Owning all of the top 10 positions for one keyword
-
Hello,
I would like to know if it is considered bad by Google to rank every single spot in the top 10 with the same keyword?
All websites conver the same topic which this keyword, but have unique content. Those websites dont link to one another.
To be clear, I am not asking if it is a good idea because it will be harder to rank, find links etc. or because the last positions don't bring enough traffic. I really just would like to know if it against Google guidelines? Any thoughts or sources are greatly appreciated.
-
I agree with Tom and Lynn. It would be technically possible if you make sure there is no connection with the site, (who is, theme, content, different host/ ip range, etc), there would be no way for google to know one person is behind it.
But the amount of work to do that with white hat methods would be incredibly hard ( even with black hat it would be very hard), for a decent keyword worth ranking for..... I don't think its possible these days.
-
I can only go on my experiences I'm afraid, based on what I've seen and what I assume to be the right SEO practices.
I'd put a lot of money on this being the case - but hey, you could always ask Matt yourself!
-
Tom sums it up well.
In most if not all of such cases you should ask yourself if this is a 'normal' situation for a 'normal' search query and I think you will find that the answer is no. If the sites are all owned by the same person then it is certainly borderline if this situation is resulting in searchers finding enough variety in the results for them to say that google is returning the best results. Further to that, for any semi-competitive keyword it would be quite unusual for this situation to be happening so I would ask myself if it is worth the bother maintaining all these sites and tracking their rankings. Chances are that at some point the algo will mix things up and some (all?!) of the sites will move out of the top 10.
So, officially against the guidelines? (assuming no funny stuff) probably not. An un-natural situation that is unlikely to be very stable and/or worth the effort of maintaining it... probably.
-
Hello Tom Hall,
I think I wasn't clear. I didn't mean what you answered to. I meant:
10 domains with unique content on each one. Then linkbuilders get links to those sites to make those the ten to be ranked first on Google.
Basically, I meant what Tom Roberts answered to.
So, Tom, for you this should not be done because there is always a risk. Do you have sources for that opinion? That's what I would think also but I'm looking for more sources. For example, people that have been penalized or official Matt Cutts article or a study on several top 10s by a big name like seomoz or something like that.
Thanks a lot for your answers.
-
Hey there
If you had 10 individual websites with completely unique content that did not link together and each one offered a unique value, it could happen.
The unique value factor is key here - does each website not only have unique content on the matter, but also a new theme, style and way of portraying the message? If they do, I could see it happening.
But even then, I can't imagine Google would be happy if they found out all the sites belonged to one webmaster. It would take a manual review, but even if the WMT information was different, site themes were different, who.is registrar was different, backlink profile was different - basically everything was different, if they suspected it was the same person behind it all they would simply deindex the sites.
Hey, it's their search engine. We have quality guidelines and ideas of what we can or cannot do, but at the end of it there is a manual team who can penalise who they choose. This is a situation where I can imagine they would.
It's worth mentioning that I have seen a top 10 where 10 different websites which fell under one subsidiary trading name ranked for a pretty commercial keyword. So yes, it's possible.
Also worth pointing out is that 9/10 of those sites are now nowhere to be found.
-
Hi there,
This is a blackhat technique known as "Page Stuffing" it's probably not as easy to do these days due to Panda and Penguin, but the technique would involve ranking for one page (say a homepage) for a certain keyword and then duplicating the content so that each page would rank, pushing the competition down by up to 10 ranks so that one website is flooded for a certain search term.
Luckily, crawlers can now determine if a page is duplicated and just won't rank it and Google will penalize the offender.
Hope this helps.
Tom
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
-
Keyword rank drop, any advice?
Screen Shot 2021-08-26 at 19.02.18.png My search visibility dropped from around 13% a few weeks ago to 8.29%. I know that Google launched a bunch of updates in this past few weeks to ignore spam links, and I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the drop - some of the links to my site date back over 10 years and those links were garbage. Confusingly, at the same time, my Domain Authority went up by 1 to 32, then back down a week later. How can I restore my previous rank in the short term? We're designing a new site at the moment with vastly improved page speed, but I'm not sure what effect that will have yet (thespacecollective.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
What to do when on your keyword there are no questions ?
Let me give me you an example. For example for the keyword title tag (let's imagine) I would want to rank on that. I go to the keyword explorer or related searches at the bottom of google there are many questions people have.. I find expressions (with the same user intent) such as "title tag length", "title tags generator", " "why are title tag importants" (I found this one using the are questions drop down menu of the keyword explorer). With this in hand I can create a page where I answer all those questions. I would have all those expressions being an H2 and answer the questions using related phrases and context word that I will find with the keyword explorer in my paragraph below. Let now take one of my keyword "Sicily bike tours". If I type this expression int he keyword explorer...the only related phrases (with the same user intent) that I find are "Sicily bike tour", "Sicily cycling tours", "Sicily bike trips"... (first thing I noticed is that it is just variation of my main expression not really question...). If I look at questions I find "what is the highest elevation in Sicily" or "How safe is Sicily for tourists". I don't imagine on a page that sells bikes tours in Sicily having h2 tags that answers those questions... and this is not what people that rank do, they describe their tour and this is what is confusing to me. Let's now take a secondary related keyword to main keyword. Let' s take "Sicily cycling tours" (it is a secondary related keyword to "Sicily bike tours". Based on the keyword explorer, the secondary related phrases to "Sicily cycling tours" are "tour of Sicily". "trips to Sicily".... ( isn't that going to be boring and look unnatural to use all those expressions ? ). There are all synonyms of my expression but not really different which is my worry ? Or can I use an expression such as "Sicilian villages" or "Sicily maps" even though they don't have the same user intent) as my secondary related keyword "Sicily cycling tours". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Previously owned domain & canonical
Hi, I've recently joined the business and as part of the cleanup process I got told that we owned this domain preferredsafaris.com with some very similar content to our main site southernafricatravel.com. We're no longer owns the preferredsafaris.com domain but looking at Google's cache for it we realised that the title, meta description & page shown when looking at the 'cached page' is for our current domain even though it is showing the 'correct' URL there. I imagine this might have something to do with canonical set on those pages but the weird thing is all those pages now render 404 & do not show a canonical in the source code. I have used Google Removal Tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals for all those URLs & Google says that it has removed them & yet they're still showing. What do you suggest? Any potential issue in regards to duplicate content here? Cheers, Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SouthernAfricaTravel0 -
Keyword rich internal linking - problem?
Had an interesting situation today.. We write daily news articles on our site. In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links. For example.. 'Today McDonald's have announced that they are purchasing more blue widgets in order to increase their opportunity to appeal to a larger market.' So in that sentence you can see one outbound link and one inbound to blue widgets on our site. I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site.. I actually asked them why and this was their response. 'We're concerned because of the number of keyword-rich internal links in the article, and are worried that being included alongside them might be misinterpreted by Google as an artificial link.' Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?.. but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Web pages fighting over rank for one keyword. Can it be stopped?
Hey, See attachment. Website is Omega Red. The page I want to rank for seems like it is being held back by other closely related pages with similar titles. I am looking to rank for electrical earthing with this page. On the graph it shows how the other pages have interacted over a period of time on the website and how if they drop out of the top 50 this page then moves up in Google. I don't really want to canonicalise the other pages into one but maybe this is what needs to happen? Any suggestions? bWymgVt.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
Combining two pages into one
I've got two pages I'd like to combine into one. These two URLs: widgets.com/about_us.php & widgets.com/contact_us.php would become: widgets.com/about-us Two questions... 1. Is it okay to combine the content into one page and setup 301 redirects for both pages (without losing page rank)? 2. Do I keep the original pages in my sitemap.xml file or just take them out after I setup the redirect? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-hunter0 -
Multiple Keyword Research Questions, Help
Hello , I've been trying for several days to understand how keyword research works for a multi purpose website,I've read guides, articles even some chapters from the book" The Art of Seo" by O'Reilly and still no luck. It seems i can't wrap my head around keyword research,lets say I have a social gaming community website and I'm trying to rank it first on some low competition keywords + some long tail keywords.The website has functions like leaderboards, profiles,events, competitions,etc so it's not actually a news related website but it will have a blog. My website being on the games niche It would imply that I should target words that contain the word "Games" but this word generates millions of searches globally so ranking first its nearly impossible if the website is brand new. This made me pursue generic keywords formed with 2 / 3 words like fresh games, new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc which still generate lets say 30.000 searches globally each. Due to the different areas of the website like latest game events,latest games competitions,etc I'm confused If i should pursue website specific keywords like latest games events, fresh games events, latest games competitions, upcoming games competitions but these too generate 30.000 global searches each,so... 0.should i use generic keywords or keywords that include site features? So let's say I decide to pursue generic "games" keywords,due to a high competition based on the keyword I decide to go a layer deeper and for the keyword "fresh games" I obtain keywords like** "fresh games 2011,top fresh games 2011, upcoming fresh games** " and thus building a list of 30 keywords that contain " fresh games".If i do this for the rest of the keywords: ** new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc** I end up with a list of 10.000 keywords or more since each keyword generates other keywords. Is this the correct approach ? since generating 10.000 keywords sounds a lot and I'm getting the feeling that It's not how it supposed to be done,like were would I insert 10.000 keywords? So how do I know which keywords to pick and aim in order to try to get no.1 ranking? and why those? How many keywords should I use? and where should i put them? since it's not a news website so writing a lot of articles isn't an option. Should I focus on 2 words keywords with around 10.000-30.000 seaches or 2 words keywords + long tail keywords with less traffic like 100 - 5000? Is there a guide for the Keyword Analysis Tool since if i enter "fresh new games" i get a 39% keyword difficulty,is that hard to rank? and I don't know what all those color mean since some of them have higher numbers then others that are found at the top and how can i get beat a website that has has rank 10. So hopefully with your help & by some miracle I will finally be able to build a keyword list. Thank you !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arching0 -
Keyword Self-Cannibalization Concern
Right now I have an E-Commerce website that has layered menu properties. I have one page trying to rank for "NextGen Digital Ballast" that is the main category page. However, on that category page I link out to three product pages which would be "NextGen 400W Digital Ballast", "NextGen 600W Digital Ballast" and "NextGen 1000W Digital Ballast". The on page ranking factors tools is saying I may need to consider making adjustments because of the potential self-cannibalization, but I wanted to get some feedback to see what others thought about that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JerDoggMckoy2