Seasonal links, seasonal ranks

[GardenBeet]

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?

[GardenBeet]

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  -

[evolvingSEO]

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

[EGOL]

best get sculpting I suppose

lol.... yes, I better get busy 

[GardenBeet]

thanks EGOL - well best get sculpting I suppose

[EGOL]

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.