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.
-
SEO tools are an indicator. Never rely on one exclusively. Also, Moz looks at white hat factors. Your competition may not be playing by the rules. If that's the case, just hope Google handles them and keep doing your thing the right way.
-
Thanks all. The fact that this is a smaller website and not particularly well connected is what's intriguing me. If this site can get ranked well on Google (and I haven't tested it across a range of key phrases yet), then I should be able to get mine to rank at least as well. Mine is much more up-to-date.
My site also has a responsive WP theme, long posts, keywords in URL and embedded maps. I need to work on the home page as it is currently just a list of recent posts, so it doesn't help me rank for my "brand" phrase.
In many ways southeastasiatravelblog.com is doing everything wrong from an SEO angle. His URL is too long. It's almost EMD in nature. He has way too many links on his home page. Moz On-Page Grader ranks it "F" for "Asian travel blog" - scores an absolute zero! By comparison, my home page rates an "A" from Moz for this key phrase. It makes me wonder if Moz page gradings have any real value at all.
-
Agreed with the other guys here - you often see Google place sites like this in the SERPs for queries of similar competitiveness to this. It's not the internet's most competitive keyword but is also one that carries with it a lot of interest and can be profitable if the travel blog is operating as an affiliate. This example seems very closely related to the query, and Google is known to also often place "smaller" websites like this in the mix to make a change from giants like MSN, newspapers, travel guides on big sites, etc.
-
Totally agree here.
Keep in mind, there is a lot of more to the ranking ability of a site for a specific keyword than just PA, DA, links, and social.
On-page, the context of the links, etc. There's a ton of things, and Simon nailed it: if you don't know why something ranks, study it, it's an extremely valuable piece of information. It's hard not to just hate on a site and think it "got lucky," but it's ranking for a reason.
-
It's on a responsive WordPress theme
-
long page length
-
high resource value
-
Keywords in URL
-
interesting choice of description and title content and format
-
Nice file structure, repeating "southeastasiatravelblog.com"
-
Embedded maps
Asking why it should be ranking as it is, should sometimes be reversed to ask, why shouldn't it rank well? What are your first thoughts? Sometimes sites with this kind of activity are one new crawl away from a ranking adjustment, but I also think they can offer clues as to how Google etc rank sites - anomalies are sometimes gems to be studied for your own success.
-
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
-
What is the reason my ranking down?
Hey Guys, My name is Niraj Jaiswal from India! My website is that Rakhi Bazaar and my lots of keywords like send rakhi to the USA, send Rakhi to Canada, send Rakhi to the UK, send Rakhi to Dubai my previous ranking is better than now ranking. I do not understand what's going wrong. My domain name is "https://www.rakhibazaar.com/". What I do??
Link Building | | Packersmove1 -
Tool sharing sites
Hi All I have a finance calculator that our IT team have built and I would like to get it distributed to sites will find it useful, I am contacting sites that I think will directly benefit from the calculator, but are there sites that I can share it on (like you would use youtube for video)? Thanks Sean
Link Building | | MotoringSEO0 -
301 Redirect and Google...
Hi all Recently, Google has indexed the landing page url for our product differently. This has just happened. So now, when you used search for "DocRead" you would find the top result being : "http://www.collaboris.com/products/policy-and-procedure-management-software" which is what i want. However, now it's indexing it as "http://www.collaboris.com/products" this page is simply a redirect to our product page as it's part of the menu. If I look in fiddler when requesting http://www.collaboris.com/products I can see its doing a 301 redirect, which is fine. Why is Google storing the wrong url ? I also noticed we dropped in our rankings quite significantly last week.
Link Building | | MarkQJones0 -
Page Rank Sculpting
Just a thought. With the way pagerank works and passing link juice evenly across all your links. Would it make sense to structure your site so that each page passes your all your link juice from lets say your homepage to another page. Then that page would contain all the link juice from the homepage. Then do the same thing with the next pages. For instance Homepage - linkjuice 10 link1 - follow link2 rel=nofollow link3 rel=nofollow link4 rel=nofollow link5 rel=nofollow Link1 - linkjuice 10 link1 rel=nofollow link2 - follow link3 rel=nofollow link4 rel=nofollow link5 rel=nofollow Link2 - linkjuice 10 link1 rel=nofollow link2 rel-nofollow link3 - follow link4 rel=nofollow link5 rel=nofollow Link3 - linkjuice 10 link1 rel=nofollow link2 rel-nofollow link3 rel=nofollow link4 - follow link5 rel=nofollow Link4 - linkjuice 10 link1 rel=nofollow link2 rel-nofollow link3 rel=nofollow link4 rel=nofollow link5 - follow and so on. Theoretically would'nt this help pass a ton if not all of link juice to your main links? Sorry if this is a dumb question, it's late and sometimes my mind goes places 🙂
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
Ranking discrepancies
The head office of our organisation has just set up a new website and I see that it is ranking third below two of our retail stores. I performed a link analysis s and see we out rank our stores in terms of Links etc. Can someone explain to me why we are below these stores. Also our website was only launched a week a go. Could this have an effect?
Link Building | | dawsonski0 -
Links from Related Sites with Low PR or semi-related sites with High PR?
Is it better to get a link from a site with lower PR but related content or higher PR but semi-related or unrelated content? For example, if I sell shoes, would a link from a PR1 or PR2 shoe or apparel site be better or a link from PR4 website that sells books be better? I'm not talking about sites with completely unrelated content, but how relevant is PR in obtaining relevant links if I am trying to raise the PR and rankings of my own site?
Link Building | | applesofgold0 -
Building backlinks for a newspaper site?
Anyone have tips on building links to a newspaper site? I am looking for a strategy to create links to a news site beyond building one link at a time. We have so much content that is constantly updated that it would be impossible to do this one page at a time.
Link Building | | BostonWright0 -
Multiple blogs for one site
Hello, one of my competitors built all these blogs and pointed them to their main site.. Is this white hat? http://steelbuildingsblog.org/ PR3 http://metal-church-buildings.net/ PR2 http://commercial-metal-buildings.org/ PR2 http://metalandsteelbuildings.net/ PR1 http://steel-storage-buildings.org/ PR2 http://texas-steel-buildings.net/ PR2 http://steel-metal-buildings.org/ PR3 http://metal-buildingstore.com/ PR2 http://metalagriculturalbuildings.net/ PR3 Also I am looking at my links vs. theirs and they have a much higher point score for links... But the company I am doing SEO for has most of same quality links. Can this be the reason they have an edge?
Link Building | | SEODinosaur0