How Are Competitor's With Zero Links (According to SEOmoz) Ranking Highly?
-
Hey everyone! This is my first post in the community after just signing up for SEOmoz. I've already got a ton of value from this community so I'm looking for to giving back as much as possible.
The keyword gets 8000+ monthly searches on Google. Not so many, but the keyword indicates high buying intention.
The funny thing is that the top ranking page has 0 backlinks (according to OSE). It seems as though there are some black hat tactics being used, as I doubt that they are ranking solely with on-page optimization.
Any idea what's going on? Have you guys/gals seen this before?
-
Thanks for the replies! It was simply the www subdomain throwing things off.
Now, I've got a clear picture of the link profile for these competitors. Thanks again for helping out!
-
Likely, you looked for backlinks to www.ambienmed.com. Try checking OSE for ambienmed.com (without the www):
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=ambienmed.com
Boom! 898 Links!
They may get busted eventually for anchor text optimization, with 114 links for "buy ambien". However, they've got 184 links with the url as the anchor so that seems to be helping them avoid Penguin for now.
-
Hi Edward, Welcome to SEOMoz!
There may be many reasons why the website in question is ranking higher than yours.
You'll need to factor in a couple of factors, regarding both your site and the competitiors.
How old is your domain? Theirs is almost 12 months old, which if I believe correctly, is long enough to avoid any 'youth website' penalisation. If yours is new then Google may not have crawled it properly yet.
Aside from this, OSE and Google do not share databases, therefore some pages that Google is aware of, OSE may not be aware of. Mozbot would need to follow links to the competitiors site for it to be added to the index (what I believe).
As a result of this, you will see 0 on the mozbar when infact there are some links pointing to it. In fact there are some (rather dodgy) links pointing to ambienmed:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=link%3Aambienmed.com&sugexp=chrome,mod=2&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
On page content can also play a part in ranking factors. Ambienmed has a wealth of content on the home page which is very keyword heavy.
Also, as mentioned previously, your competitiors are fortunate enough to have an exact match domain name.
I hope some/all of this helps!
-
OSE is not working for me but I suggest searching using ambienmed.com (without the www.) as on Google they rank with ambienmed.com
This is a different subdomain and would be the reason there are no links to www.ambienmed.com
As well as that they are also in a fortunate position of having the keyword ambien in their domain name.
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
-
If I get multiple links from one domain, will that help my rankings?
Hello, I have developed a relationship with a blogger in my niche. He has published a guest post of mine with a link back to my site. Does it make sense to keep providing him with content to build different links from different pages within the same root domain? Thanks! Ricardo
Link Building | | myriad_ricardo0 -
How is this site ranked so high on Google?
How on earth does "southeastasiatravelblog.com" rank No 3 on Google for "Asian travel blog"? It's just a collection of basically PR type travel articles. I have profiled its backlinks using Open Site Explorer and 71% of them are dead. The rest seem to be mostly "run of site" links from his other websites, which aren't particularly travel or Asia related. The highest PA for a live backlink to this site is a link from within his own website (PA 27, DA 15). Most of his backlink anchors are URLs and look fairly EMD to me. The site has few shares (6 FB shares, 7 FB likes, 1 Twitter share). So what makes it rank so highly for this phrase? My site I'm comparing against is "travelnasia.com" which is a fairly new domain with a DA 23, PA 31 and about the same amount of shares but far fewer backlinks at this stage because I recently changed URLs to shake off what might have been an algorithm penalty from Google. I am now receiving a growing level of Google search traffic again, but it's a long climb back. I'm looking at strategies, which is why I was checking out the site above.
Link Building | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
100's of .info links pointing to my site
Hi, in the past few weeks 100's of .info links appeared in WMT pointing to my site. Should I be worried about these links ? What can I do to block them ? Thanks nick [edited for proper category - Keri]
Link Building | | orion680 -
Will placing links in articles on my site help my rankings?
I have a few page rank 2 articles on my site. Will placing links to other pages on my site with appropriate anchor text in the body of these articles help the other pages to rank higher for the anchor text i place in these links in the articles? Thanks in advance! Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Buying Branded URL's
Hello A competitor of mine has a bunch of branded terms that they purchased, with backlinks point to their main site, is there a specific reason they do this? If I analyze the links on the "branded url" theres it has very little juice/authority? Is it worth it to do this? ex www.siteCOUPON.com. or www.mainsite.biz I have a .ca and something similar to our site re-directing through register.com in Iframe. But would they just be using those terms because it has high search volume? Would this help me in anyway? Thank you!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Why does SEOmoz not show links to my website?
Google WebMaster shows that 55 external sites have links to my website (webmakercms.com). But SEOmoz shows only 5 links and when I click on "download to CSV" I get a message saying that there is no data for this url in Open Site Explorer. Why is this?
Link Building | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Is it ever the case that a link isn't worth having?
We have been asked to provide a link on our website to a website which provides us with recycled computers to use (our company brand is based around recycling). They have agreed that we will get a reciprocal link back to our site. However the comparisons show that - perhaps this isn't worth it? Our page authority: 39, theirs 26. Our domain authority: 41, theirs 14. Our linking root domains: 41 theirs 7. Finally their links are in the # [li] list [/li] # format I guess my question is threefold: 1 - Will they get significantly more out of this linking opportunity than we will? 2 - Is it worth having the link anyway? (Can it hurt us in any way?). 3 - Does having links in the # [li] list [/li] # format effect the power of the links contained? Thanks.
Link Building | | Benj250 -
Do image links with no alt tags pass link value?
"... an image link with no alt tag is useless to search engines..." according to a Nov 2007 seomoz blog post. Is this still the case in 2011? I ask because I'm about to obtain a banner link on a high-traffic site (chiefly for the clickthrough value) but I notice the site uses neither "title" nor "alt" tags.
Link Building | | Jeepster0