Competitor frustration
-
I've tried to be completely "white hat" in my SEO efforts and my site ranks pretty well. However I'm being consistently beaten in the rankings by sites that pull every trick in the book and never seem to get penalised. One of my main competitors has 100s of near identical pages (just the town name different on each) and ranks close to or at the top for many searches, and has done for a couple of years now! Another uses massive keyword stuffing without any apparent adverse results. I don't want to follow their example, but my business is suffering as a result. Why can they get away with it and is there any way to "complain" to Google about it?
-
Hi,
My main advice to you is to not worry about they are doing to rank above you.... I know that might seem counter-intuitve, but at this point it seems that is not really helping you, it is only making you focus on a goal that might not bring you business.
As Eric says,
1. Are you sure these are good keywords that bring targeted traffic?
If so, take away the idea of forensics, since you do not want to emulate what they are doing, you want to do things that make you stand apart from them...
I am sure you have heard someone throw around the word "content"
Well so am I.... Content...... Make sure you are providing a user experience on your website that would garner true interest in content that people looking for you, or looking for information around items/services you may provide.
Build this content, and build a social circle around it, build relationships and the rankings will come, if they are truly using "Black Hat" tactics they will eventually either get penalized, or you will outrank them due to you will be providing a more genuine user experience with genuine content.
Also this more sets you up for the future, as Search Engines might not be the only game in town for long, so making a more well rounded "person-centric" strategy in my opinion is better than worrying about why competitor a or b is beating you for a single term in Google.
Hope this helps
-
You may have already checked this, but are they outranking you when you remove personalization and localization from the equation?
Also, do you know that they're really getting more traffic and business just because they outrank you?
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
-
Negative SEO - Spammy Backlinks By Competitor
Hi Everyone, Someone has generated more than 22k spam backlinks (on bad keywords) for my domain.Will it hurt on my website (SEO Ranking)? Because it is already in the top ranking. How could I remove all the spammy backlinks? How could I know particular competitior who have done this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Competitor Drops 10,000 links since last index. Lets play detective.
One of the intriguing things about SEO is being able to reverse engineer your competitors rankings because all the technical information is available for those who know where to look. I recently looked at my Dashboard and saw that one of my competitors had dropped 10,000 links. The questions is why? Google algorthm change? Blackhat Penalty? Something else.? Here are the numbers, I am going to lieave my own clients site out because his numbers are pathetic. www.Leafly(dot)com 50.4k Links Down 10k www.thcfinder(dot)com 1,530 links Down 71 www.weedmaps(dot)com 64,000k links Up 1.5K Is it just me or is that a lot of links to loose over one indexing period?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidMeshah0 -
Competitor is interlinking between his websites
I have a competitor who ranks in the first page for all his keywords and i found out in open site explorer that he has been interlinking between websites and it is obvious because he owns the same domain but different countries. for example, www.example.id (indonesia) www.example.my (malaysia) www.example.sg (singapore) (asian countries domain) my question here is this even consider "white hat"? I read one of the blog post from moz and here is the quote "#7 - Uniqueness of Source + Target The engines have a number of ways to judge and predict ownership and relationships between websites. These can include (but are certainly not limited to): A large number of shared, reciprocated links
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon
Domain registration data
Shared hosting IP address or IP address C-blocks
Public acquisition/relationship information
Publicized marketing agreements that can be machine-read and interpreted If the engines determine that a pre-existing relationship of some kind could inhibit the "editorial" quality of a link passing between two sites, they may choose to discount or even ignore these. Anecdotal evidence that links shared between "networks" of websites pass little value (particularly the classic SEO strategy of "sitewide" links) is one point many in the organic search field point to on this topic." will interlinking between your sites will be ignored by google in the future? is this a time bomb method or it is fine doing so? Because as far as concern my competitor is actually ranking on the first page for quite some time.1 -
Is this a clear sign that one of our competitors is doing some serious black-hat SEO?
One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to? They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related? Wh10b97
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kibin0 -
Getting links on competitor's blog
An SEO agency I'm working with has asked if we're okay with guest posting on a competitor's blog. What are the negatives of getting a link from a competitor's blog? Two things I thought of: They can remove the link at any time - why wouldn't you as a competitor? I generally don't want to alert my competition what I'm doing for SEO and how I'm doing it. Is that enough to not pursue those links? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Can I report competitor for asking to guest post?
I just had an email from one of my least preferred competitor's SEO company asking about guest posting. They are already totally dominating the SERPs where they have no natural reason for being. Is there anywhere to bring this to the attention of the search engines?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cornwall0 -
competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority
According to my recent SEOmoz links analysis, my competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority... e.g. wedding site linking to a transportation attorney's website. Aother competitor site has an overall of 2 million links, most of which are seemingly questionable index sites or forums to which registration is unattainable. I recently created a 301 redirect, and my external links have yet to be updated to my new domain name in SEOmoz. Yet, by comparing my previous domain authority rank with those of the said competitor sites, the “delta” is relatively marginal. The SEOmoz rank is 21 whereas the SEOmoz ranks of two competitor sites 30 and 33 respectively. The problem is, however, is to secure a good SERP for the most relevant terms with Google… My Google pagerank was “3” prior to the 301 redirect. I worked quite intensively so as to receive a pagerank only to discover that it had no affect at all on the SERP. Therefore, I took a calculated risk in changing to a domain name that translates from non-latin characters, as the site age is marginal, and my educated guess is that the PR should rebound within 4 weeks, however, I would like to know as to whether there is a way to transfer the pagerank to the new domain… Does anyone have any insight as to how to go about and handling this issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eranariel0 -
How Can I Check Competitors Linking Profile?
If I'm looking for weak points in my competitors linking structure, how can I use Open Site Explorer to do that? In other words, I'm not sure how to use Open Site Explorer? Zane
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Springboks0