Do some sites get preference over others by Google just because? Grandfathered theory
-
So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche.
I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/
This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic)
Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com.
Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?
-
Hello,
I understand clearly what you mean, and I can say I was on the other side.
I was among the first ranking in a smaller country for the most popular "blog" related queries. The page was a part of a more general website, was very solid and solved most of the problems for users searching for those particular queries. Most of the people were clicking my search result and they were pretty satisfied by what they got there. The website was old school, layout old scool. I had amazingly attractive title and meta description, I basically nailed it.
Then bigger brand names and huge websites were launched on the same queries. Solving way more problems and dealing with the matter in a new way. But I was still the first. Brands with pagerank 5 to 7 were competing with my page with no/or close to zero pagerank. I did not even have a fraction of their links and authority. I even laughed seeing that year after that I rank 1st above these big guys, they were on 2nd, 3rd and so on. A lot of years passed and I was still the first. It was really funny. And I tried to learn from it.
Then I decided to refresh and modify the layout, because it was old school. I had some problems with internal linking and domain was down for a while. Then somebody hacked my server and I got some stuff injected there. I solved most of the problems, it was not easy. But when I got back I lost the top spot. There were a lot of changes, but the URL and the content of that particular page was exactly the same.
So, from personal experience I can tell you that things can change.
I had the following:
-
I was the first to cover that area
-
a lot of users were clicking on my website - CTR from webmaster tools was amazingly high, and bounce rate was low
And I can tell you that one of those ranking factors talked about a lot on seomoz - "User Usage and Traffic/Query Data" weigh way more than people think. At least from my experience. Anyway, try to ask yourself the following questions:
-> Are the differences between your website and the old one significant? Do the users see them in the search listing and do they consider them of significant importance? If not, try to give them a 10th times better reason to click on your website, and also give them what they want (sometimes the bounce rate has something to say about this, but not always).
It may look like Grandfathering, it's really hard to dismiss or confirm it. At first I thought about it the same way you do. However, first it would be very nice to answer honestly and from the user's point of view to the above questions.
Good luck!
-
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
-
How to stop google bot from crawling spammy injected pages by hacker?
Hello, Please help me. Our one of website is under attack by hacker once again. They have injected spammy URL and google is indexing, but we could not find these pages on our website. These all are 404 Pages. Our website is not secured. No HTTPS Our website is using wordpress CMS Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShahzadAhmed0 -
Site redesign what to consider to avoid any issues
Hi GUYS I want to avoid getting myself into a bad situation with google, so I'm just wanting to know if there are any steps I would need to take whilst I'm redesigning and developing my site as I'm currently deploying our new designs. One thing I noticed, i have my new designs and content on our development server to run through any checks before deploying it to the live environment, however while our live site is up, I have duplicate content on the live site that exactly matches the dev site for obvious reasons but do I need to tell google that the dev site is for development purposes only so google knows I'm not duplicating content? I have searched around to find some more info about this, if anyone has some insight i would be glad to know your thoughts. Thank you in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
If I am getting links on competitor websites, is it safe to assume those competitors are doing this to hurt our SEO?
We have received a few notification from Google Webmaster Tools and Moz that our competitors have "mentioned" our page on their website. This is incredibly odd as you wouldn't think they'd want to do this. Further, when I go to the page that we are supposedly mentioned on, the link to our site is not on the page. What is going on? Thank you in advance for your insights!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brits0 -
Help required as difficulty removing Google algorithmic penalty
I am not an SEO expert but I am trying to recover my company's ranking on Google. We are a UK based baby shower company. Been established since 2003. We have used SEO companies a few years ago. On September 28th 2012 our rankings in Google dropped significantly on certain landing pages, others like our baby shower gifts page has remained position 1 for UK Google searches . Bing and Yahoo were unaffected. Searches for baby shower and baby shower decorations has gone from position 1 or 2 (behind wikipedia ) to these 2 landing pages being unranked in Google. I have for the first time ever gone through our back links, tried to locate bad or low quality links, emailed where possible, and set up in webmaster tools a dissavow file ( currently not acted upon by Google). I have also amended the text in the baby shower department so it does not read as keyword stuffed. It has been two and a half months now and sales has dropped significantly and me and the staff are getting very concerned. Our site is www.showermybaby.co.uk . We have not received a manual penalty. Any suggestions or help in removing this Google penalty would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | postagestamp0 -
Beating the file sharing sites in SERPs - Can it be done and how?
Hi all, A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd" If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right? How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking? How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do? Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
I've done some link building on my website... why is google showing this?
Hi guys, it seems Google is going crazy as always, basically sometimes i'm ranked first page sometimes i'm not there, not sure if it's because of my link building and Google is indexing the links. At the moment in IE i'm top 3-4 for this keyword however the Title tag is not what I set it to be it's basically taking the product name then adding something after it. (I know google sometimes changes to what they want if they feel its more relevant but it isn't in this case) Not sure if this is normal for my keyword to keep appearing then dissapearing in Google. I noticed in FF my keyword isn't there but in IE it is. I've logged out of my Google account deleted all history/cookies etc. Even checked on my friends computer. Hope this makes sense and i'm not going crazy!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | InkCartridgesFast0 -
Interesting case of IP-wide Google Penalty, what is the most likely cause?
Dear SEOMOZ Community, Our portfolio of around 15 internationalized web pages has received a significant, as it seems IP-wide, Google penalty starting November 2010 and have yet to recover from it. We have undergone many measure to lift the penalty including reconsideration requests wo/ luck and am now hoping the SEOMoz community can give us some further tips. We are very interested in the community's help and judgement what else we can try to uplift the penalty. As quick background information, The sites in question offers sports results data and is translated for several languages. Each market, equals language, has its own tld domain using the central keyword, e.g. <keyword_spanish>.es <keyword_german>.de <keyword_us>.com</keyword_us></keyword_german></keyword_spanish> The content is highly targeted around the market, which means there are no duplicate content pages across the domains, all copy is translated, content reprioritized etc. however the core results content in the body of the pages obviously needs to stay to 80% the same A SEO agency of ours has been using semi-automated LinkBuilding tools in mid of 2010 to acquire link partnerships There are some promotional one-way links to sports-betting and casino positioned on the page The external linking structure of the pages is very keyword and main-page focused, i.e. 90% of the external links link to the front page with one particular keyword All sites have a strong domain authority and have been running under the same owner for over 5 years As mentioned, we have experienced dramatic ranking losses across all our properties starting in November 2010. The applied penalties are indisputable given that rankings dropped for the main keywords in local Google search engines from position 3 to position 350 after the sites have been ranked in the top 10 for over 5 years. A screenshot of the ranking history for one particular domain is attached. The same behavior can be observed across domains. Our questions are: Is there something like an IP specific Google penalty that can apply to web properties across an IP or can we assume Google just picked all pages registered at Google Webmaster? What is the most likely cause for our penalty given the background information? Given the drops started already in November 2010 we doubt that the Panda updates had any correlation t this issue? What are the best ways to resolve our issues at this point? We have significant history data available such as tracking records etc. Our actions so far were reducing external links, on page links, and C-class internal links Are there any other factors/metrics we should look at to help troubleshooting the penalties? After all this time wo/ resolution, should we be moving on two new domains and forwarding all content as 301s to the new pages? Are the things we need to try first? Any help is greatly appreciated. SEOMoz rocks. /T cxK29.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tomypro0 -
Doorway Page? or just a flawed idea?
I have a website which is on a .co.uk TLD and is primarily focused to the UK. Understandably I get very little in the way on US traffic, even though a lot of the content is applicable to the UK or US and could be made more so with a little tinkering. The domain has some age to it and ranks quite well for a variety of keywords and phrases, so it seems sensible to keep the site on this domain. The .com version of the domain is no longer available, and the current owner does not seem inclined to sell it to me. So, I am considering registering a very similar .com domain and simply using it to drive some traffic to the .co.uk site. To do this, I would have the same category pages and the same (or similar) list of links to the various pages in those categories. But instead instead of linking to a page on the new .com, it would take visitors to the existing page on the .co.uk. I would make this transparent to visitors ("Take a look at these pages on our sister site bluewidgets.co.uk") and the .com would have some unique content of its own. Would this be considered some kind of Doorway site/page (content rich doorway), or is it simply bad idea which is unlikely to drive any traffic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jingo010