Why is a site that does all the wrong things dominating?
-
A site that is a competitor of ours is basically dominating the search results despite doing everything you're not supposed to do, including:
- Purchasing links
- Having content that is thin, templated, and duplicate - adds little value
- Owning half a dozen other sites for linking to each other (link wheel?)
We spend a lot of time on our content and making it the most useful it can be for our visitors. Granted our site is newer but we avoid these gray/black hat practices and yet we're not ranking nearly as high. What gives?
-
Unfortunately this company is one of the largest - they're just raking it in. So not only are they ranking high but the pages must be converting well for them.
-
I agree with the other responses.
If it makes you feel any better, think of all the victims of Penguin and Panda. On top for a while, then "blamo" out of site. When Google catches up, out they go but if you keep doing the right things, in you stay.
-
Hi Mike,
It's infuriating! I've had competitors tell me - "Well, we just build blogs and link all the sites together" we do great for our customer(s). Sadly, they do for the right now, it's hard to explain to prospective and current clients who see that but all we can say is, give Google time.
Focus on great content, following the rules, code compliance and optimization- the good guys eventually win!
-
Hi Mike,
As Michael mentioned above, most likely their domination will be short lived. Also, you have to remember that showing up in the SERPs is not even 1/2 the battle. If their site adds little value, it's most likely that people do little on their website and perform no conversion steps. Most likely, those same people go back to the search engines and hopefully find a site like yours after doing another search or clicking on the next result.
Keep doing what you're doing (great content) and you will get there with time.
-
Google will catch up with them, you can be sure of that.
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
-
Want to remove a large amount of links from spam sites. SEO company says we will lose a lot of link juice?
Hi, We have a lot of links that have a spam score above 30% and 60%. I don't know if someone has spammed our website. However our SEO company has said we should remove these carefully over a period of 3 months while they add new good links. I don't quite trust this advice. Are they trying to get more business?? They have put doubt in our mind. Can anyone please shed any light on this?? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YvonneDupree0 -
Duplication content management across a subdir based multisite where subsites are projects of the main site and naturally adopt some ideas and goals from it
Hi, I have the following problem and would like which would be the best solution for it: I have a site codex21.gal that is actually part of a subdirectories based multisite (galike.net). It has a domain mapping setup, but it is hosted on a folder of galike.net multisite (galike.net/codex21). My main site (galike.net) works as a frame-brand for a series of projects aimed to promote the cultural & natural heritage of a region in NW Spain through creative projects focused on the entertainment, tourism and educational areas. The projects themselves will be a concretion (put into practice) of the general views of the brand, that acts more like a company brand. CodeX21 is one of those projects, it has its own logo, etc, and is actually like a child brand, yet more focused on a particular theme. I don't want to hide that it makes part of the GALIKE brand (in fact, I am planning to add the Galike logo to it, and a link to the main site on the menu). I will be making other projects, each of them with their own brand, hosted in subsites (subfolders) of galike.net multisites. Not all of them might have their own TLD mapped, some could simply be www.galike.net/projectname. The project codex21.gal subsite might become galike.net/codex21 if it would be better for SEO. Now, the problem is that my subsite codex21.gal re-states some principles, concepts and goals that have been defined (in other words) in the main site. Thus, there are some ideas (such as my particular vision on the possibilities of sustainable exploitation of that heritage, concepts I have developed myself as "narrative tourism" "geographical map as a non lineal story" and so on) that need to be present here and there on the subsite, since it is also philosophy of the project. BUT it seems that Google can penalise overlapping content in subdirectories based multisites, since they can seem a collection of doorways to access the same product (*) I have considered the possibility to substitute those overlapping ideas with links to the main page of the site, thought it seems unnatural from the user point of view to be brought off the page to read a piece of info that actually makes part of the project description (every other child project of Galike might have the same problem). I have considered also taking the subsite codex21 out of the network and host it as a single site in other server, but the problem of duplicated content might persist, and anyway, I should link it to my brand Galike somewhere, because that's kind of the "production house" of it. So which would be the best (white hat) strategy, from a SEO point of view, to arrange this brand-project philosophy overlapping? (*) “All the same IP address — that’s really not a problem for us. It’s really common for sites to be on the same IP address. That’s kind of the way the internet works. A lot of CDNs (content delivery networks) use the same IP address as well for different sites, and that’s also perfectly fine. I think the bigger issue that he might be running into is that all these sites are very similar. So, from our point of view, our algorithms might look at that and say “this is kind of a collection of doorway sites” — in that essentially they’re being funnelled toward the same product. The content on the sites is probably very similar. Then, from our point of view, what might happen is we will say we’ll pick one of these pages and index that and show that in the search results. That might be one variation that we could look at. In practice that wouldn’t be so problematic because one of these sites would be showing up in the search results. On the other hand, our algorithm might also be looking at this and saying this is clearly someone trying to overdo things with a collection of doorway sites and we’ll demote all of them. So what I recommend doing here is really trying to take a step back and focus on fewer sites and making those really strong, and really good and unique. So that they have unique content, unique products that they’re selling. So then you don’t have this collection of a lot of different sites that are essentially doing the same thing.” (John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trend Analyst at Google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=kQIyk-2-wRg&feature=emb_logo)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PabloCulebras0 -
A semi client of mine reached out to me recently that another site scraped his whole site and traffic dropped significantly.
Someone that reaches out to me on occasion for help but is mostly an SEO DIYer recently had his site copied completely and his traffic dropped significantly immediately after. I have never had a client experience this in the past. Does anyone have suggestions or expertise on this? See his question and what he has done below. Jeremy This site scraped my credit site. Its appearance coincides with a dramatic sitewide decrease in Google traffic.I submitted a takedown request by paying this company $200. No results yet. My hosting company also placed blocks on the site HTML which pings my server for CSS and picture files. My Google Webmaster tools account shows inbound links coming from the copycat. Is there something more I should be doing? Copy Site: http://masqueros.com/Real Site: https://www.savvyoncredit.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Do I lose link juice if I have a https site and someone links to me using http instead?
We have recently launched a https site which is getting some organic links some of which are using https and some are using http. Am I losing link juice on the ones linked using http even though I am redirecting or does Google view them the same way? As most people still use http naturally will it look strange to google if I contact anyone who has given us a link and ask them to change to https?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lisa-Devins0 -
I think My Site Has Been Hacked
I am working with a client and have noticed lots of 500 server errors that look very strange in their webmaster tools account. I am seeing URLs like this blog/?tag=wholesale-cheap-nfl-jerseys-free-0702.html and blog/?tag=nike-jersey-shorts-4297.html there are 155 similar pages yet the client does not sell anything like this and hasn't created these URLs. I have updated WP and all plugins and cannot find these links or pages on the site anywhere but I am guessing they are slowing the site down as GWT keeps highlighting them as errors. Has anybody had any experiences with these types of hacks and can point me in the right direction of how to clean it up properly? Ta
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fazza470 -
Creating duplicate site for testing purpose. Can it hurt original site
Hello, We are soon going to upgrade the cms to latest version along with new functionlaities - the process may take anywhere from 4 week to 6 weeks. may suggest - we need to work on live server, what we have planned take exact replica of site and move to a test domain, but on live server Block Google, Bing, Yahoo - User-agent: Google Disallow: / , User-agent: Bing Disallow: / User-agent: Yahoo Disallow: / in robots.txt Will upgrade CMS and add functionality - will test the entire structure, check url using screaming frog or xenu and move on to configure the site on original domain The process upgradation and new tools may take 1 - 1.5 month.... Concern is that despite blocking Google, Bing & Yahoo through User agent disallow - can still the url can be crawled by the search engines - if yes - it may hurt the original site as will read on as entire duplicate or is there any alternate way around.. Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi1 -
Is pulling automated news feeds on my home page a bad thing?
I am in charge of a portal that relies on third-party content for its news feeds. the third-party in this case is a renowned news agency in the united kingdom. After the panda and penguin updates, will these feeds end up hurting my search engine rankings? FYI: these feeds occupy only 20 percent of content on my domain. The rest of the content is original.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | amit20760