How are these sites ranking!?!
-
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client.
Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this:
http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance
http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance
http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance
http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance
We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it.
Any ideas at all?
-
David's right, unfortunately - even in the insurance industry, you see sites pop in and out, beating the big aggregators and private companies for short periods. It doesn't happen very often anymore with the blue-chip terms ([car insurance], [health insurance], etc.) but for the second-tier you can still see examples like this. Google isn't perfect at killing spam yet.
Keep in mind that some of the big algo updates regarding links in the past two years have not really been targeting spammers at all: they have been targeting otherwise legitimate businesses (from large corporations to "mom & pop shop" organisations) who've sought to use manipulative link dev tactics. The tactics that a lot of recent manual and algorithmic penalties have focused on are buying into link networks and schemes rather than outright automated, old-fashioned spam. You can still get rankings with blackhat / greyhat tactics and some of those rankings last a surprisingly long time.
I am not saying that the sites above are outright spam at all - they are affiliates who'll get burned in the end if their strategies aren't watertight, and they all seem to be owned by QuoteSearcher Ltd. Even the big guys in insurance get burned regularly - I'll stay away from citing actual examples due to past experience with agency-based client work, but big brands would rise and fall all the time during the five years I worked in insurance SEO.
-
Black hat still works and always will. You can wait and hope they lose rankings or decide how much risk you're willing to take and try to beat them at their own game.
-
If you domain authority or link profile is lower then the competition, you would probably rank lower. However, i do agree that there are websites which look ugly and poorly optimized and do look spamy ... but still rank better. I tried reporting it to google but it is a slow process with no guarantees.
-
Hi Syed
If you look into it properly, you will see that pretty much all of the links any of the sites have are firstly from completely spammy and unrelated sites and also use over optimised anchor text links.
As well as this, all of the above domains are less than two years old, which I would class as a relatively new site, especially in the insurance industry which is extremely competitive
-
All of these websites have 40+ page authority, 30+ domain authority and 200+ external links ... i think these are not new websites.
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
-
Bing Ranking Factors
Question... I have a few clients that rank well for Google (first page) but are not ranking as well on Bing (page 5). Any suggestions on what to do to increase Bing ranking? I understand that Google and Bing use different algorithms, but just curious how you can increase ranking. Appreciate your input. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Linking to one of my own sites, from my site
Hi experts, I own a site for castingjobs (Site1) and a site for selling paintings (Site2). In a long time, I've had a link at the bottom of Site1, linking to Site 2. (Basicaly: Partnerlink: Link site 2). Site1 is for me the the only important site, since it's where Im making my monthly revenue. I added the link like 5 years ago or so, to try to boost site 2. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
1. Is it somehow bad for SEO for site 1, since the two sites have nothing to do with each other, they are basically just owned by me.
2. Would it make sense to link from Site 2 to Site 1 indstead?0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
New pages not ranking
I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better. The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages. Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Why is my client's site not ranking anymore? Like big time!
Ok, I'm reaching out to all of you Moz'rs for some help with this one. My client's site has dropped off the face of google in a real short period of time. It went from page 1 (avg rank 3 to page 6 (avg rank 50) and below in the matter of 2 weeks. Here's some facts: 1. DA is a 22 and homepage PA is a 31. It outranks all other sites in its competitive set. 2. The homepage used to be the page that displays for keyword searches, now its the FAQ page, which has a lower PA of 23. Why has the home page seemingly vaporized? And, why is the FAQ showing as the first result? What should I start checking. I feel paralyzed, not sure where to start. More info: a. There are no alerts present in Webmaster Tools. b. For some reason the homepage (domain.com) was 301'd to domain.com/home.html. Domain.com is indexed by Google, however, domain.com/home.html is not. If this is the issue, what is the best way to handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhoadesjohn1 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Djdealeyo0 -
How to rank for difficult terms
I am helping launch a new business venture that sells oak furniture in the UK. The key product terms are along the lines of; oak bed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pretige12
oak dining table
oak chairs etc which are very popular search terms. Im used to being able to hang of local or branded search which arent available in this project. The domain is around 12 months old, it has few inbound links which we are working on now with an overseas freelancer (keeping an eye on them). The pages of the site are unique-content rich and the titles and other meta boxes are ticked. What else would the experts recommend?0