HELP ME! So Confused!! Competitor has 1.5K backlinks and ranks 6K keywords in the top 20 positions
I'm confused, I've been across many websites for 18-24mths and this one website is killing me, I dont understand whats going on.
In semrush, the website is pulling 6K keywords in the top 1-20 positions.
The backlink count in ahrefs has 1.5K, webmeup has 1.3K and majestic has 800 in the fresh, but 18K in historic
There is very limited social signals across this site (like 200 FB likes, and the odd product page with 10 FB likes, but mainly 95% of the pages have no social signal on them)
ahrefs domain rating is 43, opensiteexplorer DA is 24.
Finally the website has about 15K unique pages / URLs. I walked it with screamingfrog and got about 14K in total. So that means 1 in 3 pages rank something on the first 20 positions.
Now whats interesting about this site is that in the niche I'm investigating everyone else seems to be waaaaay outside these measures. They either have a stronger DA - 50+, more backlinks (like 50K-250K), more unique URLs (100K+) all for about 2-3K keywords in the top 1-20 positions. Everyone else is doing it much much tougher.
So I've pulled a backlink and anchor text analysis on their profile, and yes theres some crappy shit that freelancer/odesk/warriorforums has done for them, but its only like 50-100 backlinks out of 1.5K. They dont have that high of trust flow either, with majestic reporting some issues with trust.
I am stumped as to why they are ranking as high as they are. I ran a report on their website (siteliner) and can confirm their panda scores could be very high. Most pages have enormous avg word count (2.5K words on avg across 15K pages placing them in the top 3% of all websites known to siteliner tool) and they appear to all be in good health from an external duplication perspective. But I'm not convinced that a panda quality score would boost them so high (can anyone comment from experience with this?)
So my current thinking is this;
1. Is panda that strong? Does it stick out like this when you are doing it right?
2. IF they have a PBN boosting them, blocking ahrefs and majestic bots, how could I find this network?
3. Would the 18K backlinks in majestic's historic index provide clues, or any weight in current rankings?
4. They are also a Google Trusted Store. Would Google favour them like this in return for giving them all this transactional data?
Experienced thoughts on this appreciated as I am really stumped... !!
Comments
That seems like pretty good keyword diversity for a single site. It is obvious he is not trying to focus all his efforts on a main keyword, but most probably use a very wide variety of anchor text ( long tails ) and most probably raw urls.
I also assume allot of those keyword would be brand name.
When are people going to learn that bigger isn't always better
Hiding SEO bots is easy if you own the T1 and T2 links... You can't possibly own all of the Tier sites, but the authority ones that are owned by the same person will of course have robots.txt or (even better) .htaccess blocks. Did you check the T1/T2 robots.txt files? did you check the T1/T2 links using user-agent switcher to mimic 'Googlebot' ?? I block "all but Googlebot" using their IP range, which you can't really spoof that well, but you can spoof the useragent.
BTW, Google doesn't know about LOADS of PBNs. Every so often they take one down amongst a big bruhaha and another 10 re-surface. They then whack them in a few months, and the cycle continues.
It doesn't sound like you are trying to reverse-engineer their link profiles so you can copy it. It sounds more like you want to inform Google about them, which is quite a shitty move so I hope I'm wrong!! If you can't beat 'em, join em.
In regards to PBNs, one of the ones I use got hit last week. The owners already had hundreds of new blogs ready and building ranks and authority but were hidden to Googlebot. Now they've turned it back on and my ranks have recovered in 4-5 days.