Am I missing something?
-
Hey guys,
First of all, a big thanks to SEOmoz and the community. I've been an avid reader for about a year now and have seen some great improvements.
I'm always focusing my efforts on strategies that work well for my niche. Although I've come accross one of my competitors that doesn't seem to have much going for him, although he ranks very well. His root domain is ****E and the URL where (seemingly) spammed links point to is ***. If you do a site: command he has 1000+ pages although most consist of "events calendar" (empty). Also, I ran some of his content through copyscape and there seems to be multiple versions of it throughout the web.
After all this, he ranks very well for money keywords in our niche, although his on-page is horrible so there are many opporunities I've capitalized on.
Is there something I'm missing? I'm trying to find the value in his website but its not very clear to me since his backlink profile is (seemingly) junk and his on-page goes against all I was told to implement.
-
You are not the only one that is frsustated with this, please post url i can only guess without it.
-
Several things play here. They could have great anchor text, more followed links from stronger sites, or better on-age (although you discredit this) . Without seeing the actual site, it is hard to say what is going on.
-
I disagree with removing the links. How can we do any DD for you?
-
I didn't mean it like that......but honestly i'm stumped......
-
I don't really appreciate the condescending talk but it's 59% and 55%. Understand, I'm not an SEO by trade and its really a small part of my daily duties.
-
unrelated anchor text in places with lots of oubound links = NO rankings........so there's something else ranking him that OSE missed??? The only factor OSE doesn't count is domain age.
Also, tell us the seomoz keyword difficulty of the keywords this guy is ranking for that are the 'money' keywords.
-
I decided to edit the question since Barry raises a good point. I only wanted to bring something to the light and didn't intend on "calling" anyone out- my apoligies if it came off like that. I only wanted to explain that I've done some due dilligence on this website and have found very little reason for this website to be ranking for high traffic keywords (yes personalized search is off..). In his backlink profile there are around 8 local directories listed, and then about 1200 forum spammed post with some weird anchor text not at all related to our niche ("cheap viagra" "cheap auto insurance"). His website isn't alone, it's listed among 30-50 other websites on each post. These forums are often in foreign languages so that just seemed really odd. Majestic SEO shows these links started aroun 2008 and continued through 2009.
-
I dunno if a mod will stop by but I imagine there will be a lot of requests to 'out' other sites (not saying I've found anything dodgy); are there any guidelines on reporting competitors dodgy tactics as I know mostly seoMoz and other big sites usually avoid public outings and would there be any liability should the site complain?
Just thinking aloud.
-
Good catch. Or you could try adding &pws=0 to the end of the URL string for your search, and that should eliminate the personalized results from being delivered to you.
-
It seems like when I run into this same scenario, I'm dealing with a mature URL that has simply positioned itself in a market and been able to hold. It's not that they are technically doing things "right", but apparently are not doing enough wrong to affect the gravity of their age and backlinks.
I think the original registration on that domain was 2003. Are there any other sites ranking around some of your key phrases that are less than 1-2 yrs registered? Age could be a factor.
-
I'm not sure what the money keywords in your industry are, but the guy doesn't have any link anchor text to speak of in the OSE profile, and his few backlinks are not high quality so its doubtful he is ranking for anything. Also, he's nowhere to be found on SEMrush.
Most likely what's happening is you've clicked on his site so many times, google has personalized your search and pushed his site to the top of the results for YOU ONLY. Try logging in with a different browser or running the seomoz keyword difficulty tool for the keyword that you think he ranks highly and see if he shows up.
-
First you might want to post the non shortened version of the URLs. I know many people do not trust shortened links from sources they don't know well enough.
Your competitor may be buying links en masse with customized anchor text for the links. I see it daily with the competitors of my client's sites. If you aren't in an overly competitive keyterm space, a few thousand bought - anchor text optimizied - low quality links can easily be enough to get someone ranking for terms even though the rest of their SEO is abysmal.
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
-
Missing Titles?
Hi All, Don't know if anyone can help me but Moz is showing lots of errors for my website for not having title tags for pages when they do? Also when a user refines they search results it is seeing every instance of this as a new page - we have canonical tags across the site to stop this happening yet it is still occurring each time - is there anything else we can do to resolve this problem? It's creating lots of errors for us. Thanks, Laura
Technical SEO | | Citybase0 -
I am getting html validation errors on my schema, is there something I've done incorrectly?
When I tried to validate my html after added some schema, I am getting html validation errors. I have some examples below. Any ideas on what I've done incorrectly? www.mexpro.com Line 9, Column 80: there is no attribute "itemprop" `…ontent="http://www.mexpro.com/mexico/images/mexpro-logo.jpg" itemprop=**"**logo" />`_L Line 130, Column 23_: "itemscope" is not a member of a group specified for any attribute `itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">`
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Missing Meta Tags - "thousands" using WooCommerce?
Recently took a site live for a client using WP/WooCommerce to replace their antiquated shopping cart site and have encountered thousands of "Missing Meta Description Tag" errors. Have researched and tried a couple different approaches, but nothing really seems to fix this problem. I'm happy to continue to research, but have never encountered this problem before. Anyone else encountered similar? If so, how did you fix? Which resources to start with? 2VKDRVx
Technical SEO | | twelvetwo.net0 -
Is it something really obvious or is off-site link building all thats missing?
I'm trying to get a client ranked for the keyword Quaich and its like pulling teeth 😞 This keyword performs brilliantly for adwords but I've never got it ranked at all in googles SERPs. Last November I created this page: http://kiltmakers.co.uk/quaich Which ranks as A with seo-moz but still nothing. I'm still a newbie to SEO work but can someone point me in the right direction? Is it just the domain authority that the issue - should I switch my focus to link building off-site?
Technical SEO | | sunscreem0 -
Diagnostics say I'm missing Page titles... but I am not?
I've been running a crawl of one of our new site builds for a couple of weeks. The Diagnostics picked up a couple of issues, which was great, but it's saying we're missing Page Titles and Descriptions on pages that we have Page Titles and Descriptions. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | niamhomahony0 -
424 Crawl Notices Found - Most of these notices are 301 redirects for our blog. Are notices something that would keep me from ranking well for my keywords?
212 are rel canonical and 176 are 301 permanent re-direct. An example of the re-direct is a change I made to the /trackback 302 status on my blog like; http://www.bluesunproperties.com/2012-spring-biker-rally-thunder-beach/trackback/ Are these Crawl Notices something that I should spend resources on, or should I focus more on my errors and warnings?
Technical SEO | | classa0 -
Why "title missing or empty" when title tag exists?
Greetings! On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24). "Title missing or empty" was 9,676. "Duplicate page content" was 9,678. Whoa! Content at site has not changed. I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag. Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar. I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place . In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler. I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages. Titles were found and hash codes were unique. Hmmm. Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com Small sample of pages with errors: electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
Technical SEO | | groovykarma
electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot. What am I missing please? Thanks kindly, Loren0 -
Meta description tag missing in crawl diagnostics
Each week I've been looking at my crawl diagnostics and seomoz still flags a few pages with missing meta description although they are definitely in there. Any ideas on why this would be happening?
Technical SEO | | British_Hardwoods0