Experts please take a look.
-
Below is a screenshot from the website ahrefs.com (They identify the backlinks to your website), containing 3 results. My website, competitor 1 and competitor 2.
My website - I spend a year optimizing my site and doing back links as natural as possible. - Currently #10 in google.
Competitor 1 - Low URL rank and Super unnatural back links. - Currently #1 in google. This competitor has 195K backlinks by having 3 seperate websites linking each in their the main header.
Competitor 2 - Low URL rank and only 58 back links. - Currently #2 in google.
They have been on the top of google for a few keywords for months. And I do not understand why they are #1 constantly.
-
I don't like trying to solve problems without specific domains and example KWs so I can do a real diagnosis but let me suggest a few hypotheses (I would not suggest all of these if I could see the URLs.)
-
You don't know what they've disavowed - they could have, for whatever reason, disavowed their own cross-domain links. Disavow says "ignore these links" which is (if you're not an SEO) basically the same as nofollow "don't pass juice to these links." So they may have made a (poor) choice to disavow their own links but it may be working for them.
-
Competitor 2 has at least 1 redirect. Could be a site with 20 million links for all we know. Could be nothing.
-
Can't tell the site speed, titles, content or any other on-page issues with any of the sites. You could be over-branding (Panda issues) or smashing the site with keywords.
-
Sometimes Google doesn't make sense.
-
Ahrefs only picks up around 10-20% of all links from what we've seen. Hard to make estimates on what Majestic, OSE, & Google see without the domain info.
You're assuming this is a link issue - but honestly we just can't tell yet. Not enough info to fully diagnose.
-
-
Most likely they are if the situation you described is how they have gained their links.
-
From the result shown above, competition 1 is using bad tactics correct?
-
SEO is not all back links, content is king, traffic is important and on-page problems can drag you down. Instead of worrying about rank and back links you should work on a content strategy, make sure what you control is optimized (fast page load, no huge errors, proper meta etc.) and work toward small, sustainable incremental gains. If your competition is using bad tactics it will catch up with them, you can grow your position now and be primed to take over when Google catches them.
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
-
How long Google will take to Disavow a link?
Just want to know how long will Google take to Disavow a link? I uploaded my file on 18 Dec 2020 and today is 5th January 2021 and still, that link is appearing in my Search Console in Top linking domains. Anyone who recently done this practice and how long it took? I mentioned the domain name below and hopefully, it will disavow all the links [subdomain+www+without www] coming from that domain. domain:abcd.com Help me out, please...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seotoolsland.com0 -
Dealing with Dodgy Looking Traffic
Hi there I am really hoping someone can help. The site I run has started receiving traffic from the US (we are a UK run firm who don't ship overseas). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a massive problem but the traffic is coming directly to lots of pages and instantly bouncing. I am worried this is going to negatively impact my rankings as drop off rate and conversions are getting hammered by this 'fake traffic'. The attached image shows the traffic for the homepage but its happening on every page with hundreds of hits bouncing and hurting my stats. Is there any way of dealing with this or reporting it to an authority or even Google itself? Any help would be greatly appreciated. George 7vprsJo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrinvaleBird0 -
Recent 2017 Disavow Experience - How long is it taking?
Hello All A client's site recently got hit with links from an XXX neighborhood. My clients site is on the periphery of adult entertainment, think Maxim Magazine, but not in the porn space. These links could be natural, or pushed by a competitor, we definitely did not solicit them. Regardless, dozens of links were established and then found by Google starting in February and a few very important keyword rankings disappeared about 2 months later (after Google found more and more XXX links). The linked to page is the only one that was really hit and it's not a manual action - seems completely algorithmic. We have disavowed all that we can put our finger on but I'm trying to provide guidance as to how long it has taken others to see some type of recovery...?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoaustin0 -
Looking for feedback on Scrapebox
Hello, I have been doing some research this morning and have come across Scrapebox, does anybody use them? What do people think of the comment poster? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mblsolutions1 -
By changing the wordpress theme what need to take for seo consideration?
Hi guys! we have a site that been using a theme for a year now and we decided to change to a new one, the question here is, does it affect seo? or it is possible to remain 100% for the seo? What caution tips that you guys can share for changing the theme? Does just remaining the same URL works?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andrewwatson922 -
Virus on wordpress second time PLEASE HELP
hello Mattew i have a big problem on the web is the second time that a virus attacked the wordpress of my web. That is why i am being very busy trying to solve it fisrt time i upload a backup before the attack, but now if infected again All de webs that are positioned on google for ejemple if you look for anithing on google "estetica of propdental.com" it redirects to page http://medicaresue.com can you help me please is the second time and i am losing lots of traffic and positions on google thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
My website disapeared from google rankings, please help?
Our website url is http://www.phoria.com Around January 16th we disappeared from google for the keyword 'kratom' We were on page 3 for the longest time. We have no critical messages in webmaster tools however I did notice most of our links seem to be website directory links.We still rank for a couple terms like buy kratom on page 6.I think a google update occurred around this time so I've read however if we had a variety of links that went against google guidelines wouldn't we have received a message stating so in Webmaster Tools?This month has been very confusing to say the least. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gregdotcom0 -
Please help? unique penguin problem with a blogger template
**Can any one help? The problem: **There is a free blogger template on this site http://btemplates.com/2012/blogger-template-crystalweb/ that has a anchor text link to our site using the keyword "wholesale" in the footer, that is the main course of our site being hit with a penguin penalty.**The story so far:**On the 24th April our website dropped out of the serps for our main keywords, traffic has been down 90% ever since, we are a small family run business that relies on the inter-net and goggle for our site to work. Goggle organic serps is about 30% of our turnover and have already had no choice to let 3 people go, problem now is we are left with Me, my Dad and Mum, Both my Brothers and nephew and my wife and my brothers wife so unless we can turn this around I can see us going bankrupt.**What I have done so far:**After the 24th I have learnt a lot about S.E.O , and managed to remove 99% of all bad/spammy links and have now come to a dead end. I have been promoting what we do as a company and promoting our blog over the last 4 months and also built a great twitter/facebook following with lots of re-tweets and shares which we have made some good sales from. We have re-designed most parts of our website and managed to up the conversion rate by 300% We have worked on all aspects of our website to make sure we have little/no duplicate content , have worked on ways to speed up the site and fixed most dead links/404 problems.<var id="yiv904548185yui-ie-cursor"></var>**Now onto our main problem:**After a few weeks of removing links I found a blogger page that kept coming up with the same link, after some detective work I found the template was originally designed by http://www.deluxetemplates.com/ after a few emails we found out that someone paid deluxetemplates to add the link to the site, I'm guessing it was a S.E.O. company we used for 2 years, but they did not admit to this and could not help. A guy called Klodian from deluxtemplates was really helpful and helped remove from his site, also he agreed to a cost of $250 to remove all the pictures on his server to force the blogger's to update, this is what the template from deluxtemplates now looks like vozconuncion.blogspot.co.uk .Now this was only helping fix this issue a small bit as a different site called btemplates also used the template and added it to there website as a free download and hosted the template pictures on there servers. I have emailed a few times, I have sent them twitter messages and also added messages to lots of there templates on there site in the hope they can help, I have also contacted the owner directly on his goggle+1 page but no reply. This template is being downloaded once or twice a day, with no way to get hold of the blogger's using it. As a last resort I offered the owner $1000 to help me remove the template but still no luck.Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve? we are willing to pay to resolve this and will do what ever needs to be done.Thank-you for taking the time to read.Karl.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0