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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

  • GipsyKingsGipsyKings My Own Server
    - No one can explain this unless knowing the url of the mentioned domain.
    - Anyway , let us know , Is the rank for a specific country ? is it a competitive niche ? e.g pharma ?
    - For more backlinks , check Alexa
  • edited June 2015
    @gipsykings thanks for the reply, maybe due to the lack of information its difficult to comment, I am sorry. 

    Its country specific rankings, its not US based. The niche is not competitive, definitely not the usual suspects pharma, health, insurance, finance etc etc...

    I'm more interested in learning the process to go about troubleshooting / investigating this so I can build my knowledge as opposed to just getting an answer.

    I checked alexa and I can only see 64 domains in the backlink list (but can't dig deeper into that as i'm on free account).

    What would you check next?
  • royalmiceroyalmice WEBSITE: ---> https://asiavirtualsolutions.com | SKYPE:---> asiavirtualsolutions
    "6K keywords in the top 1-20 positions"

    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.


  • Tim89Tim89 www.expressindexer.solutions
    It's not the amount of backlinks a site has, it's the power these backlinks give.

    When are people going to learn that bigger isn't always better :D
  • Ok @Tim89 just on that point, they have 6 links > 15 (ahrefs rank). With the highest being a ahrefs rank 33 link. I highly doubt these are the droids we are looking for.

    Failing discovering some PBN giving them 1000's of links, I suspect panda's quality rating is one of the most under-rated and under-valued metrics, as I can only conclude its their panda accelerator thats boosting them way above their competition.

    @royalmice yes your assumptions around brand keywords are 100% correct. They are absolutely not targeting one main keyword.
  • edited June 2015
    @turbodonkey

    AR doesn't say anything. It's a pretty shitty metric. Also Panda is just a filter for low quality sites. It filters them out if they're below a certain treshold, but doesn't give great sites a boost. 

    You're either missing hidden backlinks or you're not judging the backlinks well. 
  • @rogerke so who's metric would you recommend re: backlink strength? majestic?
  • edited June 2015
    Your own brain, but it requires a lot of experience.

    PageRank (toolbar) is also still a very useful metric, especially for higher PR (>4-5) domains/pages but you're going to have to guesstimate wether the PR is still correct.

    Another tool which I find better than checking Majestic/Moz/Ahrefs metrics is Semrush. Just enter a domain in there and if it isn't ranking well it's generally penalized/doesn't hold significant link juice- no matter how great these external metrics are. But then again, there are so many factors and nuances involved that the only way to correctly gauge backlinks is by practicing and building experience. 


  • It sounds like tiers to me with the first tier being blocked by spiders so you don't see anything.  That's just my 2 cents
  • @Seo_Gladiator if thats the case, how can I go hunting for this? This is my fear as well, but I dont even have a hint from their current backlinks that this is the case... I dont know where to start digging. 
  • edited July 2015
    turbodonkey   Honestly,  I don't know the answer to that question.  Maybe someone else can chime in as I would like to know as well, but I have never been able to figure it out.  I do tier link building all the time and just about all of my tier1 links built with FCS Networker you can't find on any backlink search software anywhere. Just about all the quality web 2.0 sites block spiders.  I see my tier1 backlink in my site's webmaster tools.  So from my end I love the fact that my sites can't be reversed engineered and nobody can see my backlink strategy.  How ever I analyze competition like you are doing too, and it is a concern when I am analyzing backlink profiles of my completion. Especially when I see 200 links to the domain and they are ranking for something competitive.
  • @Seo_Gladiator surely there are PBN buster tools out there? If Google knows about them in GWT then for sure they are there in the public index somewhere... Can you not go hunting using a google search with inurl: operator?

    PS. I did try but failed, perhaps that was too easy...
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited July 2015
    Is this a UK niche? it sounds like mine lol.

    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.
  • @spunko2010 relax its not in the UK, and I'm not looking to out anyone, I'm looking to understand. I'm not entirely convinced that theres a PBN going on for these guys, as they aren't too big of company, so I'm driven by trying to understand how they are ranking, and yes that would absolutely drive how I could use this learning to assist my sites.

    I love the idea of switching the user-agent, because there are many backlinks that go no where in their ahrefs profile, so perhaps this is key, I'll give it a go in the next 24hrs.

    The problem I have is that I don't know the T1/T2 links. I suspect that they are there, but I have no way of finding them out via ahrefs/majestic/opensite explorer.
  • edited July 2015
    There are many more backlink checkers out there. Try out some smaller (free) ones from this list: http://linksphinx.com/backlink-checker-tools/

    Generally their crawlers and DB suck, but at least most people forgot to block them. In fact, I've yet to find a site which blocks all of these, but then again, if they did I wouldn't be able find them lol. 
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited July 2015
    Try using Google... Copy and paste one of the subpage URLs for their site and put it in quotes " " then it'll show up the links, if they exist. Doesn't always work. Once you find one though, you'll be able to find loads.

    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.
  • @Tim89, if this site had dmoz.org and wikipedia.org links and other competitors not, could this be the case? I find it hard to believe that just 2-3 links like this would equate to such a massive buff in all their keywords?
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    ^ DMOZ is useless now. Don't know if that correlates with anyone else's findings, I've tested it quite a lot, think about it though, t why would Google give much weight to something that is basically a relic from 20 years ago?
  • He must have done amazing on page work which you cannot see any SEO tools which we use to check any website's off page SEO efforts, like backlinks etc.
  • spikedealerspikedealer United States
    Maybe the reason that website had 1.5 backlinks and 6k keywords ranked on top 20 position is the on-page work. One of the key points in having a great on-page to your website is no other than high quality content and proper keyword placement and limits. Maybe the owner of that website had truly done his homework before executing the plan. It may not be easy as it seems, but it's all worth it in the end.
  • What is the domain authority like. I seen domain rank with 0 backlinks but high domain authority
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