Can you explain why a site with loads of keywork anchor backlinks is ranking well?
-
Hi All,
A couple of years ago my site got punished and i kind of figured out it was due to keyword anchor text backlinks.
I recently was considering getting a new SEO company and found one that promotes another company in my industry. However, when i look at the backlinks, of the website they do SEO for, via open site explorer - I noticed nearly all of the backlinks are keywords.
website in question is http://goo.gl/6nRzLi
And if you see the search results here: http://goo.gl/9bXoxY they are ranking on first page with very big brands - and have done for about a year - but nealy all of their backlinks are the keywords in this search...
I understood this is the kind of thing that killed my website 2 years ago - are these backlinks ok? should i still consider this SEO company to work on my site, i 100% do not want my site to be penalised again so any advice appreciated.
thanks
James
-
I agree with Richard,
A little research shows that this website does not seem to have a whole lot of linking domains/back links. Being that is is such a small website I don't think Google is worried about penalizing them until they get a bit larger. In which case if they continue the same keyword anchor text practices they may run into trouble.
On a good note: Seeing as they do not have a lot of high quality back links you should easily be able to beat this company rankings fairly quickly without having to resort to the over optimized anchor text practices. This should be a fairly quick project depending on your budget and desire to move up fast.That's great news for you !
Remember, sometimes when a website is ranking high for certain keywords, it's not always because the website and seo are done so well. Sometimes it's just they have no competition doing very well at trying to beat them. Which I think may be the case here.
Hope that helps,
Joe
-
There aren't many links showing to the site at all in OSE or Ahrefs. Rarely would a site with so few links receive a penalty. They also have their main keyword in their branded name, which I think can partially shield them since it's part of their brand name.
Remember as well that these tools include only a portion of the links that are out there. Most sites such as social/branded and NAP (name, address, phone#) listings don't show in OSE. These sites tend to have more links that include the brand or url or generic items such as "View Website" that can be balancing out the keyword rich anchor text as well.
-
Thanks for the response Dirk,
Please understand i am not an "SEO" and do not currently employ an SEO, hence i asked the question - i kind of figured it was shady, but just needed some confirmation from SEO experts such as yourself.
Thanks for confirming.
-
I think that the answer that Richard gave you on your first question is also applicable on this one.
Apart from that, you should see SEO as a long term strategy, if your competitor is ranking well with shady techniques, it's may be good on the short term, but he'll loose on the long term. I saw plenty of my competitors take a dive in rankings after the Panda update in May, while quite a number of our sites gained substantial search traffic (+25%)
If you already got punished for over optimised backlinks, I would certainly not take that road again, and be very careful with any SEO company which would propose this strategy.
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
More content, more backlinks, more appealing design, better SEO than competitor but ranking worse. Why?
Me and my team are working hard to put a good SEO strategy in place and good, useful content for our visitors. We're online for a little more than a year and we got some success but nothing compared to the majority of our competitors. The only thing we noticed so far is that our strongest competitors all seem to have a website based on WordPress... well is it possible to rank better than a site based on WP if we optimize everything well? One of our competitor is a very simple, thin affiliate website based on WP and is called www.comparatif-meilleur.fr ... their content is limited but they do better than us in term of ranking organically... On our side (www.lecomparateur.net) we have backlinks from Wikipedia, Dmoz and a couple of other very good sites, plus a better content, better design and better overall optimization. There must be something we do bad, but we can't find it. Please help 😞 P.S. We update our site quite often too
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benoit_20180 -
Subfolder ranks worse than the rest of the site
We have the strangest problem. The blog for our website ranks very poorly: www.lifeionizers.com/blog = average position in SERPs = 200. The site itself has an average position in SERPs of 12. The blog has a few terms it ranks #1 for such as branded terms and: is mineral water alkaline = 1.3 kangen water vs alkaline water = 2.6 kangen water pyramid = 1.2 ph of redbull = 1.1 (Used by Google as answer in knowledge graph) But the blog ranks terribly for most search terms. This blog has about 440 pages of in-depth, well-written authoritative content. Readers are well engaged, the blog has a bounce rate of ~3.5% with average time on page of over 6 minutes. The problem can't be the quality of the content. Does Google levy penalties against specific subdirectories? Or is this a configuration problem? Bad links have been disavowed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | karasd0 -
404 Pages. Can I change it to do this without getting penalized ? I want to lower our bounce rate from these pages to encourage the user to continue on the site
Hi All, We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is - http://goo.gl/rFRNMt I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ? So it will look like this - http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8 . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc... Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating. basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away. If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?
When considering on page / on site seo what process do you use / take to evaluate how much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site. Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect. Thanks --
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Can Google read my backlink in Javascript??
Hi SeoMoz community! I have a software product, which our clients implement onto their websites. It is like a pop up box. I know that backlinks are very important for SEO ranking, and I really want to give our clients 2 options of product: 1. you can get the free/cheaper option if you use the code which has a keyworded backlink to our site on it 2. you can pay small fee if you don't want to use the version with a link to our site on it Now, the problem is that the product is written entirely in Javascript, and I don't think that Google crawls this, do they? Is there a way around this? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qdigi0 -
Recently created site indexed; no backlinks showing?
I launched a website for a client in mid-March. The site is already indexed, I have built quite a few links to it (links are also indexed), and ranks well for some targeted keywords. However, when I try to check backlinks to the site with Open Site Explorer, it comes back with "No Data Available For This URL". Is this something I should be worried about or merely a case of 'recency' of page creation'? I know it says that it can take 45-60 days for a site to be included in Linkscape but I'm approaching the 60 days mark and still nothing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Igor-Avidon0 -
Steps you can take to ensure your content is indexed and registered to your site before a scraper gets to it?
Hi, A clients site has significant amounts of original content that has blatantly been copied and pasted in various other competitor and article sites. I'm working with the client to rejig lots of this content and to publish new content. What steps would you recommend to undertake when the new, updated site is launched to ensure Google clearly attributes the content to the clients site first? One thing I will be doing is submitting a new xml + html sitemap. Thankyou
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qasim_IMG0