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
-
Wondering why my site ranks well for one page and not another.
Customers mainly find our site from searching very specific part numbers on google. My site is launch3telecom.com. Take for example these two parts:
Competitive Research | | launch3
MT500A-81015 MR050-81045 Search only those parts in google - we rank 3rd for one of them and don't rank at all for another. Is there any way to check backlinks pointing to those pages? We even show up before big sites like ebay and such on one of them. Can anyone help me understand this?0 -
Query for checking is a link to domain A already exists on domain B
Hi, I was wondering if anyone can help. I need to have a simple check where I have 2 domains, and I can check of there are any links from domain A to domain B. Does anyone what would be the best query for this and if you would use google, bing, yahoo or other SE. Many thanks
Competitive Research | | James770 -
How come the results in Google vary with domains
Hello, How is everyone doing? My question is about the google search engine results page. How come some results have the www. in front of them and some don't. Also what are the SEO implications of having www. in front of your search results vs. not. Is this something to do with canonical? I have included a screen shot so you will see what I mean. One result is www.gearyi.com and the result without the www is ingenexdigital.com. R6GLL.png
Competitive Research | | digitalops0 -
My Competition is using some Strange Achord Text and Inbound Links
I was doing some research and a lot of my competition are websites from Universities, but I got surprised when I saw that a lot of their Anchor Text where things like Buy Viagra , Play poker , Buy Cialis , a lot of their inbound links where about things like that , one of the sites I was doing research on was www.imba.ie.edu , this site was #1 for the keyword I want that is related to education. Also other sites on the #1 page of google for this keyword (universities websites) had the same kind of inbound links and achord texts. Whats going on here??
Competitive Research | | globalcampus0 -
How can a site rank higher when you beat them by A LOT on virtually every SEOMOZ factor?
Any insight into what's driving these results would be appreciated. Another site ranks #6 and we rank #22 on a keyword that scores 67% for "Keyword Difficulty", but we score significantly higher than them on almost every ranking factor including having nearly 10 times more backlinks along with higher PA and DA scores,etc. Here is a comparison from the Keyword Difficulty Tool report. Question: What could be going on? Factor and ranking comparison (us v. them) with our higher rankings are listed first. PA: 61 v. 39, mozRank 5,85 v. 4,54, mozTrust 6.00 v. 5.49, mT/mR = 1.0 v. 1.2, total links = 4,198 v. 90, internal links = 4198 v 90, external links = 275 v. 57, followed links = 4171 v 85, no follow links = 27 v 5, linking root domains = 46 v 30 on-page grade = A v B broad keyword usage in title: yes v yes broad keyword usage in document: yes v yes keyword used in url = no v no keyword used in domain = partial v no KW exact match - no v no exact anchor text links = 2373 v 13 %links w/ exact anchor text = 56% v 14% linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 7 v 8 % linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 15% v 26% partial anchor text links = 0 v 0 Domain Authority = 54 v 27 Domain mozRank = 5.4 v 3.2 Domain mozTrust = 5.8 v 3.7 DmT/DmR = 1.1 v 1.2 External links to domain 9261 v 63 Linking root domains to this domain = 355 v 33 linking c- blocks domains to domain = 267 v 30 tweets = 4 v 3 FB shares = 13 v 11 Google Plus one shares = 1 v 0
Competitive Research | | rickt0070 -
Online checkers for Anchor Links ?
Okay, we are looking for online tools to check our backlinks, and anchor links top domains, etc. OSE is not working for us, because looks like , it gets updated in some months. We are looking for something, which can drag the statistics in fw hours and show up. Let me know.
Competitive Research | | qubesys0 -
How can I add more than 3 competitors
Is there some way to add more than 3 competitors to the tool to benchmark against?
Competitive Research | | lockwoodl1 -
What sould I focus on to get over the top of my competors ?
Ok, I've been on this site for approximately one week now. There is a lot of good information but quite honestly, I don't know where to shoot at first in getting a better ranking against my competitors I have done pretty much everything on my web site to optimize, but I don't get at all the ranking close to my competition. They don't have as much content as we have other than they have been doing SEO for much longer time. I have worked a lot on the content optimization of our site, I get pretty much good result on some of the keywords, registered my site to google, bing , yahoo, I'm using the site map, configured the robot.txt, on-page metatag, URL canonical, clean-ur, H1 H2 tags, etc etc. Ho, And I just got today the approval of Yahoo Directory Listing. It's not sill showing up, but I guess it will come. You will find attached the output of 2 of my competitors and Us. They both rank very well on the keyword we are interested. Where should I start ? I know the Links Juice i important, but how can I workout my strategy to defeat them. Any help would be appreciated. Best regards, h837v
Competitive Research | | processia0