Strange strategy from a competitor. Is this "Google Friendly"?
-
Hi all,We have a client from a very competitive industry (car insurance) that ranks first for almost every important and relevant keyword related to car insurance.
But they could always be doing a good job.A few days ago i found this: http://logo.force.com/
The competitor website is: http://www.logo.pt/
The competitor name is: Logo
What I found strange is the fact that both websites are the same, except the fact that the first is in a sub-domain and have important links pointing to the original website (www.logo.pt)
So my question is, is this a "google friendly" (and fair) technique? why this competitor has such good results?
Thanks in advance!!
I look forward to hearing from you guys
-
Be very careful about making assumptions regarding competitors.
Just because you see one thing, does not mean either that one thing is helping or hurting a site. SEO is a vast, complex environment. If a site has enough very strong signals across many areas, one or even a few very poorly executed things may not hurt the site. Or it may not hurt the site "until Google catches up with it".
Duplicate content, regardless of method (within a single site, across multiple domains, across a mix of domains and subdomains" is never a true best practice. Ever. it's artificial, and Google most definitely takes the position that if you are attempting to "artificially" (in their view) manipulate rankings in a non-best-practices manner, that's a violation of their guidelines, policies or TOS.
-
Hi Lesley!
Thanks for your response.
The robots.txt file is exactly the same as the "original" website.
I thought the strategy would be to obtain some benefit in being under a strong DA (79).
And i still find strange the fact that is always ranks first for the most important kws for this industry (very competitive one) but maybe it has something to do with the backlinks.
Thanks again!
-
Is there a chance that you could have found their dev site? Look at the source and robots.txt, is it set to noindex and to disallow?
edit: Actually in looking it up, it is something that sales force is doing. I think it would be considered bad, its duplicated content. Another one that is hosted on the same server is
which is also
It looks like salesforce is copying the websites for some reason.
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
-
"Fake" market research reports killing SEO
Our robotics company is in a fast growing, competitive market. There are an assortment of "market research" companies who are distributing press releases about their research reports (which are of less than dubious quality). These announcements end up being distributed through channels with high domain authority. The announcements mention many companies in the space that the purported report covers - including ours. As a result, our company name and product brand is suffering since the volume of press announcements is swamping our ratings. What would you do? Start writing blog postings on topics and post through inexpensive news feeds? Somehow contact the firms posting the contact and let them know they are in violation of our trademarks by mentioning our name? Other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | amelanson1 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Using competitor brand names. How far is too far?
We are a small company competing for traffic in an industry with more or less one other very large brand. I'm noticing we are getting a descent amount of organic traffic for the competitor's brand name however I haven't done any on-page inclusion or link building for the term. We are using their brand as a keyword in our paid campaigns and seeing potential. I firmly believe we have a superior product. I'm tempted to start going after our competitor's brand as a keyword to skim some of their traffic. My question is how far it too far? Do I actively try to obtain a few anchor text specific backlinks? Dare I use their brand name as a term on our page? Maybe just a simple blog post comparing our two products is more appropriate? Any suggestions are appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaliB0 -
Fix Bad Links in Google
I have a client who had some grey hat SEO done in the past. Some of their back links aren't from the best neighborhoods. Google didn't seem to mind until 9/28, when they literally disappeared for all searches except for their domain name. Google still has their site indexed, but it's just not showing up. There are no messages in Webmaster Tools. I know Bing has the tool where you can disavow bad links and ask them to discount them. Google doesn't have such a tool, but what is the strategy when you don't have control over the link sources, such as in blog comments? Could this update have been a delayed Penguin ranking change from the latest Penguin Update on the 18th? http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomBristol0 -
Product Reviews – Link Building Strategy
I own Simply Bags and have been sending sample bags to bloggers as a link building strategy. The following four links are a sample of recent product reviews. http://bit.ly/Mk6Z1t http://bit.ly/Mk6Smq http://bit.ly/Mk7atN http://bit.ly/Mk7wR8 Product reviews were considered a good link building strategy. After Panda & Penguin is Product Reviews still a good strategy? Please comment on the quality of the four sample links. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b4tv
Bob Shirilla0 -
Google turned me down, don't know why...
Hello, I'm experiencing decreasing on some of my keywords. I'm aware of some things which could be responsible for it. So I'd like to asi you, if my thoughts are right, and what to do with it. 1. I put backlinks leading onto my website. Those backlinks are on website I also own (they are on the same server). But nothing happened. Than I put other backlikns on this webiste. Those links also led to webistes I own. So could Google "punnished" those websites I'm linking to? 2. I offered my content to another website, which has a higher authority. This content had been published on my website weeks ago, I put it on this (another site). Co could Google punnished me for "duplicate" content? 3. In the past, we outsorced our SEO, and the company which was responsible for our SEO put backlinks leading to our website almost everywhere, I mean, those websites, they put links leading to our webistes fos focused on almost everything but our field (finance). But everything seemed to be fine, till now 4. Couple of days ago, I put our RSS on many RSS agregators and put our webiste on many catalogs. My website URL is www.penizenavic.cz Could you help me out? 🙂 Thanks a lot Petr
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petr.rozkosny0 -
Has anyone seen this kind of google cache spam before?
Has anyone seen this kind of 'hack'? When looking at a site recently I found the Google cache version (from 28 Oct) strewn with mentions of all sorts of dodgy looking pharma products but the site itself looked fine. The site itself is www.istc.org.uk Looking in the source of the pages you can see the home pages contains: Browsing as googlebot showed me an empty page (though msnbot etc. returned a 'normal' non-pharma page). As a mildly amusing aside - when I tried to tell the istc about this, the person answering the phone clearly didn't believe me and couldn't get me off the line fast enough! Needless to say they haven't fixed it a week after being told.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JaspalX0 -
Is domain name or page title "safe" as anchor text?
I am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0