Poor Link Profiles Out Ranking Whitehat
-
Hi guys / girls,
We have a few clients in some very competitive areas that are struggling to gain the top spots. We have been building some good quality links, relevant directories, quality citations, guest posting from good quality websites, broad anchor texts profiles, really strong social signals, competitor back links lookup etc.
The issue is that nearly all the websites that are out ranking us have really bad links profiles, lots of spammy links, abusing anchor texts etc
So what can you do in this situation. The obvious path is to think, right well lets match them for cr*p links and get some results. However I am more than aware that Googles Algorithm eventually will pick up on this... well at least you hope so.
Its just very frustrating when you're getting your ass kicked by poor link building techniques and you're doing good work.
I am sure other people have come across this, and I was just wondering if there are any bits of advice of how to move past this? Or is it simply a case of keep doing good work and eventually we will get rewarded?
Thanks!
-
I a agree with Zakaria and George. I too am struggling with the same issue. I even private messaged SEOMoz to get their take on my specific situation. Their answer agreed with Zakaria. But believe me, I understand how hard it is to go to a CEO who sees his competitors outrank his site and convince him that you just need to keep exactly what you are doing. I think you are definitely on the right track by going after your Toyota niche. Sometimes the problem when trying to explain to a CEO or Marketing Director that you are doing the right thing is because they are hung up on "vanity" keywords. What I mean by that is keywords that they want to rank for but probably the site really shouldn't rank highly for based on content and competition. As you mentioned, your competitor's site has a broader scope, meaning they will have a better chance at ranking for broader, and perhaps more competitive keywords. However, by going after "Toyota" you probably have a better shot at actually increasing revenue than you would if you spent a lot of time, money and energy chasing those harder keywords.
Good luck Jon. I feel your pain!
Dana
-
Agree with Zakaria, hang in there, My niche was exactly the same, i tried to compete doing as the bad guys were and got penalised. thankfully im back on track, not where i was but traffic is steady.
If its any consolation I see the the spammy sites come and go, however the white hat sites are still there or about's .
Keep things real and don't cut corners you will get your rewards.
One thing i have noticed as that some sites can get away with a mixed bag of links, but my advice is don't gamble, do it right and reap the rewards
Good Luck
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 anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links?which one is better to rank a website? i am looking for the help for one of my website
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links? which one is better to rank a website? I am looking for help for one of my website vacuum cleaners
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hshajjajsjsj3880 -
Hammered by Spam links
When we moved from one host to another in Wordpress engine, we had this insertion weird redirect thing happen. We 410'd the page cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi, but it hit us hard in the anchors. If you go to ahrefs, we are literally all Asian in anchors text. Anybody have any suggestions, thank goodness it looks like it finally stopped. I am looking for creative ways to repopulate our back end with the right stuff. Any thoughts would be great! Heres a example: allartalocaltours.com/tumi-tote-401.html ↳customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳www.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳lockwww.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
Rankings disappeared on main 2 keywords - are links the issue?
Hi, I asked a question around 6 months ago about our rankings steadily declining since April of 2013. I did originally reply to that topic a few days ago, but as it's so old I don't think it's been noticed. I'm posting again here, if that's an issue I'm happy to delete. Here it is for reference: http://moz.com/community/q/site-rankings-steadily-decreasing-do-i-need-to-remove-links Since the original post, I have done nothing linkbuilding-wise except posting blog posts and sharing them on Facebook, G+ and Twitter. There are some links in there which don't look great (ie spammy seo directories, which I'm sending removal requests to) although quite a lot of others are relevant. Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've tried to make the site more accessible - we now have a simple, responsive design and I've tried to make the content clear and concise. In short, written for humans rather than search engines. As of the end of November, 'nuts and bolts' has now disappeared completely, and 'bolts and nuts' is page 8. There are many pages much higher which are not as relevant and have no links. We still rank highly for more specialised terms - ie 'bsw bolts' and 'imperial bolts' are still page 1, but not as high as before. We get an 'A' grade on the on-page grader for 'nuts and bolts, and most above us get F. I was cautious about removing links as our profile doesn't seem too bad but it does seem as if it's that. There are a fair few questionable directories in there, no doubt about that, but our overall practice in recent years has been natural building and link earning. So - I've created a spreadsheet and identified the bad links - ie directories with any SEO connotations. I am about to submit removal requests, I thought two polite requests a couple of weeks apart prior to disavowing with Google. But am I safe to disavow straight away? I say this as I don't think I'll get too many responses from those directories. I am also gradually beefing up the content on the shop pages in case of any 'thin content' issues after advice on the previous post. I noticed 100s of broken links in webmaster tools last week due to 2 broken links on our blog that repeated on every page and have fixed those. I have also been fixing errors W3C compliance-wise. Am I right to do all this? Can anyone offer any suggestions? I'm still not 100% sure if this is Panda, Penguin or something else. My guess is Penguin, but the decline started in March 2013, which correlates with Panda. Best Regards and thanks for any help, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
Rank drop in June
Since fixing a major duplicate content issue in Dec 2012, our traffic saw steady and dramatic growth through the summer. It has started to settle down now and rankings have started to decline. I have a bad feeling that something is wrong but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. Our Moz rank is pretty high but some of our biggest keywords have gone from #2 to #9 in a fairly short time period which makes me very nervous. I am not even sure where to look at this point. Any suggestions are welcomed as I am kind of at a loss now but worry I am missing something basic. www.threeguysgolf.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astaelin0 -
Why Is This Page Not Ranking?
Hi Mozzers, I can't rank (the page is nowhere on the Google grid that I can find) and I've not been able to move the needle at all on it. The page is http://www.lumber2.com/Western-Saddle-Pads-s/98.htm for keyword "western saddle pads." I'm inclined to think I'm cannabalizing the category with the products so I removed the word saddle from the majority of the product names on page. However, saddle pad or saddle pads is in the meta title for most if not all of the products. Do you think I'm cannabalizing with the product titles or is there something else going on? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Excessive navigation links
I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created). Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5 <nav>element: <nav id="access" role="navigation"> Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the <nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav> </nav> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress1 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0