Crazy SEO question (maybe I'm missing something?)
-
OK -
so one of our customers just called us and told us an interesting story:
A local SEO company called her yesterday to try to sell their services to her. She's in the process of starting SEO services with us, so she told them she wasn't interested. The sales guy told her that they were better (without even asking who she was currently using) and asked her for a term that she'd like to rank higher for.
She said she'd like to rank higher for "spray in bedliners northern ky" and he said "Gotcha, call you tomorrow"
He called back just now and told her to look at Google. She's now ranking number one for that term. He didn't have access to her site, so he wasn't able to change anything on her site.
He won't tell her what he did, and told her it was legitimate - but it seems to me that with only off-site tactics, it'd be nearly impossible to white-hat her site to number one overnight...
Any ideas what he's doing? First of all, we want to be able to tell her what he's doing, because she's curious. More importantly, we want to be sure he's not doing anything black-hat that's going to hurt our client's site.
Thanks for your help, Mozzers!
-
Because "spray in bedliners northern ky" is a low competition/no competition term, hence why ranking with offsite can easily be done -
They just provide a huge number of automated links over night from websites like:
http://pezis.com/linexofky.com (for example, guessing this is your client's site)
Tell her to say ok we want to rank for "bedliner" when they call back,
Kind Regards,
James Norquay
-
To echo what the others shared, the results work because of two reasons:
1. The term is a long tail and very specific phrase "spray in bedliners northern ky". It is 5 words and no one else on earth is targeting that phrase in that exact manner.
2. Google loves fresh data and links. It is easy to spam social media or various sites with new links which are given weight today but quickly fall to obscurity tomorrow.
Using Google's Keyword tool you can see there is absolutely no traffic at all for the given phrase. If you want to rank #1 for a keyword that no one searches for, the world will let you. It is pointless.
Try again with the phrase "bed liner". That phrase has over 100k searches a month (compared to zero for the other phrase) and it also has competition.
-
The reason he got her to rank for that keyword very quickly is because there is no search traffic behind the term and no competition. You easily spam a couple hundred blogs/forums.directories/other crap link source with the exact match anchor text and rank pretty comfortably.
Get her to pick a keyword that is searched for and tell them to try again.
-
I looked into a bit and think I found the links on Blekko and IceRocket. several anchor text links. Juice fading fast. I think it started out on PR 7 (PA 89) and it looks like a few PR4 (PA 66) sites. Not sure if the links started on the front pages, but they are not on the front pages now. I will send you the links. Didn't take much for such a specific phrase
-
Check the back links. you should see what they pointed to her site. I doubt they did anything that is repeatable for many keywords. They probably made short article and placed it somewhere with a lot of juice. Great for a demonstration, to valuable/expensive a spot to use for a lot of keywords.
-
To work that fast, I am betting that they have a link from a page with enormous power.... PR8?
Of course, "spray in bedliners northern ky" is a wimpy term to rank for... tell her to call him back and ask for a real money term.
-
Maybe Google have started their own SEO business??
That would be a sure way to wipe out the competition and earn some cash!
Seriously though, unless they have access to some amazing link resources then this has to be black hat doesn't it? unconsenting at that! like you say, if it's dodgy then some serious damage could be made here in the long term.
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
-
Why my website's Alexa rank is dropping
My website Alexa rank has dramatically dropped in the past 3 months: Website: www.sastasundar.com End of July, 2012: 5217 Global, 265 Local(India) But Now: ** 29260** Global, 2274 Local(India) Definitely something big has affected my global ranking and I'm not able to figure it out. Please help.
Competitive Research | | foreseegame0 -
What One SEO Metric Would You Choose?
If you had to choose one SEO metric to measure a site's SEO performance what would it be? I know you shouldn't use one metric, but lets say you had 10 seconds to assess how well a site was probably doing from an SEO perspective. What metric would it be? *I also asked this question on the inbound forms.
Competitive Research | | eyeflow0 -
Pagerank and sitemap question :)
As most of us are, I am working on pushing my page rank up and in that I have been looking at some of the pages ahead of me to see what they may be doing. I noticed one of my main competitors has some different sitemaps than I am using. My sitemaps consist of:
Competitive Research | | allstatetransmission
Using Yoast WP PLugin:
Posts
Pages
QA/FAQs
Testimonials
Categories
and FAQ Categories Using Google Images Sitemap WP Plugin:
Images Sitemap http://1stimpressions.com/sitemap_index.xml Their sitemap has:
Posts
Pages
Attachment
Portfolio (Next Gen Gallery)
Category
Post Tags
Next Gen Gallery (NGG) Tags
Portfolio Type Sitemap
Author Sitemap http://smartwrap.com/sitemap_index.xml Could adding in some of these sitemaps help in page rank? I have looked at their links and on page optimization and we are just about par in comparison if not ahead of them, but they still are a whole page ahead of us in google searches for phoenix vehicle wraps, or car wraps phoenix and related searches. Thanks for your input, I really appreciate it. 🙂 Cheers! (edited spelling)0 -
Question about OSE
Just registered, so please excuse my ignorance. How can you get your competitors' recent backlinks using OSE? Thank you!
Competitive Research | | georgesan0 -
Analyzing Back Links - Says site A has back link to Site B but when I look at site B I can't find any back link to Site A. Why?
I am new to SEO Moz - It looks like incredible technology. I was playing around with different websites to see where they had back linked to see how it works. Looked at a site called racingsecretsexposed [dot] come and it said that it had dozens of links to www.ndesignstudio.com such as: ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites?replytocom=893 with link anchor text "laying horses" but when I do a search for the company name, or the anchor text "laying horses", or the owner of the company's name on ndesignstudio.com - nothing appears. Why not? Isn't the back link anchored by the text laying horses, which should link back to the racing secrets website? Thanks
Competitive Research | | NewtoSEO900 -
I'v been trying to rank for this word for a long time
Hi, I have this one page designed to rank for a spesific word i google (sweden). The page has a flawless moz grade A on-page. While my competator ranks for their subdomain, also grade A. I rank 6 he ranks 2 in google. Would I be doing a misstake if i 301 directed it to mu subdomain. In visitor perspective it would be a better landig page aswell. I dont want to lose my rank though. Best practice, anyone?
Competitive Research | | SuperlativB1 -
SEO Strategy Questions on an International Domain
I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question. Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated! We recently purchased a Germany-based company. They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website. Domain1 and Domain2. I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well. We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US. Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany. So we split it using GeoDNS. Any international traffic goes to their server. Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours. From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US. So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs. The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools. They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still. We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name. Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name. My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name. I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | KathleenLTG0
