How come this site does so well?
-
Hi Guys,
It's bugging the crap out of me why this site does so well http://www.stagedinburgh.com/ when I look at it's link profile its so weak and terrible plus many links comes from the sites they own. Somehow the site out ranks many sites for search terms like edinburgh stag party, edinburgh stag do, edinburgh stag weekends. Am I missing something? They seem to only have links from 13 domains and they aint great.
What am I missing?
-
Sorry for slow response kids school holidays have started! Yeah Doug i thought their on-page was well stuffy, almost spammy but some how they still get away with it.
What i have noticed on a few tests we have done in May / June is how quickly I can get a new site to rank for 2 or 3 keywords and stick in a matter of weeks.
Bang goes my theory of building one great website and it's back to building micro sites specific and not have all eggs in one basket.
Tom I know I should not get wound up by it, but when you spend 10 years on a brand / site to be beaten by some crappy sites it's hard to swallow, like anchovies
Dan yeah the site has ranked high for a while, and I see his other sites doing well, I may wake up one day and he gets hit across his network but to date that's not happened and I am not sure he is actually breaking any Google rules.
-
Hey There
This is an odd one for sure, and a really crowded space with a ton of EMDs and PMDs so a lot of noise. But I have a few hunches just after looking around a bit.
1. Their site is visually blazingly fast compared to chillisauce.
2. Their site is one of the few I could find, where the entire domain is hyper-focused on "stag in edinburgh" - and has the benefit of the homepage being the page to rank or match topically for those types of keywords. Whereas chillisause and some others are broader focused in what the site is about - and so architecturally, or linking, perhaps not as easy for Google to rank/credit those types of pages within the site, in this case, and as Doug pointed out perhaps their on-site is not so strong.
3. User metrics could be playing a role - CTR in serps etc. They actually stand out as being the least spammy of most other results, and have a shorter domain name (less spammy looking).
But yeah, there's plenty of anomalies - all exact match anchors for linking, less links, a borderline spammy/keyword-stuffed website. Has this site done well for a really long time?
-Dan
-
"Now, it's a guess, but I'm wondering whether the website is using the .htaccess file to block some crawlers, such as OSE and Majestic, from looking at its link profile. So there could be a bunch of links that are not being seen."
Tom, surely this would only block such crawlers from identifying outbound and internal links from their site - not the inbound ones. OSE is showing the inbound links so it doesn't appear to be blocked. The spiders.txt file is used to help identify bots rather than block them.
Looks like lots of on-page optimisation there! Compare it to this one which has better PA/DA but just look at the on-page:
-
Hi Mark
The site-wide links from those domains you mentioned would probably be giving a lot of juice, plus the on-page optimisation is certainly geared to those keywords (perhaps more so).
However, there might be something more to this. In the robots.txt file, they are disallowing a file called: Disallow: /spiders.txt. In the spiders.txt file, you've got a list of a whole bunch of web crawlers on the net.
Now, it's a guess, but I'm wondering whether the website is using the .htaccess file to block some crawlers, such as OSE and Majestic, from looking at its link profile. So there could be a bunch of links that are not being seen.
The thing is, this is all speculation - which is why I always advocate not to spend too much time focusing on competitors. It's definitely frustrating and sometimes more frustrating than helpful. Looking at competitors can provide some takeaways and quick wins, but if there are none on display, as in this case, accept defeat and move on.
Not much help I know, but hope it does somewhat.
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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Reindexing a site with www.
We have a site that has a mirror - i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com - there is not redirect both url's work and show pages so basically a site with 2 sets of URLs for each page. We have changed it so the domain.com and all assorted pages 301 redirect to the right URL with www. i.e. domain.com/about 301's to www.domain.com/about In the search engines the domain.com is the site indexed and the only www. page indexed is the homepage. I checked in the robots.txt file and nothing blocking the search engines from indexing both the www. and non www. versions of the site which makes me wonder why did only one version get indexed and how did the clients avoid a duplicate content issue? Secondly is it best to get the search engines to unidex domain.com and resubmit www.domain.com for the full site? We are definately staying with the www.domain.com NOT domain.com so need to find the best way to get the site indexed with www. and remove the non www. Hope that makes sense and look forward to everyone's input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
301 from one site to another
I have two e-commerce websites and i'm going to remove some products from website as requested by a supplier and sell them only on one site. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect the pages from site 1 to site 2?? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Why does my site keep dropping and dropping when it comes to impressions?
It all started very well but now it is all just going down and down even though I try to follow the proper guidelines. Could anyone give me some advice if I pm the link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | y3dc0 -
My Job Site is having Indexing Issues
I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Pages un-indexed in my site
My current website www.energyacuity.com has had most pages indexed for more than a year. However, I tried cache a few of the pages, and it looks the only one that is now indexed by Goggle is the homepage. Any thoughts on why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernatj0