How did this little site rank #2?
-
Keyword: "adoption agency"
Site: http://www.opendooradoption.org
These guys are ranked #2 for this very competitive term in all US regions. They're beating Bethany (and my company) who are orders of magnitude larger in both company size and link profile. Their domain authority is 40, and they have less than 200 links pointing to them with "adoption agency" in the anchor according to OSE. Their on-site is pretty much nonexistent.
Does anyone have any theories as to how they accomplished this?
-
Good point donford. I first noticed this maybe a week ago... knowing that rankings can shuffle like you described I bit my tongue and waited a bit. For some reason today it popped back into head and I did a search in several regions and found them still ranking.
Maybe I'm asking this too soon? I'm not sure how long the google shuffle lasts.
Honestly I don't mind that they rank #2, I just want to know their secret
-
Ryan out of curiosity did this just happen, or have they maintained this position for awhile (weeks+)?
As you may already know, Google randomly ranks or serves sites which have no business being in the top pages. This is more of a Google test on how people perceive a site, and typically only last a couple days.
We recently had a new site come out of the blue ranking #1 for a keyword we have dominated for many years, within 3 days they were gone out of the top 50.
I personally would only be alarmed if this positioned had been maintained for extended periods of time.
Hope that helps
-
heheh yeah I wasn't impressed when I clicked through to the site either. I guess the 13k pages may have something to do with it, although amazingly many of them just 404 like this page http://www.opendooradoption.org/china_girl.htm (and wth were they going to have on that page anyway??). My site only has 2k+ indexed in comparison, but I don't feel good about churning out crap content, so that'll have to stay the same for now.
-
Thanks for the reply Phil! I may give that a try.
-
good lord that site is the worst site i've seen in a long time! It was all pieced together, the directory structure is all over the place. It looks like a couple of sites were combined to make one site which may be helping it reach critical mass.
This first URL is the same as the second one and both are indexed:
http://www.opendooradoption.org/Content/Default/13/207/0/pregnancy-gps/pregnancy-gps.html
http://www.pregnancygps.org/Content/Default/13/207/0/pregnancy-gps/pregnancy-gps.html
It's a complete disaster but for some reason Google is giving it a pass.
Two things going for it:
a) the homepage is PR4
b) they have 13,500 pages indexed in Google.
-
This is very interesting.
This might be showing the power of their title tag and URL. They have "adoption agency" in the title tag and "adoption" in the URL. Bethany.org doesn't have either. Still a bit baffling though.
If you're up for a test, try changing your title tag to start off with "adoption agency". Of course, only do this if it's right for your business.
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
-
The same page ranking twice in the top 10?
Whilst doing a SERP analysis for a particular phrase, i noticed that the same page is ranking twice in the top 10. I've known of the same domain ranking twice with different pages which makes sense but to see the exact same URL ranking twice is a new one for me. Has anyone seen this before too and know of reasons why this would happen?
Competitive Research | | jamiemonteathaegon0 -
How on Earth are These Sites Outranking Us?
Hello all, My colleague and I have been doing a lot of work to optimise our companies site (www.allseasonshire.eu/). The project is still massively work in progress. While we've been analysing the SERPs for KW's we're trying to rank for we've noticed two sites that are outranking us and we can't work out why. The sites in question are www(dot)nationwide-boilerhire(dot)co(dot)uk & and www(dot)nationwideboilerhire(dot)com. They're both very small sites, with hardly any content and basically zero external links pointing to them. When we compare the root domains in OSE our site comes out on top on every single competitive metric as well, most of them by a long shot. I'm just wondering if anyone can help shed some light on why these two sites would be appearing so high in SERPs and why they would be outranking us? Any input anyone has is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ryan Edit: Keyword in question is 'boiler hire'. Thanks for your answer Nishadha, would that alone really be enough though?
Competitive Research | | allseasonshire0 -
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 -
Ecommerce seo - competitors are using spammy links to rank HELP
After setting up SEO Moz and whilst waiting for it to crawl my site i have checked out my competitors who are ranking for the keywords i am going after. It appears from what i can see in OSE that they are ranking with back links from spammy looking sites and lots of exact match anchor text. I have tried to match a few links with what they have currently without getting myself into anything too spammy but i really don't want to follow how they have done it exactly. The niche i am in is pretty boring but the rewards are great but i am finding creating content and distributing it correctly difficult which is why i need some help. My site is roughly 9 months old and the product descriptions are hand written trying to give as much info as possible with a hint of personality so no cookie cutter back of the box descriptions. i have matched a few of the links from competitors which weren't too spammy and as relevant as i could get to my niche, i have also created articles for some article directories - all of which isn't really getting me very far and i am running out of ideas on how to create new content & the types of new content to help me get back links naturally. If any of you friendly guys could offer me some assistance in setting up a basic seo campaign which would help me target my keywords i would be very much in your debt
Competitive Research | | GarethEJones0 -
Another how the *%#^ is this site ranking question
I saw a question posted by someone a while back asking how a certain (in their opinion crappy) site was ranking in the top then. It happened that there were some good reasons for that site ranking. Well.... I have stumbled on a site that seems to be ranking for (almost) no reason at all: relatively low DA/PA very few inbound links (none seem to be that special) thin content The only thing I can think of, is that the site has the keyword in the domain name. But looking at the search results, there are other domains with exact match keyword in URL and somewhat stronger metrics that don't rank.
Competitive Research | | inhouseseo0 -
Identify keywords certain sites target
Hello, I've been asked to identify what keywords a group of blogs/communities might target so that we might gain some insight for our own SEM purposes. It's been several years since I used SEOmoz's tools, so they have changed a lot. I couldn't remember if you had such a tool, but it appears you do not--or at least not that I am finding. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of such a tool where I can input a subdomain, and have a report stating which keywords are the ones the domain rates highly for. To be clear: I'm not looking for a traffic estimation or anything; simply a breakdown of what keywords a specific page or domain support most. P.S. I did a search on here for certain terms like "competitive keyword targets" and so forth, and saw no matching QA. I'm sorry if there is a duplicate! Thanks,
Competitive Research | | krisgosser
Kris0 -
Keyword based link problem on site
So I think I might have identified an issue with a site that I'm trying to get ranked for a specific keyword but, wanted to get some opinions before I started making some big changes on the site. On my homepage I have the keyword that I would like to be ranked for in the title lets say "Blue Widgets - Company Name', also on the home page I have some descriptions of our services including the keywords. I also have a couple of the keyword based links within in the content, navigation and footer. But these keyword based links all point to another page on the site: blue-widgets.htm. If I really want my home page to rank for the keyword "Blue Widgets' should all of these links point to the home page instead of the sub page? I know there are a great number of other factors that contribute to rankings but looking at my competition, this is something that they seem to be doing. The keyword based links within the content, navigation or footer all point to the homepage. I also have a higher Domain Authority than some of the sites that rank higher than me so I'm not sure if building more links is the answer. Of course I always want to build natural links but these sites don't seem to be doing that either. Any comments, suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | TRICORSystems0 -
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