How does a site get to no 3 in Google with no KW in their links?!!
-
Hello everyone, my first post - ahhh
I'm investigating a niche and there is a site that should have no right being there in my view.
It's no. 3 Google UK for 'company formation' with a small site with 65 weak links from only 7 domains and hosted in the US.
But more importantly, the Open Site Explorer says there is not 1 link with that term in its anchor text. This I find crazy and makes me suspicious.
But before I go back to my client saying "oh they must be black hat" I would like your expert views. I'm not sure whether to tut or congratulate them and for the first time I'm not sure what reasons to give for their amazing performance!
What's your views?
-
Yeah tried that, only 3 in Google and stopped my Magestic subscription.
I'll accept it for now and move on, but I haven't come across a white hat site that doesnt give some indication of why they rank so highly. This site goes against the grain with me in so many ways that it looks suspect.
The big issue is as 'the SEO expert' I have a question mark and the client will want to know why I dont know.
I'll just have to bump them down with my client's site wont I. Thanks for the reply.
Oh and nice G btw ;o)
-
Hi Stuart,
Even though OpenSiteExplorer has a decent index, it doesn't have all the data Google has. You might want to look into other sources like MajesticSEO, Google link: command or Yahoo Site Explorer Inlinks.
Recently, I was also looking at a competitor website and I was like "man, how can they rank for that query with such a low number of links and no good anchor text". I discovered that using the link: command on Google returned much more links than OSE.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Did anyone else have a thought on this or shall I give up on SEO and just invest in EMD's! (joke).
Although I appreciate one members view I would like another, as I persoanlly cant believe that they have the strength to be where they are just based on the domain.
-
Exact match domains are still very powerful in Google. Matt Cutts said the team was going to look at them in 2011, but that has not happened yet to my knowledge and even if they do, no guarantees of if or when they'll make an algorithm adjustment.
It is an exact match domain because the term "company formation" is in the URL, it's just the words are switched. But the phrase still appears in the URL and none of the other URLs are like that.
Right, they're only ranking because of their domain, at least in my opinion. Their DomainAuthority is very weak otherwise compared to the others.
-
Thanks for the response, I didnt say which domain but I dont consider www.theformationscompany.com/ to be exact match; it is they Im confused about.
As I understand EMD are not so powerful anymore in Google' s eyes, just that you get great backlink anchor text even with directory submissions.
Plus the main point is the strength of all the sites around them. I would Put them on page 4 at best!
-
I looked up the domain you're referring to.
The easy answer? They have an exact match domain. They have a somewhat okay title tag, and they do have backlinks.
Exact match domains are way overpowered and I think this is the case for this term!
It's not blackhat, just taking advantage of EMD's.
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
-
How can stie A be outranking site B?
Hi everyone. I seem to have a lot of questions the past couple of days! Take a look at these two URLs: Site A: http://www.peachstateaudio.com/products/Mixing_Consoles/Digital_Consoles/Roland/peachstate-audio-roland-m200i Site B: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/roland-m-200i-digital-mixer I will mail 2-dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies to anyone who can tell me why Site A massively outranks Site B for the term "roland m-200i" - Seriously. Thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | danatanseo0 -
How to check Google Keyword rankings?
Hey, So I recently watched the DuckDuckGo commercial about Google's results bubble. My question is how can you get the actual keyword rankings of relevant key phrases without Google taking your locations and search history into account? Would it just be a case of clearing your cache & history from the beginning of time or is there an accurate tool (other than SEOmoz ofc that I can use? Best regards, Dan
Competitive Research | | Sparkstone0 -
Spam affiliate outranking quality site?
I purchased a site hotkeyit.com which was making decent revenue without much work (all via PPC or CPM) but then afterwards started looking at the SERPs and realized I was being outranked for the main term, 'starcraft 2 guide/s' by crappy ClickBank sites like starcraft2guide.com and many others. Researching starcraft2guide.com specifically in SEOMoz/Rush/Majestic shows hotkeyit.com as being quite superior in everyway, not to mention it has quite a social following for a small gaming site, yet Google seems to care not. Can someone please explain what's going on here? It seems like the site was penalized, but there was never any link building done for it aside from word of mouth on forums (this was mentioned beforehand). Thank you everyone.
Competitive Research | | Neyzio0 -
How to estimate what traffic you should be getting?
Hey guys i have a question in regards to targetting seo results. A lot of my customers will me SME and most have visitors of under 50 per day. My question is how do you judge the amount of traffic a website of a small local business should be getting? For instance i have a site that gets average 22 visits per day, i would love to know how much their competitors get per day so i can know what targets to strive for. I feel that is 22 is ten times more than the compeitors website then the amount of seo time needed is less than if it is 10 times behind what competitors get. Thoughts?
Competitive Research | | buntrosgali0 -
How does Google decide whether a Google News box appears in organic search results?
How does Google decide whether a Google News box appears in organic search results? A list of any specific factors, if known, would be very helpful.
Competitive Research | | pathjoy0 -
Unjustified ratings and reviews in google SERP?
I was checking Google US for some search term my company is interested for and found a thing I cannot explain well. The site Tradecarview is shown with a rating of 4.4 stars from 4209 reviews. (Please see attached image).The same rating is shown on their homepage, but I could not find much more details. (By the way: Tradecarview is a sort of directory for used car dealers to post their vehicles, something similar to Ebay or Yahoo motors.) The question is simple: is Google trusting the ratings given directly on the website? Maybe just summarizing the ratings shown here? http://www.tradecarview.com/pr/providerlist.aspx?pn=0&st=7 Or are there other sources I couldn't find that Google used to specify the rating? What do you think? Thank you in advance for your answers, Dario Pe1ft.jpg
Competitive Research | | Darioz0 -
Keywords in URL structure for Large Site
We are creating a national real estate website which will contain 2mil+ listings. Our aim is to compete with the National leaders in the field. We are trying to lock down a url structure and it basically comes down to if we should put a major keyword in the url structure or not. The structure would have regional keywords naturally. Its the addition of a more descriptive key word which is in question. Our domain name has no keywords in it. For the sake of this example, we would be targeting "city real estate"... oursite.com/real-estate/state/city/ or oursite.com/state/city/ Here is what the big sites use as an example: http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/New-York-NY/ http://www.trulia.com/NY/New_York/ http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/New_York-New_York/ http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/New-York Id love to not have to throw keywords in there and be as clean as possible but i also dont want to shoot myself in the foot. The big boys do add additional keywords in the url, does that mean we should? Id much rather be a leader than a follower but again, I dont want to mess this up from the start and these guys have probably tested this (or have they?). Input would be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | cobbsfriedman0 -
How many Page Rank 8 sites are there?
Anyone have any estimate of how many Page Rank 8 sites are out there? Best, Steve
Competitive Research | | Aggie0