Owning all of the top 10 positions for one keyword
-
Hello,
I would like to know if it is considered bad by Google to rank every single spot in the top 10 with the same keyword?
All websites conver the same topic which this keyword, but have unique content. Those websites dont link to one another.
To be clear, I am not asking if it is a good idea because it will be harder to rank, find links etc. or because the last positions don't bring enough traffic. I really just would like to know if it against Google guidelines? Any thoughts or sources are greatly appreciated.
-
I agree with Tom and Lynn. It would be technically possible if you make sure there is no connection with the site, (who is, theme, content, different host/ ip range, etc), there would be no way for google to know one person is behind it.
But the amount of work to do that with white hat methods would be incredibly hard ( even with black hat it would be very hard), for a decent keyword worth ranking for..... I don't think its possible these days.
-
I can only go on my experiences I'm afraid, based on what I've seen and what I assume to be the right SEO practices.
I'd put a lot of money on this being the case - but hey, you could always ask Matt yourself!
-
Tom sums it up well.
In most if not all of such cases you should ask yourself if this is a 'normal' situation for a 'normal' search query and I think you will find that the answer is no. If the sites are all owned by the same person then it is certainly borderline if this situation is resulting in searchers finding enough variety in the results for them to say that google is returning the best results. Further to that, for any semi-competitive keyword it would be quite unusual for this situation to be happening so I would ask myself if it is worth the bother maintaining all these sites and tracking their rankings. Chances are that at some point the algo will mix things up and some (all?!) of the sites will move out of the top 10.
So, officially against the guidelines? (assuming no funny stuff) probably not. An un-natural situation that is unlikely to be very stable and/or worth the effort of maintaining it... probably.
-
Hello Tom Hall,
I think I wasn't clear. I didn't mean what you answered to. I meant:
10 domains with unique content on each one. Then linkbuilders get links to those sites to make those the ten to be ranked first on Google.
Basically, I meant what Tom Roberts answered to.
So, Tom, for you this should not be done because there is always a risk. Do you have sources for that opinion? That's what I would think also but I'm looking for more sources. For example, people that have been penalized or official Matt Cutts article or a study on several top 10s by a big name like seomoz or something like that.
Thanks a lot for your answers.
-
Hey there
If you had 10 individual websites with completely unique content that did not link together and each one offered a unique value, it could happen.
The unique value factor is key here - does each website not only have unique content on the matter, but also a new theme, style and way of portraying the message? If they do, I could see it happening.
But even then, I can't imagine Google would be happy if they found out all the sites belonged to one webmaster. It would take a manual review, but even if the WMT information was different, site themes were different, who.is registrar was different, backlink profile was different - basically everything was different, if they suspected it was the same person behind it all they would simply deindex the sites.
Hey, it's their search engine. We have quality guidelines and ideas of what we can or cannot do, but at the end of it there is a manual team who can penalise who they choose. This is a situation where I can imagine they would.
It's worth mentioning that I have seen a top 10 where 10 different websites which fell under one subsidiary trading name ranked for a pretty commercial keyword. So yes, it's possible.
Also worth pointing out is that 9/10 of those sites are now nowhere to be found.
-
Hi there,
This is a blackhat technique known as "Page Stuffing" it's probably not as easy to do these days due to Panda and Penguin, but the technique would involve ranking for one page (say a homepage) for a certain keyword and then duplicating the content so that each page would rank, pushing the competition down by up to 10 ranks so that one website is flooded for a certain search term.
Luckily, crawlers can now determine if a page is duplicated and just won't rank it and Google will penalize the offender.
Hope this helps.
Tom
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 have two brands and I market one in English (BrandA.com) and one in Spanish (BrandB.com), and the websites are identical but in different languages, would that have a negative impact on SEO due to duplicate content?
I have a client who wants a website in Spanish and one in English. Typically we would use a multi-language plugin for a single site (brandA.com/en or /es), but this client markets to their Spanish-speaking constituents under a different brand. So I am wondering if we have BrandA.com in English, and the exact same content in Spanish at BrandB.com if there will be negative SEO implications and/or if it will be recognized as duplicate content by search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Designworks-SJ1 -
Structuring sentences after keyword research
Hello, Once I have done your keyword research is there way to write other than "naturally" which is what everyone says ? Could someone explain what they mean by naturally. For example let's say my keyword is Piedmont bike tour, some of the words I find through my research are cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine etc... Is there a way to integrate those so that google understands what I mean. I imagine that google parses sentences for s reason and imagine that if I only sprinkle those words like in the sentence below it won't work. Piedmont bike tour, cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine all this is cool ! Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Anchor Text to Rank for a Keyword
Is it still possible to use anchor text to rank for a keyword that is not present on the landing page? Or are there any alternatives?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Keyword research
Hi, When you do keyword research and my terms is SEO for example. Do I need in the content to have the word "SEO" by itself and then a related keyword like "SEO tools" as 2 separate keywords or can I have "SEO tools" only and will this be counted as 2 separate keyword. The 1 st one will be "SEO" and the other one will be "SEO tools." Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Where is the best location for my primary keyword in my URL?
http://moz.com/learn/seo/url says: http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html However I am wondering about structuring things this a little backwards from that: http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ (this would be an introduction and overview of the topic described by the primary keyword)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/ (this would be a category landing page with snippets from articles within the niche described by the secondary keyword, which is itself a niche of the primary keyword)
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/article-title/ (in-depth article on a topic within the scope of the secondary, which is within the scope of the primary) Where http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ is the most important page targeting the most important URL. Thoughts?0 -
Keyword Spy Source?
We've got a few backlinks from Keyword Spy and Keyword Spy Pro. I'm pretty sure of the answer but I'll ask it anyway. Is there any way to determine who's doing the snooping? Are there any signals to look for while clicking back through the link "crumbs" that might tell me something of interest or value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Keyword research - how to find additional competitors and links
Hello, We need 100 strong linking root domains to rank at all in our industry (probably more). But all our competitors are using internal pages. I only found one competitor that is using their home page, and I found 12 good backlink possibilities through it. How do I go about finding other competitors? I know this is a general question, but what strategies do you guys use, and could you give examples?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
What is the best way to consolidate two websites into one?
Someone within our company's IT department just sent me some SEO advice that I believe is bogus. Can someone let me know if my initial gut-check is correct? We have two websites selling two identical catalogs of products but branded differently (color scheme, wording, etc.) like this: www.one.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan-Ricketts
www.two.com We want to shut down the second website. I think we should set up 301 redirects from all pages on the second site to corresponding (relevant) pages on the first. In theory, this would pass over 90% of the earned link juice from one to the other. Here is what my IT peer said: "We could keep www.two.com set up indefinitely and just have it as the same web site as www.one.com (so two URLs but one site). This would help alleviate any issues with search engine results, etc. (Although I believe Ryan would agree this does impact www.one.com's rankings a bit, but shouldn't be a problem as long as we don't advertise both.) Google doesn't know they are on the same site, so you could technically get away with it. And it helps in indexing multiple pages on our sites." ... but wouldn't this be a big no-no because of the massive amounts of duplicate content it would create?0