Competitor has 50 linking root domains, 2500 facebook likes
-
Hello,
A competitor of ours is ranking way higher than you would expect. They have very few links, half the DA and homepage PA of us, yet they rank several slots higher.
On analysis, the only difference seems to be that they have 2500 facebook likes.
Did they buy likes? Have you seen anything odd like this before?
Thanks.
-
What would be a 100% white hat way to get the same results?
-
Sounds pretty gray-hat. I don't believe it violates any of Facebook's rules though. A company I used to work with did those promotional "like-us" campaigns... never a big fan personally but they did get numbers.
-
A little digging uncovered what they did.
1. They held a $200 sweepstakes that you had to like their page to join and they published press releases.
2. They offer a $3 coupon if you like them on facebook.
Brilliant, but is it white hat?
-
Have you checked the age of your domain name, compared to the age (both forward and backward) of their domain name? That could factor into the ranking analysis.
It's possible they bought likes, but it's likely that the people running the other organization are spending a lot of money sponsoring Facebook posts that get people to like their site.
This might be the case where the social component of the ranking outweighs a site that has other high metrics from Moz (Google doesn't use PA and DA; Moz ranks based on these estimates).
It could be that their site content is more recent and topical, so the site is ranking for fresh, new content, instead of a page that has withstood the test of time.
I'm happy to take a look at both your site and the competitor's site to see additional differences, and look at search results, if you want to post them here...
Thanks,
-- Jeff
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
-
Advertising to competitors fans
I want to target my FB ads to my competitors fans. I tried setting it up through power editor, but when I type in my competitor's name in Precise Innterest field, it just doesn't show up... My competitor has over 30k fans - is it not big enough? Is there any way around it?
Social Media | | imoney0 -
Facebook Pages for Business
Our company has over 100+ stores. Does it make sense to have a main Facebook page and individual pages for each location? How does each affect SERPs? Thanks!
Social Media | | Buddys0 -
Facebook: How do you post to a brand's page, as your own brand page?
Eg, if you are an administrator of "Funco" which has a FB page, how do you post on the wall of "Followerwonk" as "Funco", not your personal FB account?
Social Media | | sftravel0 -
Qualty of Likes, Shares etc
People often say that Social Media shares are all about the quality of them but not the volume when it comes to a factor in SEO. However, as far as I know, Google does not have any in depth access to the likes Facebook and Twitter's API, so how can they tell the quality of likes. Most Facebook accounts are hidden or restricted so Google can't tell from that either.
Social Media | | gazza101uk0 -
Facebook Like button on website: which "URL to Like"? Website or Facebook Page?
Hello, I have a question about the Facebook Like Button. We we are setting up a Like Button to put on the top page of our website (300 likes) However, we already have a Facebook Page (1000 likes). Now, in the set up of the button, we need to decide which "URL to Like" and I really do cannot realize which one is best. Do you think we should use the url of our website or the url of our Facebook Page? Why? Thank you in advance for your help, Dario
Social Media | | Darioz0 -
Facebook Advertising Noob Question
Hello Mozzers, I have a noob question for which I have not been able to find a clear answer on the internet. When a client asks you how much would I have to spend on FB ads to get 100,000 fans how do you go about making a "media plan". I can understand you can calculate clicks using your budget and CPC but fans? Also, ad impressions on Facebook? FB doesn't even give that metric anymore on its default ad dashboard where you have campaign reach, social reach, CTR etc. So if a client wants 1Million Facebook Ad Impressions (I know, I know), how do you tell them how much its going to cost them. In a nutshell, clients want to know how much they should be spending to get x number of fans and impressions and vice versa, how many fans and impressions will $XXX get them. So how does one go about making a media plan for Facebook advertising, what do you include in it and well, anything else that I should know? Thank you, Rishad.
Social Media | | AsadMemon0 -
Do facebook shares pass share juice the same way links pass link juice?
If i have a page on my domain say PAGE-A and let's say it's located at: http://www.mydomain.com/something/page-a and this page has quite a lot of page authority from many many inbound links. It is my understanding that if i "sculpt" the internal links on PAGE-A to point at only my primary targets, let's call the PAGE-B, PAGE-C, and PAGE-D; then those pages would gain some benefit from this link juice flowing through. Consider a similar situation where i have a page, say PAGE-F located at: http://www.mydomain.com/anotherpage/page-F and page-F gets 150 facebook shares. would the links on page-F pass this benefit on in any way? Or is only the direct target of the facebook share gaining benefit from this facebook sharing? Furthermore, lets consider a scenario where there are 30 or 40 similar pages like PAGE-F all with links out to my primary targets. Would these primary targets gain anything as these 30 or 40 pages gained facebook shares? Repeat above question, replace 'facebook' with 'twitter'. repeat again for 'google+' ?
Social Media | | adriandg0 -
Roundup of Facebook Share & Facebook Like. Which one is better for SEO?
There doesn't seem to be clear cut advice / data on whether Facebook Share or Facebook Like is more valuable from an SEO standpoint. So I'm asking you SEOmoz fans have you come across conclusive evidence or have your own sites / testes proven that one is stronger than the other.
Social Media | | walidalsaqqaf0