How are these sites ranking!?!
-
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client.
Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this:
http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance
http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance
http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance
http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance
We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it.
Any ideas at all?
-
David's right, unfortunately - even in the insurance industry, you see sites pop in and out, beating the big aggregators and private companies for short periods. It doesn't happen very often anymore with the blue-chip terms ([car insurance], [health insurance], etc.) but for the second-tier you can still see examples like this. Google isn't perfect at killing spam yet.
Keep in mind that some of the big algo updates regarding links in the past two years have not really been targeting spammers at all: they have been targeting otherwise legitimate businesses (from large corporations to "mom & pop shop" organisations) who've sought to use manipulative link dev tactics. The tactics that a lot of recent manual and algorithmic penalties have focused on are buying into link networks and schemes rather than outright automated, old-fashioned spam. You can still get rankings with blackhat / greyhat tactics and some of those rankings last a surprisingly long time.
I am not saying that the sites above are outright spam at all - they are affiliates who'll get burned in the end if their strategies aren't watertight, and they all seem to be owned by QuoteSearcher Ltd. Even the big guys in insurance get burned regularly - I'll stay away from citing actual examples due to past experience with agency-based client work, but big brands would rise and fall all the time during the five years I worked in insurance SEO.
-
Black hat still works and always will. You can wait and hope they lose rankings or decide how much risk you're willing to take and try to beat them at their own game.
-
If you domain authority or link profile is lower then the competition, you would probably rank lower. However, i do agree that there are websites which look ugly and poorly optimized and do look spamy ... but still rank better. I tried reporting it to google but it is a slow process with no guarantees.
-
Hi Syed
If you look into it properly, you will see that pretty much all of the links any of the sites have are firstly from completely spammy and unrelated sites and also use over optimised anchor text links.
As well as this, all of the above domains are less than two years old, which I would class as a relatively new site, especially in the insurance industry which is extremely competitive
-
All of these websites have 40+ page authority, 30+ domain authority and 200+ external links ... i think these are not new websites.
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
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Duplicate content across hundreds of Local sites and they all rank #1
Usually when we discuss duplicate content, we're addressing the topic of penalties or non-indexing. In this case, we're discussing ranking high with duplicate content. I've seen lots of dental, chiropractor and veterinarian sites built by companies that give them cookie cutter sites with the same copy. And they all rank #1 or #2. Here are two companies that do that:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse
http://www.rampsites.com/rampsites/home_standard.asp?sectionid=4
http://mysocialpractice.com/about/ The later uses external blogs to provide inbound links to their clients' site, but not all services do that, in fact, this is the first time I've seen them with external blogs. Usually the blog with duplicate copy is ON SITE and the sites still rank #1. Query "Why Your Smile Prefers Water Over Soft Drinks" to see duplicate content on external blogs. Or "Remember the Mad Hatter from the childhood classic, Alice in Wonderland? Back then, the process of making hats involved using mercury compounds. Overexposure could produce symptoms referred to as being" for duplicate content on chiropractor sites that rank high. I've seen well optimized sites rank under them even though their sites have just as much quality content and it's all original with more engagement and inbound links. It appears to me that Google is turning a blind eye on duplicate content. Maybe because these are local businesses with local clientele it doesn't care that a chiropractor in NY has the same content as one in CA, just as the visitor doesn't care because the visitor in CA isn't look at a chiropractor's site in NY generally. So maybe geo-targeting the site has something to do with it. As a test, I should take the same copy and put it on a non-geo-targeted site and see if it will get indexed. I asked another Local SEO expert if she has run across this, probably the best in my opinion. She has and she finds it difficult to rank above them as well. It's almost as if Google is favoring those sites. So the question is, should all dentists, chiropractors and veterinarians give it up to these services? I shudder to think that, but, hey it's working and it's a whole lot less work - and maybe expense - for them.0 -
How can this site rank post panda/penguin?
I am doing link building for an adult dating comparison website. One of the main competitors though, having checked their backlink profile have anchor text that is not varied at all. In fact many, many links that are all the same. How can they possibly rank in the post panda/penguin era? In fact they're at number 2! The site is an adult site and it www.f hypen buddy.co.uk if anyone wants to runa backlink check on OSE. Any help greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Changing Site URLs
I am working on a new client that hasn't implemented any SEO previously. The site has terrible url nomenclature and I am wondering if it is worth it to try and change it. Will I lose rankings? What is the best url naming structure? Here's the website http://www.formica.com/en/home/TradeLanding.aspx. (I am only working on the North America site.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
How to increase rankings?
I know to increase rankings involves link building, but what kind of link building is worth it and what type is not? At the moment most of my link building effort is focused on guest blogging, which has worked well for me, I have seen some good movement on a range of keywords using this tactic but I cant help but think I could get a lot more movement in the serp's if I mixed it up a little. A few other link building techniques I know of are below, but I don't really use them, so my question is what ones should I be using combined with my guest blogging to give my rankings that little extra help. 1. Directory Submissions 2. Article Submissions 3. Press Release Distribution 4. Forum Signatures 5. Blog Comments 6. Social bookmarking 7. Social Sites (Squidoo, Weebly, Wordpress, blogger) If I have missed something please let me know. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Not ranking well after site was hacked
My site was hacked and that seemed to have a pretty big effect on search rankings. I'm pretty sure I've gotten the hack completely removed (as of 10/16.) During the hack and even now, all of my posts created after Aug 1 don't rank in regular Google searches at all even if I search for the titles in quotes. But I can tell they are indexed because I see them when I do a site search in Google. And I see that they are cached. Posts from before Aug 1 rank well in Google searches. The issue with August and after posts no longer appearing started in mid September. Prior to that the some of the August posts were actually performing very well. The September date corresponds to when we first started working on removing the hack. It looks like the August and after posts all have a pagerank of 0, whereas the mozrank is much higher. I've request reconsideration from Google and was told that no manual action was taken against my site. I know that's a lot of background, but I'm wondering how long do I need to wait before the August and after posts start ranking? Is there anything I can do in the mean time to address this pagerank issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris-at-Magoosh0 -
Ranking problems
Hi All My site is live for a year now. I;m getting tons of traffic (alexa 54k) and business are good. The only problem is that I have 0 page rank....I have checked again and again the site;s structure to see if there is anything wrong with the site but everything seems to be ok. Google just added search links to the site (megamoneygames) which looks very nice. For example, none of my competitors have search links but they all have page rank of 4 while I have 0. In addition, for some reason the site's age (days) shows 0 although it is live for a year now... Do you have any idea of what is going on? do I have errors in the site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pariplay0