Competition cheating on seo

[grnside1]

So im trying to rank for O'fallon lawn care. And my competitor bought a domain lawncareofallonmo.com and now ranks number one....there is even a link to "take me to my homepage" What is going on i thought this was so 2008 not 2014.....

[JVRudnick]

clicked on that competitor URL and it's plain jane junk...

if you create a real site with great content you should go by this EMD site in time...

and DO NOT copy this p**spoor example of serp manipulations either!!!

[MoosaHemani]

OK, there may be other factors as well but yes exact match domain do have an impact not huge but they do have the power to outreach if all other things are working along.

I think this is what you should do:

-          Audit the website and see how many total links they have and how many are coming from quality sources. Compare it with your link profile and see if this is the problem

-          Another Research why they out rank you can be the quality of content on their website as compare to on your website. You can improve the quality by rewriting content plus adding some additional informative content.

-          Check social and compare it with yours.

Ideally, perform the complete website audit for both websites and if data says you are better it’s just the matter of time that you will again rank and the competitor will either go down or will completely go out from the search results.

Hope this helps!

[LeeC]

Have you added your competitor to Moz analytics and then compared the metrics, that should give you a better idea as to the why's?

Had a quick look and you're right it's terrible, the blog is a list of testimonials (that link no where), and from what I can see it's only a three page site? You've not given a url to campare or said when the new competititor site was launched, but if its a recent addition, personally I'd not worry, Google is never fooled for long and it is usual in some circumstances for google to add new sites to the top to test them, but its generally slippery slope, especially for sites that don't provide good quality content.

Don't consider using similar tactics yourself, just write better content (lets face it that won't be hard) and beat them the right way, I think what they're doing speaks volumes about their marketing knowledge, sound like an easy win for you.

Also when viewing the search results do you see this in Moz or Google as if you're logged into google, personalised search will show the sites you visit the most first, rather than they're true position.

Cheers, Lee