Seasonal links, seasonal ranks
-
As the garden season begins to wane I notice yet again how my ranking for some garden specific terms - eg ' garden tealight holders' start to rise again.Since I am doing nothing much I can only assume that my competitors have moved their focus to more winter based merchandise.
Does anyone have a good understanding of how some websites are able to acheive high rankings during peak season only?
I am assuming they are buying advertising (with the follow) for say 3 months before the season peak and manipulating internal linking to direct link juice from one section of the website to the other.
Is this strategy risky. Has Google ever made mention of this issue?
-
mmmm - maybe but I suspect there is paid linking and deliberate sculpting going on - Garden Beet is more active on social forums relating to gardens than one of its main competitiors
however in support of your argument I recently witnessed Garden Beet shoot from the dark unseen ranks of 54 to number 8/9 following a tv campagin on a related term - but yawn yawn - the page is now hovering around 20 -
-
My guess would be social sharing volume could be playing a huge role, and this could especially be true in the last few years. Tests by Rand and SEOmoz have shown that sized quantities of tweets or facebook shares, especially very rapidly have had significant effects on ranking.
Also, I don't dispute the fact that people probably are buying links, but I would also think there may be a bit of natural back linking happening, in the news sites (high authority), blogs, etc surrounding the on-season.
-Dan
-
best get sculpting I suppose
lol.... yes, I better get busy
-
thanks EGOL - well best get sculpting I suppose
-
I see some of my competitors starting to pop-up in the rankings for Christmas merchandise. I think that they are buying links. I think that this is a risky strategy, but as you see, it can be effective.
A few years ago, internal links and anchor text were extremely powerful for moving different parts of a site in and out of the SERPs with each arriving season. However, the ability of a webmaster to do that with his own site has greatly diminished - at least that is the effect that I see on my own sites. I don't think that this is a risky strategy, but its not as effective as it was a few years ago.
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
-
Link Juice
Do you guys think having a guest post close to the root domain has more link juice that being in subfolders? example.com/123 vs example.com/nov/123 Both pages have the same amount of internal links and both pages don't have external links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arango201 -
Link Building Strategy?
If I use unique content written from writers & post it to good sites (free blogs, bookmarking, directory, articles sites, etc.) having nice good cache, good PR, different IP's do i still have a chance of get hit by Spam actions of google? Planning to do like just 30-50 a month all with unique content or say 1 unique content then re-written & used not more than 3 times. If not this then What else would you suggest? One more thing to add up, like i have 1000+ pages out of which i have like 80-90 pages that matters to me (important pages) then how do I spin the anchor text between all the pages. Should i spin them between 1000+ pages or use only 80-90 IMP pages. If the content is 300 words let say then how many anchor tags should i have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Ranking and Deindexing Issues
Hi We have a website www.advanced-tuning.co.uk which has been suffering since Penguin 2 in terms of SERPS drops and indexing of pages. There are several issues which I believe are impacting on rankings and indexing/ pages being removed from the index. 1) Unnatural links. Been through Cemper and 2% of back links are toxic , 71% suspicious. There has been some auto link building undertaken by previous SEO’ers which has resulted in a lot of very poor quality back links - .pl forum member links etc. I put together a link disavow doc and have now seen Average Link Detox Risk drop to moderate from high. There still a few dodgy links but I’m working my way through these. 2) “thin” content – the site has a lot of auto generated manufacturer / model web pages e.g. http://advanced-tuning.co.uk/model/chevrolet-captiva-2-0-d-vcdi-150/ http://advanced-tuning.co.uk/model/bmw-116i-115/ these pages are internally linked to each other In addition there's a series of geographically targeted web pages which tbh don't seem to have been hit (yet) e.g. http://advanced-tuning.co.uk/location/engine-remapping-huddersfield/ My question is should I; a) Look to remove these manufacturer / model pages completely b) Invest time in generating suitable content for the service /location pages? c) Remove both types of content and concentrate on creating suitable content and links for the top level manufacturer web pages Also If i do remove the manufacturer / model pages is it worth me 301'ing the pages that are still indexed? Thanks in advance, Ade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Door4seo0 -
Advice on Link Building?
I know webmasters shouldn't focus on link building but unfortunately there are some types of content that doesn't get shared as much as other. And for content to go viral, it ain't that easy and it's almost impossible in some smaller niches where you don't have the volume to go "viral". That said I know about the common link building techniques. I know I can submit guest posts but when you're competing with websites that have over 10,000 backlinks, there is no way I'm going to get close to this with guest posting and commenting on other blogs. One way I found for getting backlinks is to publish interviews. Most of the time, people/businesses you interview like to link to this type of content. Publishing value-added content about other businesses' products or services may get some backlinks in return but not that often. So other than that, can some of you share some "out-of-the-box" link building strategies? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Can a domain rank for a competitive term with no links?
Hi, I know that this topic has received a lot of attention recently (Not all of it good) and I am not normally one to re-open a can of worms but the whole 'Camper Mens Shoes' fiasco has got me thinking. If you're not familiar with the story then you can get the highlights of it here - http://martinmacdonald.net/the-curios-case-of-camper-shoes/ My question is this - Say that you had a domain (Domain A) that was ranking well for a competitve keyword and that it had a good backlink profile. If you used rel="canonical" on every page of Domain A to point to a duplicate site on a different domain (Domain B) , would Domain B then rank well in place of Domain A? I know that this probably doesn't have much practical use but I am trying to get a better understanding of the effect of using rel="canonical" Would the result of doing the above mean that Domain B would rank well without having any links pointing directly to it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0 -
GOOGLE Rankings
We built a site for one of our clients about 3 years ago and added Meta tags to each page of the site. But when you do a google search on the keywords the site still does not come up. I thought it would be spidered into the system by now. Web Site - www.specialtysealgroup.com Let me know what we can do to improve our GOOGLE rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thine1230 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0