Competitor Rockets to #1 and I'm looking at keyword stuffing. Will Google catch up with it?
-
We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign. They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position.
In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term. I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven
tags on said page.
Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc. Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven
tags, and possibly adjust their rank? Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?
-
Now that I can see the real reason that our competitor is number one for one of our key search terms, it's because they bought hundreds of links from spam blogs. This just occurred in the past 30 days. Here's the big question: Do you report them or see if Google will catch up? I don't use black hat link building, but I would rather not draw attention to this issue if there is a chance for any "blowback" coming our way. I would use my secondary Gmail account to do the reporting, but I worry that Google would do something more than just look at that site for that term, and that rank. Any thoughts?
-
They moved all key items on their home page to top-left, and their content updates are better optimized to rank for the key search term. The older version of their site focused more on their company name, less about the product. As for their previous rank, they would never get above page three. I didn't even track them from week to week, becuase they were not worth my time. After reading what you said, and now looking at it with that information, they just figured it out.
-
A couple questions...
Was this competitor homepage optimized for this term before the redesign? Where did they rank for this term?
You say that this site is pretty well branded... often a site like that can decide to use the homepage to go after a term and.... BAM... they will be there the next day. Also, powerful sites can add a new page an.... BAM... be at TopSERPs for a brand new term the next morning.
Sites like Amazon can do a lot of damage when their sellers move into a product line.
About the
and KW stuffing. I don't think that will hurt them. Lots of people use
for design reasons so I don't think that google will whack them for it. A year ago one of the strongest sites in the "hosting" niche had their persistent navigation links all as
... the dominated with that and when they removed it in a redesign their rankings didn't change.
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
-
Curious why site isn't ranking, rather seems like being penalized for duplicate content but no issues via Google Webmaster...
So we have a site ThePowerBoard.com and it has some pretty impressive links pointing back to it. It is obviously optimized for the keyword "Powerboard", but in no way is it even in the top 10 pages of Google ranking. If you site:thepowerboard.com the site, and/or Google just the URL thepowerboard.com you will see that it populates in the search results. However if you quote search just the title of the home page, you will see oddly that the domain doesn't show up rather at the bottom of the results you will see where Google places "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed". If you click on the link below that, then the site shows up toward the bottom of those results. Is this the case of duplicate content? Also from the developer that built the site said the following: "The domain name is www.thepowerboard.com and it is on a shared server in a folder named thehoverboard.com. This has caused issues trying to ssh into the server which forces us to ssh into it via it’s ip address rather than by domain name. So I think it may also be causing your search bot indexing problem. Again, I am only speculating at this point. The folder name difference is the only thing different between this site and any other site that we have set up." (Would this be the culprit? Looking for some expert advice as it makes no sense to us why this domain isn't ranking?
Web Design | | izepper0 -
Wow, does a website's hosting company have that much affect on SEO?
As a small SEO agency, we also handle hosting for some of our clients. Our clients' sites are Wordpress. We set them up with a Bluehost account with a dedicated IP address, and spend a lot of time focusing on load times (implementing a CDN, optimizing images, installing W3 Total cache and using recommended settings, etc.). Last month, we had a client inform us that they are bringing their web marketing efforts in-house, so they switched to a new hosting provider and took their (existing) site to the new hosting company. They kept their old Google Analytics code installed, so I can still see how much traffic they're getting. Since switching to a new host, despite the load times taking longer, no CDN, and other errors that came up prior to us spending time "optimizing" the website, their organic traffic has increased by 26%. Same exact website, same inbound link profile. According to Webmaster Tools, their impressions and clicks have also seen dramatic increases. So now, obviously, I'm considering looking into other options for the hosting of our other clients' websites. From your experience, and especially when it comes to Wordpress websites, do you think that a hosting company can make that big of a difference in terms of SEO? I've heard of positive results from people who have used WP-Engine, and other Wordpress-dedicated hosting companies, but I just find it hard to believe that we spent so much time on load-time-specific ranking factors and come to find out, a different hosting company would have made a huge difference. Any thoughts/feedback?
Web Design | | georgetsn1 -
Moz crawl showing up ?s=keyword pages as errors
Hi all, Hoping someone can she some light on a fix with ref to wordpress and the search function it uses as Moz is craling some pages which reference the search domain.com/?s=keyword Errors showing up are duplicate pages, descriptions and titles. The search function is not important on this site and I have tried to use a plugin which disables the search page which it does but these errors still show up. Can anyone assist as this is the final piece of the puzzle and then we're down to 0 issues on the site.
Web Design | | wtfi0 -
Should I create a microsite or will 301 be sufficient?
We have a client http://www.shedfinders.com/, new site and we are slowly building DA & PA for. However they have another domain industrialpropertyscotland (one of the keywords they want to rank for) Should we create a little microsite attached to the main site - Say "Your guide to buying industrial property in Scotland" or should we just stick to a 301 redirect and keep working on the main Shedfinders site? Thanks, Laura
Web Design | | lauratagdigital0 -
Parameters - Google Web Master Tools
In Google Web Mastertools you can stipulate which paramters you want the Googlebots to ignore when crawling your site. This is common place on pages that add some form of parameterisaton to the end of the link when a web user filters the information on a page (eg. on a clothes website someone may filter the products so they only see 'blue' jumpers, rather than 'all') This is meant to be beneficial as it means Google trawls through less duplicate content. Having now set this up, what impact will this have on my search results, if any? Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting to shoot up to no.1, but will it benefit me in any way?
Web Design | | DHS_SH0 -
Do I need to redirect soft 404s that I got from Google Webmaster Tools?
Hi guys, I got almost 1000+ soft 404s from GWT. All of the soft 404s produce 200 HTTP status code but the URLs are something like the following: http://www.example.com/search/house-for-rent (query used: house for rent) http://www.example.com/search/-----------rent (query used:-------rent) There are no listings that match these queries and there is an advanced search that is visible in these pages. Here are my questions: 1. Do I need to redirect each page to its appropriate landing page? 2. Do I need to add user sitemap or a list of URLs where they can search for other properties? Any suggestions would help. 🙂
Web Design | | esiow20130 -
Footer backlinks for sites I've developed
I link back to my website via my company name on the footers of sites I develop. Lately I've been changing this to my keyword and mixing and matching. This has been done for new sites I create and old sites I've not seen any benefit so far after a couple of months. Most my clients are hosted on the same server as my main site that it links back to. 1. Is this a bad idea to link back on the same IP?
Web Design | | sanchez1960
2. Is footer backlinks to the main developer going to annoy Google?
3. Should I change my main site's server, will it help? All my competitors seem to do it and as far as I can tell they seem to get better results than I do. Because I'm now changing them the reason I see no benefit? Thanks0 -
SEOMoz crawl report shows a duplicate content and duplicate title for these two url's http://freightmonster.com/ and http://freightmonster.com/index.html. How do I fix this?
What page is attached to http://freightmonster.com/ if it is not the index.html ? Should I do a redirect from the index page to something more descriptive?
Web Design | | FreightBoy1