Blogging just to manipulate rankings?
-
Hi,
I have been playing with Open Site Explorer for a while and have been trying to figure out how some of our competitors could rank with "not so great" articles. I don't want to sound harsh here but some of the articles outranking us are nothing but 6 images + 200-225 words from a press release and a Video. How exactly does Google justify this by ranking them higher than a 1500 word unique article that has been written in no less than 7 days?
According to OpenSite Explorer, about the two pages compared, the difference is the number of LINKS. The sad part is, without 1 exception, all their links are coming from blog pages like *.wordpress.com *.typepad.com etc. I would have been just FINE if their links were NATURAL.
You may ask me why I assume those blogs are created by them. Because every single post on those blogs are pointing to their domain... I don't think a normal blogger would keep pointing to the same domain.
So what are we supposed to do here?
-
Wait 3 months so people discover our articles and natural links will come? (It happens sometimes but then it may not...)
-
Do what they do?
Sorry about the ranting but I have one question if you don't want to read the rant. Is blogging to build links, considered black hat or not?
-
-
I agree. It is very hard to find a good writer. If we can't beat them with our content, then it's all fair anyway. At least you understand why you are outranked by them.
Thanks for your answers.
-
Good luck to you.
I think that it is very difficult to find an author who can write highly competitive content - no matter how much you pay them.
If you look at what is already on the web, ranking on the first two pages of google - that is what you need to beat. If the content can not beat that then I don't think that the "publish and forget it" method will work well.
-
Thanks for the answer again.
And it's great to hear it works in long term.
Something to stay positive...
We have a very decent team of writers and we do try to pay them higher than the industry average, as I am a writer myself and I try to make them happy and give them what they deserve. (instead of investing in (or purchasing) low quality links).
best,
-
We have got 1500 words + 15-20 high definition images + videos
Oh... thanks for adding that. It sounds like you deserve to be winning.
The articles that you are producing sound a lot like mine. They usually start out deep in the SERPs but over time they slowly climb the rankings. A year later, maybe two, they are at or near the top of google for their target keywords.
It is really slow progress, but instead of spending time/money on low quality links, I allow things to happen naturally and spend my time on another article.
-
No sir. Not like that
Sorry I forgot to -specifically- mention about our visuals but I was trying to compare the amount of unique text on the page.
We have got 1500 words + 15-20 high definition images + videos
anyway, thanks for the answer
-
hmmm...... you have fifteen hundred words...
They have two hundred words and six nice images and a video?
Imagine the contrast in the first impressions of a visitor...
Six juicy images and a video vs a block or black and white text.
I think just about anybody anywhere would rather watch a video and look at six nice images.
If I was you I would be buying a digital camera.
To be honest, I have the same frustrations as you do. I can't say if their satellite blogs are making an impact. But I think that you can make a better first impression if the visitors to your page see a big nice image above the fold and maybe more of them below. A digital camera will help a lot and if you don't have the topics needed you can license some really nice images from istockphoto for not a lot of money. I usually spend quite a bit of money getting props for images, paying someone for custom graphics. When I add them to an article the visitor stays a lot longer and I assume that it really helps with social sharing.
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
-
(Need helps here!) Can homepage and other internal pages (services) rank high together on Google?
Hi Moz community, Recently I am working on our website's SEO. Our company is a marketing agency. We provide general marketing services and also web design. Here is the content of our homepage and internal pages (specific services). Homepage (marketing agency) Internal page #1 (XXX marketing service) Internal page #2 (YYY marketing service) Internal page #3 (web design) I suggest to my supervisor that we could make some improvement and optimize different keywords for these 4 pages, respectively (homepage, internal page #1 #2 #3). However, my supervisor holds a different point of view that homepage and internal page#3 cannot rank both high for their own keywords because web design is not as related to marketing. So I did some research and look for some top-ranking marketing agency guys who also offer web design. I found their internal pages about web design service rank pretty bad for their own web-design-related keywords. Here are my thoughts and guess (please correct me if I am wrong): Google takes everything into account and deems web design to be kind of irrelevant content to the website, so the internal page for web design will not rank high. The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development. My question is: In above case, can homepage and other internal pages (our services) all rank high together for their own keywords? I know what I wrote is kind of confusing...But I really need help here and want to solve this problem badly. Really appreciate any help!! Thank you in advance! Best, Raymond
Competitive Research | | Raymondlee0 -
Competitor Ranks Top Keywords Without Backlinks
One of my competitors is ranking very well for many different competitive keywords (1k+ searches per month). I'm trying to figure out how in the world he is ranking so well. I've signed up for MozPro and looked at his back-links. He has 1 branded site-wide back-link from a decent blog. He also has 1 contextual back-link from a decent blog. Other than these 2 back-links, the rest are garbage links unlikely to even count for anything (he has maybe 12 of these low quality back-links). My website on the other hand has more than 15 back-links from different (high quality) websites and does not rank anywhere near this competitor. This leads me to believe that either MozPro back-link reporting is inadequate or there is foul-play on the part of my competitor. As far as on-page SEO is considered, his website is far inferior. Therefore, I highly doubt this would play a role. What are some reasonable approaches I can take to better understand the cause of this discrepancy. Clearly the back-link reporting has not revealed any answers.
Competitive Research | | poke10 -
Keyword strategy for wordpress category base blog in competitive industry
Hi friends, We have a client in the movie review blog industry, which we are aware is highly competitive, but we have tons of content (over 10,000 unique posts) and a good team of reviewers for fresh content. I was wondering about any input on keyword variations for our SEO Title of our wordpress main categories, like "Movie Reviews". I was thinking a modification to "Latest Movie Reviews", but the competition is only slightly less, and still seems questionable for attaining eventual rankings. "Best Movie Reviews" is slightly higher than "Latest Movie Reviews" but the competition still seems tough. What would be a good long term strategy with these category pages, any suggestions?
Competitive Research | | JustinMurray0 -
Relevancy vs Quality of the website in blog commenting
For example, I would like to comment on a do follow blog with my link inserted in the comment. The blog post is relevant with the link i inserted however there are too many spammy links on the comment. Will this affect my website in terms of "link neighborhood" even my site is relevant to the blog? how do you judge whether the blog is worth commenting and putting your link on it? Does link building on blog comments actually hurt the page rank of websites if it go wrong such as spammy sites?
Competitive Research | | andzon0 -
SEO ranking question
Hey, If a site for had a series of articles, and had the privilege of guest posting on several sites, such as mashable, entrepreuner.com, inc.com, and a few other not as big sites. and let us also say that this site is new and currently has pagerank of 0. How would the above benefit the site and the visibility of the articles on google? Also, with guest-posting, is it problematic to have the exact article also on your site? thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | Raz.0 -
My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there. I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12. And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes. It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least. So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful. I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess. We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
Competitive Research | | harrybingham0 -
Why is my competitor's site ranking #1?
I'm about to work for a local business website that offers cleaning services and products. The keyword they want the most is ruled by a very odd site; My client's competitor's site has been around for 7 years. (Less than the average of it's competitors. Less than my client's) Has 1 backlink. Lower PA MR MT & DA than any other in the SERP. It's a 1 page site made with Flash. They do not have FB or Twitter accounts. So I thought maybe they were ranking so well because of their traffic. But neither my client, me or my coworkers have ever heard of this company. And yet, they are ranking #1. And the only thing I notice that might have helped is that the title of their page is the exact keyword and nothing more. Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | Eblan0