Can you explain why a site with loads of keywork anchor backlinks is ranking well?
-
Hi All,
A couple of years ago my site got punished and i kind of figured out it was due to keyword anchor text backlinks.
I recently was considering getting a new SEO company and found one that promotes another company in my industry. However, when i look at the backlinks, of the website they do SEO for, via open site explorer - I noticed nearly all of the backlinks are keywords.
website in question is http://goo.gl/6nRzLi
And if you see the search results here: http://goo.gl/9bXoxY they are ranking on first page with very big brands - and have done for about a year - but nealy all of their backlinks are the keywords in this search...
I understood this is the kind of thing that killed my website 2 years ago - are these backlinks ok? should i still consider this SEO company to work on my site, i 100% do not want my site to be penalised again so any advice appreciated.
thanks
James
-
I agree with Richard,
A little research shows that this website does not seem to have a whole lot of linking domains/back links. Being that is is such a small website I don't think Google is worried about penalizing them until they get a bit larger. In which case if they continue the same keyword anchor text practices they may run into trouble.
On a good note: Seeing as they do not have a lot of high quality back links you should easily be able to beat this company rankings fairly quickly without having to resort to the over optimized anchor text practices. This should be a fairly quick project depending on your budget and desire to move up fast.That's great news for you !
Remember, sometimes when a website is ranking high for certain keywords, it's not always because the website and seo are done so well. Sometimes it's just they have no competition doing very well at trying to beat them. Which I think may be the case here.
Hope that helps,
Joe
-
There aren't many links showing to the site at all in OSE or Ahrefs. Rarely would a site with so few links receive a penalty. They also have their main keyword in their branded name, which I think can partially shield them since it's part of their brand name.
Remember as well that these tools include only a portion of the links that are out there. Most sites such as social/branded and NAP (name, address, phone#) listings don't show in OSE. These sites tend to have more links that include the brand or url or generic items such as "View Website" that can be balancing out the keyword rich anchor text as well.
-
Thanks for the response Dirk,
Please understand i am not an "SEO" and do not currently employ an SEO, hence i asked the question - i kind of figured it was shady, but just needed some confirmation from SEO experts such as yourself.
Thanks for confirming.
-
I think that the answer that Richard gave you on your first question is also applicable on this one.
Apart from that, you should see SEO as a long term strategy, if your competitor is ranking well with shady techniques, it's may be good on the short term, but he'll loose on the long term. I saw plenty of my competitors take a dive in rankings after the Panda update in May, while quite a number of our sites gained substantial search traffic (+25%)
If you already got punished for over optimised backlinks, I would certainly not take that road again, and be very careful with any SEO company which would propose this strategy.
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
More content, more backlinks, more appealing design, better SEO than competitor but ranking worse. Why?
Me and my team are working hard to put a good SEO strategy in place and good, useful content for our visitors. We're online for a little more than a year and we got some success but nothing compared to the majority of our competitors. The only thing we noticed so far is that our strongest competitors all seem to have a website based on WordPress... well is it possible to rank better than a site based on WP if we optimize everything well? One of our competitor is a very simple, thin affiliate website based on WP and is called www.comparatif-meilleur.fr ... their content is limited but they do better than us in term of ranking organically... On our side (www.lecomparateur.net) we have backlinks from Wikipedia, Dmoz and a couple of other very good sites, plus a better content, better design and better overall optimization. There must be something we do bad, but we can't find it. Please help 😞 P.S. We update our site quite often too
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benoit_20180 -
Only homepage is ranking after site re-launch
We've been moving all our sites over to a new platform (Demandware) this year. In the process, they've all gotten updated designs (from the same template), on-page optimizations, etc. Since they're all on the same platform and are essentially copies from one template, any technical issues found have been fixed across all sites. The problem I'm seeing is there are a few sites that haven't really seen much/any recovery from the site launch, and these are sites that were done 4-5 months ago. There's one in particular that's especially concerning, since it's showing issues that none of the other sites seem to have. In my Moz reports, it looks like of all the keywords that are ranking, they're only ranking the https version of the homepage (and from what I'm seeing, the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October, which was also the time that WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions). I've crawled the site (ScreamingFrog), done a site search in Google (all pages look to be indexed), etc. and I haven't come across any specific problems there that would suggest a technical issue. We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem, since this site had the most dramatic change in navigation. The navigation used to be product based (Boots, Shoes, etc.) and is now broken up by gender. I've noticed that a few other pages that are ranking are dual gender pages that also existed on the old site, whereas all of these new categories aren't ranking at all and I'm not seeing this happen with any of our other sites. I've gone down a bunch of different paths trying to figure this out, but I haven't come up with any concrete answers as to why this is happening and how to fix it. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into or try for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Mobile Friendly Site yet rankings are in alot of cases worse than desktop
Hi All, We made our Website mobile responsive well in advance of the recent mobile algorithm changes . We only have a couple of pages with minor errors but yet our mobile rankings have not improved that much (maybe 1 place) and in alot of cases, we rank higher on desktop than we do on mobile for the same term etc. No the ranking boost is minimal at best and worse in many cases. I have checked our site on google mobile test and we are mobile friendly and on page speed test our mobile site is 99/100 user experience etc. Just wondered if anyone else has found the same ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Site-wide Image Backlinks - Are they bad?
Hey guys, A little help required. We are potentially taking on a new client who has over 5,000 image backlinks (4,000 of those from one site) from around 7,000 total backlinks. Would this be a problem? It's been noticeable recently that both footer and blogroll links seem to be getting targeted by Google. Would this be the case for images links too? Especially considering the top-heavy nature of the link profile? Thoughts welcome. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Not ranking as well in Yahoo/Bing as in Google. Why?
For my top 132 keywords, my target ranks an average of 7 positions lower in Bing and an average of 9 positions lower in Yahoo. Does anyone have some good resources to read, or any tips on why we would rank so much poorer in Bing/Yahoo than in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0 -
Any Tips For putting up a new site and not loosing rankings?
We are switching one of our sites to a magento site and dont want to loose current rankings what are the best practices for this? Same Domain but the deep url pages will change urls
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0