This Guy Is Turning SEO Upside Down
-
Hi,
Everything my competitor does goes against everything I have learned about SEO so far. For starters:
-
he registered a brand NEW domain and within a space of **4 months and ** has a top ranking for one of the most competitive search terms on Google.
-
he uses scraped content
-
the navigation is almost non-existent.
-
his backlinks seem dodgy. 1-page sites with content that doesn not relate. Bunch of links to other websites too
And yet his site stats are as follows:
-
Domain Authority: 72
-
MozRank: 4.63 MozTrust: 4.72
-
Linking Root Domains: 1725
On further investigation I discoverd that he owns a SEO company and that they in fact have achieved a #1 rank in various niches such as life insurance, car insurance, mortgage etc.
On his SEO site he actually promises a #1 ranking in less than 4 months. The sample sites he lists on there all achieved #1 over a 4 month period...of course he owns most of these domains and then just sells the leads...
So, my question is how on earth does he do it? Do you have any ideas
Zane
-
-
I've seen some other South African sites like this that have ranked really well. In fact our brand name is a big term is South Africa, hence the reason I noticed the odd .za site appearing in the rankings. I'm not sure if the algorithm is different for the area and that's why it works??
To be completely honest with you, what you competitor has done may not be sustainable in the long term, but you can see he's got some easy links from 'high ranking pages'. I won't endorse it and sooner or later he may get a penalty, but he does seem to have found some easy wins for the moment at least!!
-
Some analysis for this site:
-
any site will receive a significant boost for the exact domain name match phrase. This site owner is using a South African ccTLD, org.za for his domain name. He added "lifeinsurance" as the domain name which will earn him a boost in rankings for that term.
-
His home page is 100% targeted to the "life insurance" phrase. His page title, H1 tag, H2 tag, and alt text all use the term.
-
the content uses the term enough to be very relevant for the phrase.
-
the site has 45 internal followed links, 0 external links. The links are highly efficient. While it is true the site does not offer any navigation in the header, it forces users to scroll to the bottom of the page where 100% of the links are located, in the footer. As long as users are ok with this method, there is nothing wrong with it. The footer seems quite spammy to me, and I would expect Panda to hurt this site a lot, but I don't think Panda has reached South Africa yet. If anyone can confirm the Panda status in SA, that would be helpful
-
the best backlinks are from other sites which he owns such as www.lifeinsurance.org.za which has the identical look and feel. There are also sites he works with such as www.fastcompany.com where the link appears on the profile page of the "Chairperson" of the company.
-
many other links are from blogs which don't add the "nofollow" tag to comments. First, these sites are not related to life insurance, so the linking value is minimized. The first such site I noticed is destructoid.com which is a gaming site. There are tons of others trying the same method so the links are highly diluted with over 500 links on the page. I have to believe that Google has some awareness to this type of issue and catches many of these links and wipes out their value. They could algorithmically investigate the site receiving these types of links and remove other links as well.
So in the end, what does your competitor offer? An exact match domain name with very solid on-page SEO. That is enough to earn good rankings. Combine it with a smaller market (South Africa) and the backlinks from his other sites which have solid PA/DA and he has earned his ranking.
You can collect as many FACTS as possible and share them with Google. Share the information about his network of sites demonstrating they clearly use the identical web template. Demonstrate the spam blog links. Report the site and hope some action is taken.
With the exception of the blog spam and duplicate sites, I would suggest copying some of his other tactics as there is nothing black hat about them.
-
-
According to OSE his page authority is built up by finding blogs without rel=nofollow in their comment section and spamming his keywords in the links on hundreds of blog comments.
Frankly I'm surprised this is working so well.
-
Okay, that makes sense.
-
Is there any reason your competitor's site information cannot be shared openly in this Q&A? Without looking at the site, we are left to offer general feedback which clearly wont be as helpful.
-
I agree, but how do you compete? For example, he gets links from so-called 'authority' sites such as http://www.multicrawl.com/ with a Page Authority of 64 (PR 6)
And sites such as http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.db.html where I can't even find his links on the page??
-
This type of SEO drives me crazy and it's one of the aspects of SEO that makes me want to pull my hair out. Typically you see "SEO" companies that participant in awful, obviously black hat SEO and they rank quickly and for a long time. A white hat SEO tries to build quality links but it's near impossible to dislodge these websites when faced with the overwhelming value provided from these spammy websites.
I'd be happy to take a look at the website's backlink profile as well (PM Me). I recently came up against a massive link pyramid that I had to compete against and I know how frustrating it can be.
-
Ryan, I'll be PM his details to you
-
I don't know if I can offer any insight, but if you provide a link its more likely.
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
-
SEO for International Expansion - Best Strategies
Looking for some Best Strategies in SEO for International Expansion . We were based in a single country till one year back and then decided to expand to other English speaking countries as well. Traffic from SEO for us is around 1.3 million users only from the single country and we rank in top#3 for 90% of our targeted keyword bank of 45000+ keywords. We just launched in some new countries like singapore , philippines and few other English speaking countries with really unique content and I wanted to check whether I can use my mother domain or use any other strategies for growing SEO faster in other countries. Any inputs on scaling up SEO traffic internationally will be appreciated
Algorithm Updates | | ozil1 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
What's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX
Hello Mozers; I am having an issue, my client has 10K pages on their site; in WP, and they have a classified section. Question #1: I am asking, what's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX, for their Classified section. They currently have no SEO plug ins, that fix their errors, and warnings. Question #2: My question is also, do I want the Categories crawled, or INDEXED or NOINDEX? Check out their Campaign results by Moz: Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) 32 Too Many On-Page Links 9,032 Missing Meta Description Tag 6,234
Algorithm Updates | | smstv0 -
Why SEO
Hi Guys, it's going to be a long one so thank you from advance for your patience. First i wanted you to i am new to SEO world and this world excites me In the last 30 days, i started to check my companies (i am employee not an owner) website in SEO point of view. What we do: Online grocery shopping and home delivery www.artizone.com I will share with you some of the results: 5482 errors for duplicate page content 8850 errors for duplicate page title 37 title missing or empty some pages had 4+ H1 tags many more HTML errors. page authority 42/100 domain authority 40/100 We have no listing 163 back-links domain to our Dallas & Chicago website and much more another thing i checked was where are we for the keywords that we are interested in: "online grocery shopping Dallas" - position 1 in Google search shop for groceries online Dallas - Position 1 in Google search shop for groceries from home Dallas - Position 1 in Google search And some more and the same for Chicago I Did all the searches in new incognito window My Question - how come we build our website so bad, with no Google+, we have very few back-links(compare to our competitors) and the page and domain rank are so low and still we are in the 2 or 3 highest position in Google search One more question - Why to invest time in fixing all the SEO issues i found? You are all welcome to have a SEO view in my website Thank you vest much Ivgi
Algorithm Updates | | iivgi0 -
Seo results are down. Is my "all in one seo pack" to blame?
My website www.noobtraveler.com has shown a dip of 40% since Penguin's last update in November. I also transferred hosting at time, but I was wondering if I'm over optimizing with the all in one seo pack. I would appreciate it if someone could do a quick sweep and share their thoughts. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Noobtraveler0 -
How to write a good resourceful SEO enabled article
We have our saas based website - most of our online customers are those who keep coming back to us and my GA is full of their footprints. I completely want to concentrate on getting hold of those who might really need our software and as of now are not able to find them . Including keywords through which people might want to find us is one of the ways. Next how do I publish that to the majority of the users to find and get traction better on that article or post? Would posting links to facebook twitter etc and getting people to find those articles there and link back and come on our main website to read it - will this help? We sell cloud based software but have various domains where our customers can make use of it. There are at least 5-10 of them. We don't have content at all on our website. In a few simple steps how can I get started with this - Content generation **Linking back the content ** Generating good foot falls from users to those cotent Notching up on google for those content page A detailed insight would prove much helpful Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | shanky11 -
Big site SEO: To maintain html sitemaps, or scrap them in the era of xml?
We have dynamically updated xml sitemaps which we feed to Google et al. Our xml sitemap is updated constantly, and takes minimal hands on management to maintain. However we still have an html version (which we link to from our homepage), a legacy from back in the pre-xml days. As this html version is static we're finding it contains a lot of broken links and is not of much use to anyone. So my question is this - does Google (or any other search engine) still need both, or are xml sitemaps enough?
Algorithm Updates | | linklater0