How is this possible?

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Katie2010

  • #1
    Hi guys,

    I've been studying our competition for a few months now and noticed this site which suddenly started coming up 2-3-4 on page 1 for very competitive keywords. Up to about 2 months ago they were on page 5-10 or even lower depending on the search term.

    The site is 2 years old, PR1, is not optimised much from what I can see - the keyword they are ranking 2nd on page 1 is not included in title tag, they have no meta description at all, the keyword in question comes up twice on the homepage, no H1, H2 or H3 anywhere in sight. Hardly anything in product description. I've tried checking their backlincks - something like 85 come up and mostly from a few local directories, no authority sites. No blog, no articles that I can find.

    They seem to do quite a bit on facebook and twitter and that's about it...

    How? So far the only explanation I can come up with is that they have a personal relashionship with somebody at google lol :D

    But seriously, am I missing something?
     
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    LBtrading

    Free Member
    Nov 6, 2008
    77
    27
    Dorset
  • #3
    they could have just been doing some good old link building and most of the links probably wont show in yahoo for quite a while if at all, another thing is yahoo site explorer is quite a fickle thing in that one day the number of links it reports back for x site could be 500 and the next day u check will be 375 then a few days later back up to the 500 mark.

    there are other backlink checkers which tend to show more links and even more data if you upgrade to paid versions,

    main ones are opensiteexplorer.org(gives some free results)
    majesticseo.com(paid)
    linkdiagnosis.com was a pretty cool tool last time i used it.

    they could also have other things going on like internal links and also links to deeper pages etc.
     
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    Katie2010

  • #4
    Thank you for the tools you mentioned, I will make a note of them for the future. Just tried running a report on them, still nothing interesting comes up - under 100 links and all fairly standard.

    Maybe you are right and their recent links are not showing up yet.

    But even if they just got another thousand links - can the site really go from position 100 to 2 within a couple of months?

    If so, I need to start working harder :)
     
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    Katie2010

  • #5
    Now this is interesting! Just clicked on some of the links that came up on one of the reports and they took me to a few articles on their website. The articles are on subjects completely unrelated to the main website and look like affiliate marketing to me - link to different websites, selling jewellery, clothing, insurance. But they are almost impossible to get to from the home page - tiny letters in the footer.

    What do you think this is about?
     
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    G

    gemd89

  • #12
    And if its the one i just looked at that was number 2, they have the word rugs after every word on the homepage and then lots of text about rugs underneath

    Gemma

    MASSEY said:
    They have that phrase "modern rugs" in the title of the website Katie.

    And it sits in a H2 tag.

    You can view the source code of their web page by right clicking your mouse or laptop button and then click on view source. Hopefully im not stating the obvious to you. :D
    Click to expand...
     
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    Katie2010

  • #13
    MASSEY said:
    They have that phrase "modern rugs" in the title of the website Katie.

    And it sits in a H2 tag.

    You can view the source code of their web page by right clicking your mouse or laptop button and then click on view source. Hopefully im not stating the obvious to you. :D
    Click to expand...

    :) Sorry, I confused you all - I didn't want to mention names. The site I was talking about is the one on position 2 - rugsandthings.

    Gemma- we are not on page one unfortunately :) and we'll have a struggle competing with modern rugs, they've been around for years. But then I am not hugely interested in this particular key word, I just gave it as an example.
     
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    aidan1980

    Free Member
    Jan 16, 2008
    1,321
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    Leicester
  • #14
    Katie2010 said:
    :) Sorry, I confused you all - I didn't want to mention names. The site I was talking about is the one on position 2 - rugsandthings.

    Gemma- we are not on page one unfortunately :) and we'll have a struggle competing with modern rugs, they've been around for years. But then I am not hugely interested in this particular key word, I just gave it as an example.
    Click to expand...

    they are position 2 on page 3. my guess is you are logged into google or havent disabled the personalised search thing
     
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    eventdomain

  • #18
    Peronalsied search thing - nothing to do with this IMHO.

    Katie, I have checked just 2 of your main keywords in Google and they show you as:

    Pos 98 for Shaggy rugs

    218 for Wool rugs

    -- this isn't good...

    there's even an dumb ezine article at 119 for wool rugs beating you.

    Without checking your competitors websites, I'd hazard a guess they have more links than you. They might even have paid to get on authority websites, but don't bother checking that, you'll just waste time, just get more related links.

    But IF one of the competition has the word rug in their domain name, has great content, this could be permanent trouble for you, as Google will view them as authority... and rank/keep them higher
     
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    Katie2010

  • #20
    Eventdomain - thank you for taking the time to have a look at our website. The keywords I concentrated on so far are traditional rugs and cream rugs - both are on pages 9-10, which is pretty sad.

    Saying that, the site has only been live for something like two months (I know in web time it's a long time :)) and I never expected quick results. I am working on link building, but some of the competitors have in excess of 2,000 or in some cases even 3,000 links. Hopefully we'll get to that at some stage, but I fully understand that it's not something they've achieved overnight and some of these sites are 5-6 years old.

    I still have a very long list of things I want to do, but I am very new to this and am still finding my feet under the table so any comments or critisism is always greatly appreciated :).

    lol re the ezine article - that's actually mine and it links back to our site :D
     
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    eventdomain

  • #21
    the site has only been live for something like two months
    Click to expand...

    Ahhh, that explains things a bit.. Thats part of the reason for low rankings.


    competitors have in excess of 2,000 or in some cases even 3,000 links
    Click to expand...

    I don't doubt it, trouble is its going to take at least 12 months to match 3000 links - I'm trying to think of a way to accelerate this.... er, what about making your site into a little resource eg: make a proper link resource page by UK County, add a guide about rugs, maybe some news about the world of rugs - this is all spider food for the engines.

    I've checked some rug directories, some are okay, so might be worth getting listed.
     
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  • #22
    Katie2010 said:
    Eventdomain - thank you for taking the time to have a look at our website. The keywords I concentrated on so far are traditional rugs and cream rugs -
    Click to expand...

    Katie if they are your target keywords they should be the first words to appear in your index page title.

    It may help your campaing to geographically target areas.Like putting up the names of the larger UK cities either at the bottom of your page or sprikle a few in your title for most effect.

    Use your other pages in a similar way until your site has matured a bit and your link profile has increased its always best to be a large fish in a small pool.

    Nice looking rugs.:)

    Earl
     
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    Alby10

    Alby10

    Free Member
    Jul 14, 2008
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  • #23
    It can be difficult sometimes to ascertain why a site is showing in a certain positions in Google. I have seen sites that are poor quality with very little on page seo, show up in some top positions, which can only be down to backlinks. In my experience, the difficulty is finding out the details on the backlinks, as i have yet to find any solution, software or online, that gives accurate data regarding backlinks.

    All i would say is build up some quality one way do follow backlinks with your keyword as anchortext, pointing to the relevant page of your website.
     
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    Katie2010

  • #24
    Thanks Alby10, yes, I am beginning to realise that on-page SEO is great, but it's the backlinks that really matter. And no matter what you do, it takes time. So far for traditional rugs, which is one of our main keywords we have moved from page 15 to page 7 in the last three weeks. Obviously page 7 is still no good, but hopefully in a few months time we will see some results of all the link building that I've been doing.

    At the moment webmaster tools are showing that we have just under 1,800 links, but it's the quality links which are not easy to come by. Still, I am working on it :)
     
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