Competitor frustration
-
I've tried to be completely "white hat" in my SEO efforts and my site ranks pretty well. However I'm being consistently beaten in the rankings by sites that pull every trick in the book and never seem to get penalised. One of my main competitors has 100s of near identical pages (just the town name different on each) and ranks close to or at the top for many searches, and has done for a couple of years now! Another uses massive keyword stuffing without any apparent adverse results. I don't want to follow their example, but my business is suffering as a result. Why can they get away with it and is there any way to "complain" to Google about it?
-
Hi,
My main advice to you is to not worry about they are doing to rank above you.... I know that might seem counter-intuitve, but at this point it seems that is not really helping you, it is only making you focus on a goal that might not bring you business.
As Eric says,
1. Are you sure these are good keywords that bring targeted traffic?
If so, take away the idea of forensics, since you do not want to emulate what they are doing, you want to do things that make you stand apart from them...
I am sure you have heard someone throw around the word "content"
Well so am I.... Content...... Make sure you are providing a user experience on your website that would garner true interest in content that people looking for you, or looking for information around items/services you may provide.
Build this content, and build a social circle around it, build relationships and the rankings will come, if they are truly using "Black Hat" tactics they will eventually either get penalized, or you will outrank them due to you will be providing a more genuine user experience with genuine content.
Also this more sets you up for the future, as Search Engines might not be the only game in town for long, so making a more well rounded "person-centric" strategy in my opinion is better than worrying about why competitor a or b is beating you for a single term in Google.
Hope this helps
-
You may have already checked this, but are they outranking you when you remove personalization and localization from the equation?
Also, do you know that they're really getting more traffic and business just because they outrank you?
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
-
Competitor Drops 10,000 links since last index. Lets play detective.
One of the intriguing things about SEO is being able to reverse engineer your competitors rankings because all the technical information is available for those who know where to look. I recently looked at my Dashboard and saw that one of my competitors had dropped 10,000 links. The questions is why? Google algorthm change? Blackhat Penalty? Something else.? Here are the numbers, I am going to lieave my own clients site out because his numbers are pathetic. www.Leafly(dot)com 50.4k Links Down 10k www.thcfinder(dot)com 1,530 links Down 71 www.weedmaps(dot)com 64,000k links Up 1.5K Is it just me or is that a lot of links to loose over one indexing period?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidMeshah0 -
Competitors in directories according to OSE, should I submit for the same?
Hey Mozers! I have just began my link building process, firstly creating unique and quality content and looking at my competitors. I have found that much of my competitors are in listed in many directories. Some are paid and some are not. I noticed the paid ones had higher DA which seems appealing, however I'm stuck to think wether or not it is relevant to my site and if my audience will go there to search my services. But then I'm thinking well if my competitors are there then why is it so? etc Does anyone know if this is something I should look at? My site has been live since november last year and we only have 1 backlink at the moment according to moz...We are on the writing wagon to filter our content and make sure were writing good engaging content however I'm seeing this obviously not the only way. I have also read the beginners guide to backlinks via moz and researched and read other interesting ways, including blogger outreach within my niche. Any advice around this approach?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Competitor Bad Practice SEO Still Ranking Well But Why ?
Moz Friends, A very close competitor have always been challenging for similar competitive keywords. We seem to have the advantage for alot of long tail keywords but on one of the higher traffic relevant keywords they seem to do well. I really struggle to understand why, particularly with the back links they use Just my thoughts and notes on the two: Our Page Better written text content (Maybe slightly written to for experienced target audience but we are working on simplifying things) Good Clear site URL structure and navigation for usability Fresh content updates Mobile optimized Reasonable page speeds Good on-page optimization Good back links from industry influences Competitor Page Negatives Site structure and URL's are inconsistent and messy Lower quality content site wide They use tried and tested on page optimization methods like Keyword spamming, Bold Keywords,Underlining Keywords (Sarcasm) Terrible back links, all directories and free article submission sites (Seriously take a look) Less focused on page optimization Not mobile optimized Most of the rest of the sites carry on the same sort of differences, Engine: www.google.co.uk Keyword: Sound level meters **Our Page: **www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/products/sound-level-meters/ **Competitor Page: **www.pulsarinstruments.com/product-information/Sound-Level-Meter.html Any feedback would be greatly appreciated please, i am really struggling to get my head around this Thanks James
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Antony_Towle1 -
Competitor website, how come they get away with it?
Hi we have been looking at competitors websites do see how we can improve, this website jumped out at me straight away as spammy gateway pages where 3 words was the only difference on all of the pages. Why does google give them so much weight still and rank them so highly? I thought this is what G was trying to avoid? Am I missing something here in terms of great SEO opportunity? A checked for noindex or canonical and I cannot see any. Love to hear some feedback. Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Is one of my competitors trying to get my site penalized?
Hi guys, I have been ranking #2 for a popular search term for several months now, and today I noticed a drop to #5, so I went to check my backlink profile, and I'm seeing thousands of no-follow exact keyword matched backlinks, all from spammy looking websites. I looked at some of the links and they do link to me, but I didn't generate these links, and I have never paid anybody externally to build links for me. What is the best course of action for me here? link disavow tool?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | davegill0 -
Competitors using unsavoury methods of link building. How to combat?
A lot of my competitors are using a lot of unsavoury/old-fashioned SEO methods to build links but are actually doing really well from it. A few different competitors are buying links in directories, using blogspam comments, forum posts, buying links in other places. The problem is, they all seem to be doing very well with it! What I've always been taught is that these methods are out and they could actually harm you - yet I haven't seen this happen to my competitors. Should I be using these spammy methods too or just concentrate on building quality content and high quality link building?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | charliedouglas1230 -
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 -
Problems with link spam from spam blogs to competitor sites
A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market. My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!). This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty. Ideas? Thoughts? All help appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RodneyRiley0