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
-
Google Answer Box Optimization?
Anyone have any luck in optimizing your site to show up in the Google Answer Boxes that popup for informational queries? (for example: "what is seo?") I've read many of the articles that have been written on the subject, and have been able to show up for many queries by a) ranking high organically, b) placing the question at the top of the page, and then answering it succinctly. However, for one term a competitor continues to show up in the answer box instead of us, despite their site ranking lower organically in the search results. Anyone have any experience/advice for replacing a competitor in the Answer Box? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TakeshiYoung2 -
On-site duplication working - not penalised - any ideas?
I've noticed a website that has been set up with many virtually identical pages. For example many of them have the same content (minimal text, three video clips) and only the town name varies. Surely this is something that Google would be against? However the site is consistently ranking near the top of Google page 1, e.g. http://www.maxcurd.co.uk/magician-guildford.html for "magician Guildford", http://www.maxcurd.co.uk/magician-ascot.html for "magician Ascot" and so on (even when searching without localisation or personalisation). For years I've heard SEO experts say that this sort of thing is frowned on and that they will get penalised, but it never seems to happen. I guess there must be some other reason that this site is ranked highly - any ideas? The content is massively duplicated and the blog hasn't been updated since 2012 but it is ranking above many established older sites that have lots of varied content, good quality backlinks and regular updates. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MagicianUK0 -
Whether letting an old category just 404 out is OK
Hello, We've got some hidden categories that are still indexed in the search engines. If there are no links to these hidden categories, can we just let them 404 out and be OK SEO wise? We can't 301 redirect them. It's about 50 categories.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Our site has too many backlinks! How can we do a bad backlink audit?
Webmaster Tools is saying we have close to 24 million links to our site. The site has been around since the mid 90s and has accumulated all these links since. We also have our own network of sites that have links in their templates to our main site. I'm fighting to get these links "nofollow"'d but upper management seems scared to alter this practice. This past year we've found our rankings have dropped significantly and suspect it's due to some spammy backlinks or being penalized for doing an accidental link scheme network. 24 million links is too many to check manually for using the disavow tool and it seems that bulk services out there to check backlinks can't even come close. What's an SEO to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoninjaz0 -
Massive site-wide internal footer links to doorway pages: how bad is this?
My company has stuffed several hundred links into the footer of every page. Well, technically not the footer, as they're right at the end of the body tag, but basically the same thing. They are formatted as follows: [" href="http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm">" target="_blank">http://example.com/springfield_pa_real_estate.htm">](</span><a class= "http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm")springfield, pa real estate These direct to individual pages that contain the same few images and variations the following text that just replace the town and state: _Springfield, PA Real Estate - Springfield County [images] This page features links to help you Find Listings and Homes for sale in the Springfield area MLS, Springfield Real Estate Agents, and Springfield home values. Our free real estate services feature all Springfield and Springfield suburban areas. We also have information on Springfield home selling, Springfield home buying, financing and mortgages, insurance and other realty services for anyone looking to sell a home or buy a home in Springfield. And if you are relocating to Springfield or want Springfield relocation information we can help with our Relocation Network._ The bolded text links to our internal site pages for buying, selling, relocation, etc. Like I said, this is repeated several hundred times, on every single page on our site. In our XML sitemap file, there are links to: http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BD69
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Homes/
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Townhomes/ That direct to separate pages with a Google map result for properties for sale in Springfield. It's accompanied by the a boilerplate version of this: _Find Springfield Pennsylvania Real Estate for sale on www.example.com - your complete source for all Springfield Pennsylvania real estate. Using www.example.com, you can search the entire local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) for up to date Springfield Pennsylvania real estate for sale that may not be available elsewhere. This includes every Springfield Pennsylvania property that's currently for sale and listed on our local MLS. Example Company is a fully licensed Springfield Pennsylvania real estate provider._ Google Webmaster Tools is reporting that some of these pages have over 30,000 internal links on our site. However, GWT isn't reporting any manual actions that need to be addressed. How blatantly abusive and spammy is this? At best, Google doesn't care a spit about it , but worst case is this is actively harming our SERP rankings. What's the best way to go about dealing with this? The site did have Analytics running, but the company lost the account information years ago, otherwise I'd check the numbers to see if we were ever hit by Panda/Penguin. I just got a new Analytics account implemented 2 weeks ago. Of course it's still using deprecated object values so I don't even know how accurate it is. Thanks everyone! qrPftlf.png0 -
Negative SEO attack working amazingly on Google.ca
We have a client www.atvandtrailersales.com who recently (March) fell out of the rankings. We checked their backlink file and found over 100 spam links pointing at their website with terms like "uggboots" and "headwear" etc. etc. I submitted a disavow link file, as this was obviously an attack on the website. Since the recent Panda update, the client is back out of the rankings for a majority of keyword phrases. The disavow link file that was submitted back in march has 90% of the same links that are still spamming the website now. I've sent a spam report to Google and nothing has happened. I could submit a new disavow link file, but I'm not sure if this is worth the time. '.'< --Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros1 -
Build Backlinks on this site? - Advice Please
Hello, I am trying to build some backlinks to my E-Commerce site and was wondering how you all view sites like this: http://www.bookmark4you.com/ If I were to put a listing for my company/site on that site, would that be considered a good backlink or a bad backlink (in terms of Google's guidelines)... There are a bunch of sites like these, online directory or bookmark sites, and i was wondering what the general opinion is on using them for backlinking purposes. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. THANKS!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Prime850 -
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