Experts please take a look.
-
Below is a screenshot from the website ahrefs.com (They identify the backlinks to your website), containing 3 results. My website, competitor 1 and competitor 2.
My website - I spend a year optimizing my site and doing back links as natural as possible. - Currently #10 in google.
Competitor 1 - Low URL rank and Super unnatural back links. - Currently #1 in google. This competitor has 195K backlinks by having 3 seperate websites linking each in their the main header.
Competitor 2 - Low URL rank and only 58 back links. - Currently #2 in google.
They have been on the top of google for a few keywords for months. And I do not understand why they are #1 constantly.
-
I don't like trying to solve problems without specific domains and example KWs so I can do a real diagnosis but let me suggest a few hypotheses (I would not suggest all of these if I could see the URLs.)
-
You don't know what they've disavowed - they could have, for whatever reason, disavowed their own cross-domain links. Disavow says "ignore these links" which is (if you're not an SEO) basically the same as nofollow "don't pass juice to these links." So they may have made a (poor) choice to disavow their own links but it may be working for them.
-
Competitor 2 has at least 1 redirect. Could be a site with 20 million links for all we know. Could be nothing.
-
Can't tell the site speed, titles, content or any other on-page issues with any of the sites. You could be over-branding (Panda issues) or smashing the site with keywords.
-
Sometimes Google doesn't make sense.
-
Ahrefs only picks up around 10-20% of all links from what we've seen. Hard to make estimates on what Majestic, OSE, & Google see without the domain info.
You're assuming this is a link issue - but honestly we just can't tell yet. Not enough info to fully diagnose.
-
-
Most likely they are if the situation you described is how they have gained their links.
-
From the result shown above, competition 1 is using bad tactics correct?
-
SEO is not all back links, content is king, traffic is important and on-page problems can drag you down. Instead of worrying about rank and back links you should work on a content strategy, make sure what you control is optimized (fast page load, no huge errors, proper meta etc.) and work toward small, sustainable incremental gains. If your competition is using bad tactics it will catch up with them, you can grow your position now and be primed to take over when Google catches them.
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
-
Recent 2017 Disavow Experience - How long is it taking?
Hello All A client's site recently got hit with links from an XXX neighborhood. My clients site is on the periphery of adult entertainment, think Maxim Magazine, but not in the porn space. These links could be natural, or pushed by a competitor, we definitely did not solicit them. Regardless, dozens of links were established and then found by Google starting in February and a few very important keyword rankings disappeared about 2 months later (after Google found more and more XXX links). The linked to page is the only one that was really hit and it's not a manual action - seems completely algorithmic. We have disavowed all that we can put our finger on but I'm trying to provide guidance as to how long it has taken others to see some type of recovery...?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoaustin0 -
By changing the wordpress theme what need to take for seo consideration?
Hi guys! we have a site that been using a theme for a year now and we decided to change to a new one, the question here is, does it affect seo? or it is possible to remain 100% for the seo? What caution tips that you guys can share for changing the theme? Does just remaining the same URL works?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andrewwatson922 -
Looking For SEO expert
We are looking for very competent and expert to handle the SEO for a plastic surgery clinic in Toronto Canada. Does anyone knows who are the best people in that field.. I am looking for the best of the best .. any suggestions or recommendations? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Looking for recent bad SEO / black hat example such as JC Penney example from 2011
I am giving a presentation in a few weeks and looking for a "what not to do" larger brand example that made poor SEO choices to try and game Google with black hat tactics. Any examples you can point me to?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
SEO expert advice needed :)
So I have a niche site that I'm pretty sure has received an over-optimization penalty. This was about nine months ago or so. I haven’t really done much with the site since however I’d like the site to start appearing in the serps again, as I am adding fresh content and trying to create a really useful resource. I don't appear in the serps for any keywords related to my niche anymore. The site IS still indexed though. I didn't get any messages telling me that I was penalized so I don't think it was manual. I didn't use any spam or anything like that but I believe the penalty was probably for anchor text over-optimization and/or too many links to non-home page urls in comparison to the total amount of links the site had. I know removing these links or changing the anchor can help but the thing is the site only has about 30 total linking root domains pointed at it. So I was wondering if I could just add more links to other pages/the home page and add more links with varied anchors/naked urls to change the ratios and make it appear more natural. Now, would/could this fix my penalty? I am frustrated that I even received a penalty at all because much of my competition is ranking for fairly competitive terms with no real solid links pointed at their site and tons of comment spam. I have some relevant links/quality links so I am hoping that fixing this penalty could help put me back where I was before I got knocked into oblivion. There is one example of a competitor with a PR0 site getting good traffic and ranking for some nice keywords with only a bunch of self-set up web properties (and some comment spam) containing one only page for the purpose of linking back to their money site (blogspot, wordpress, weebly, mywebstarts ect). On top of that a lot of the sites I'm competing again are MFA, garbage sites that are written by non-native English speakers that offer zero value to the visitor. I need to start out ranking these spammers again. What should I do? thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmckiernan86_gmail.com0 -
My website disapeared from google rankings, please help?
Our website url is http://www.phoria.com Around January 16th we disappeared from google for the keyword 'kratom' We were on page 3 for the longest time. We have no critical messages in webmaster tools however I did notice most of our links seem to be website directory links.We still rank for a couple terms like buy kratom on page 6.I think a google update occurred around this time so I've read however if we had a variety of links that went against google guidelines wouldn't we have received a message stating so in Webmaster Tools?This month has been very confusing to say the least. Any help would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gregdotcom0 -
My site has disapeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why?
my site has disappeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why? It used to rank around 4 for the search "austin wedding venues" and it still ranks number three for this search on Bing. I haven't done any SEO work on it in a while so i don't think i did anything to make Google mad but now it doesn't even rank anywhere in the top 160 results. Here's the link: http://austinweddingvenues.org Thanks in advance Mozzers! Ron
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100 -
Not Sure Exactly How Penguin is Effecting My Site (looking for tuff love)
Hello Everyone, I own a small web design firm website. My site was for sure hit by Penguin, but not sure why they devalued my pages. I dont really do SEO or link building except for my own site. I normally turn clients down when they want SEO services. Mainly because we do web design really well, so I've chosen to invest my time doing that versus doing both. For most of my keywords I took a 5-10 spot drop. Nothing super major, but enough that its tanking my business. I've survived all of the panda stuff, so I assumed my content writing, and link building tactics were good, but I'm wrong. Here is my website: http://www.clikzy.com/ I will explain what I have been doing below, and I am looking for a little help/direction. I don't mind if you look at my site, links, and are brutally honest. I do have original content ( I just ran everything through copyscape a month prior), and I occasionally get duplicate pages as my CMS tends to create them automatically, but we do a fairly good job of redirecting those pages when they occur. My link building tactics have been a mixture of the following. I have used anchor text alot which could be my demise. Forum postings
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Juratovic
Blog Comments
Website Footers (roughly 20 over the course of a year)
Web Design Directories (explain below) I did start using directories in January. I would use OpenSite Explorer, and review some of my bigger competitors, and would occasionally get listed on a web design directory they were on. I think total I probably purchase 8-10 since Jan including botw, business.com, etc. I have some local pages which I create case studies for which ranked fairly well. For instance for the term Baltimore Web Design I used to rank #1, but not I'm 5-6. Here's the keyword: http://www.clikzy.com/reston-web-design.html One more note: I did redirect an older website I have (12 years) to my current site (3 years) in Jan. Mainly because it ranked well for terms in NYC. I've dropped for those terms around 5 spots. I have a few questions: 1. What would you suggest to fix something like this? Power Content? Better Links? (of course, we all want better links) 2. Remove links? I am not sure which ones are bad. One thought was to just kill my local pages (roughly 15 pages) which would also kill any bad links I may have point to them. 3. If I have a bad link pointing to a internal page, could that bring down my home page rankings? Any help would be appreciated. I am in the process of interviewing for a full time PR person to come on staff to help us with our content, and PR. I knew I should have invested in this person a year ago! ha! Thank you! Pete0