How does a site get to no 3 in Google with no KW in their links?!!
-
Hello everyone, my first post - ahhh
I'm investigating a niche and there is a site that should have no right being there in my view.
It's no. 3 Google UK for 'company formation' with a small site with 65 weak links from only 7 domains and hosted in the US.
But more importantly, the Open Site Explorer says there is not 1 link with that term in its anchor text. This I find crazy and makes me suspicious.
But before I go back to my client saying "oh they must be black hat" I would like your expert views. I'm not sure whether to tut or congratulate them and for the first time I'm not sure what reasons to give for their amazing performance!
What's your views?
-
Yeah tried that, only 3 in Google and stopped my Magestic subscription.
I'll accept it for now and move on, but I haven't come across a white hat site that doesnt give some indication of why they rank so highly. This site goes against the grain with me in so many ways that it looks suspect.
The big issue is as 'the SEO expert' I have a question mark and the client will want to know why I dont know.
I'll just have to bump them down with my client's site wont I. Thanks for the reply.
Oh and nice G btw ;o)
-
Hi Stuart,
Even though OpenSiteExplorer has a decent index, it doesn't have all the data Google has. You might want to look into other sources like MajesticSEO, Google link: command or Yahoo Site Explorer Inlinks.
Recently, I was also looking at a competitor website and I was like "man, how can they rank for that query with such a low number of links and no good anchor text". I discovered that using the link: command on Google returned much more links than OSE.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Did anyone else have a thought on this or shall I give up on SEO and just invest in EMD's! (joke).
Although I appreciate one members view I would like another, as I persoanlly cant believe that they have the strength to be where they are just based on the domain.
-
Exact match domains are still very powerful in Google. Matt Cutts said the team was going to look at them in 2011, but that has not happened yet to my knowledge and even if they do, no guarantees of if or when they'll make an algorithm adjustment.
It is an exact match domain because the term "company formation" is in the URL, it's just the words are switched. But the phrase still appears in the URL and none of the other URLs are like that.
Right, they're only ranking because of their domain, at least in my opinion. Their DomainAuthority is very weak otherwise compared to the others.
-
Thanks for the response, I didnt say which domain but I dont consider www.theformationscompany.com/ to be exact match; it is they Im confused about.
As I understand EMD are not so powerful anymore in Google' s eyes, just that you get great backlink anchor text even with directory submissions.
Plus the main point is the strength of all the sites around them. I would Put them on page 4 at best!
-
I looked up the domain you're referring to.
The easy answer? They have an exact match domain. They have a somewhat okay title tag, and they do have backlinks.
Exact match domains are way overpowered and I think this is the case for this term!
It's not blackhat, just taking advantage of EMD's.
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
-
Can deceptive ads help sites to rank? Pogosticking effect involved...
Hello,
Competitive Research | | fablau
I have a question for you. I have noticed that many music sites that appear in the first top results for keywords our users search for, include all the same ads that deceive people by inviting them to "Download" or get the "Full Album" of what people may be search for. Look at the following websites that are often displayed at the first spots for keywords like "Christmas Sheet Music" (just an example): [....] They all have, most of the times, the same ads. Look at the following screenshots taken from the sites above (the ads are at the top of the page): http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot1.jpg
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot2.jpg Those deceptive ads could engage users more than legitimate websites not showing those ads or not showing ads at all, making Google think that people are more engaged on those website showing those deceptive ads. If it is quality that Google is looking for, shouldn't they do something to avoid having sites ranking well just because of some deceptive ads that take users into action, but without any useful result? I am eager to know your ideas on this issue. Thanks! Fab.0 -
Link vs Subdomain Language redirect
Hi all, I'm managing a website that uses a redirect to show different languages to the users. I mean when a user access the site from any country it sees the full domain but when it access it from Italy, France or Germany it goes to domain.com/lang=FR or IT. I see that other sites use a technique to redirect to it.domain.com or fr.domain.com but I have doubts about which one is better. We do an aggressive link building strategy and we have a lot of links to the root domain across the various languages. Is it better to do the link building to the it.domain.com and fr.domain.com, depending on the language source of the link instead of the root? I'm seeing that some of our competitors are doing this but I'm afraid is going to spread the link juice across many subdomains and lose power to the root. Thanks in advance
Competitive Research | | nunob.staredition0 -
Continuous drop in Rankings on Google.uk
I have a Website who was ranked top 6 for most competitive keywords on Google.co.uk but suddenly dropped to page 2 after 21st January 2013 and later back to top 10 position and now dropped to pages 2 to 5, for most terms. I initially thought it was the transition rank causing this fluctuations. The strange thing is, i haven't done anything wrong in terms of back linking efforts. My site is content rich and offers real value to users also, the website PR increased from 3 to 4 recently, my site seomoz rank, PA, DA and Moz trust is higher than top ranked websites above mine. Please any suggestions?? Kindly help.....
Competitive Research | | ayo10 -
Best way to check a sites traffic that you dont own. (Canadian Site)
We are looking for a way to get the estimated traffic for some sites in our niche. Usually we use compete.com or spyfu, but they only track traffic in the US. Does anyone know a way we can get traffic estimates in Canada? Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | ClaytonKendall0 -
My Competition is using some Strange Achord Text and Inbound Links
I was doing some research and a lot of my competition are websites from Universities, but I got surprised when I saw that a lot of their Anchor Text where things like Buy Viagra , Play poker , Buy Cialis , a lot of their inbound links where about things like that , one of the sites I was doing research on was www.imba.ie.edu , this site was #1 for the keyword I want that is related to education. Also other sites on the #1 page of google for this keyword (universities websites) had the same kind of inbound links and achord texts. Whats going on here??
Competitive Research | | globalcampus0 -
How can a site rank higher when you beat them by A LOT on virtually every SEOMOZ factor?
Any insight into what's driving these results would be appreciated. Another site ranks #6 and we rank #22 on a keyword that scores 67% for "Keyword Difficulty", but we score significantly higher than them on almost every ranking factor including having nearly 10 times more backlinks along with higher PA and DA scores,etc. Here is a comparison from the Keyword Difficulty Tool report. Question: What could be going on? Factor and ranking comparison (us v. them) with our higher rankings are listed first. PA: 61 v. 39, mozRank 5,85 v. 4,54, mozTrust 6.00 v. 5.49, mT/mR = 1.0 v. 1.2, total links = 4,198 v. 90, internal links = 4198 v 90, external links = 275 v. 57, followed links = 4171 v 85, no follow links = 27 v 5, linking root domains = 46 v 30 on-page grade = A v B broad keyword usage in title: yes v yes broad keyword usage in document: yes v yes keyword used in url = no v no keyword used in domain = partial v no KW exact match - no v no exact anchor text links = 2373 v 13 %links w/ exact anchor text = 56% v 14% linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 7 v 8 % linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 15% v 26% partial anchor text links = 0 v 0 Domain Authority = 54 v 27 Domain mozRank = 5.4 v 3.2 Domain mozTrust = 5.8 v 3.7 DmT/DmR = 1.1 v 1.2 External links to domain 9261 v 63 Linking root domains to this domain = 355 v 33 linking c- blocks domains to domain = 267 v 30 tweets = 4 v 3 FB shares = 13 v 11 Google Plus one shares = 1 v 0
Competitive Research | | rickt0070 -
How can I add more than 3 competitors
Is there some way to add more than 3 competitors to the tool to benchmark against?
Competitive Research | | lockwoodl1 -
Link Landscape Definition
Will someone give me a good definition of "Link Landscape", or a great article on it.
Competitive Research | | Trupanion0