KWs that should put you in the position of advantage.
Third is possibly the best, their second domain is an exact match domain name for most keywords linked to this industry. On some SERP's, they have 8-10 results in top 30.
This tells me that they have a lot of content for that KW and that there are probably not a lot of strong competitors.... but really, what is more important - the number you have in the top thirty or if you are in the top three?
So, I guess I should just sit and admire them.
You can do that if you want. From what you have shared they don't sound too hard to beat. I would go after them with a single site with lots of unique, high-quality content.
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
-
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?
Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland1 -
SERP cannibalization
Hi Moz Community, Recently I've been seeing multiple pages from my eCommerce site pop up in the SERPS for a couple of queries. Usually I would count this as a good thing but since both pages that generally pop up are so similar I'm starting to wonder if we would rank better with just one page. My example is the query "birthday gifts" Both of the URL's below show up in the search results one after the other on the first page. The URL on the top is our family page and the one below it is our subcat page, you can find both in the top nav. of our site. www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/birthday-gifts/birthday-gifts (family) www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/birthday-gifts (subcat) Both of these pages have different PA's and the subcat page that currently lives in our site nav is actually: **www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/birthday-**gifts?view=all. ****This url doesn't show up in the serps and is rel=canonicaled to the subcat page without the parameter listed above. We use this page in the nav because we think it's a better user experience than the actual subcat page. If we were to condense all three pages into one would we rank higher? Any thoughts here would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Own Domains shown as Spam Links in Open Site Explorer
Hi ! I have 7 Domains that I bought that point to the same webspace as my main domain. In Open Site Explorer they are showed as spam links. So to solve the issue I redirected the links to an empty subdirectory on the same server which is different from the directory the main domain is linking to. But nevertheless the domains are still showing up as spam. Why might that be? What can I do to get rid of these domains? In fact I only need the main domain. Cheers, Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Domain Authority
Hi Our website Domain Authority isn't as high and was wondering why it's not increasing. Compared to 1 or 2 competitors we're not scoring as high as them. Are rankings are good for all chosen keywords. Just trying to get a better handle where our site is falling short on.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia1 -
To recover from Penguin update, shall i remove the links or disavow links?
Hi, One of our websites hit by Penguin update and I now know where the links are coming from. I have chance to remove the links from those incoming links but I am a little confused whether i should just remove the links from incoming links or disavow the links? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Should we move a strong category page, or the whole domain to new domain?
We are debating moving a strong category page (and subcategory, product pages) from our current older domain to a new domain vs just moving the whole domain. The older domain has DA 40+, and the category page has PA 40+. Anyone with experience on how much PR etc will get passed to a virgin domain if we just redirect olddomain/strongcategorypage/ to newdomain.com? If the answer is little to none, we might consider just moving the whole site since the other categories are not that strong anyway. We will use 301 approach either way. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Durand0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0