In one of my niches, every company on the first page usually has between 20k to 80k backlinks and 5k to 30k referring domains. There’s one company I know that’s only been around for about a year and a half, and they have less than 20 backlinks in total. Their site is very basic with little content. How are they often in positions 6 to 8 for super competitive keywords? I’ve thought about technical/on-page SEO, but even in that area, they’re nothing special from what I can tell, and they even have several errors. (The site looks like a WordPress template with about an hour of text changes on it.)
Because there’s more to SEO than just links and authority or whatever you want to call it. Don’t believe those who think that’s all SEO is about. They have no access to Google’s changing algorithms. There are hundreds of factors that affect rank.
How long have they been ranking?
Also, you’re looking at backlink count, not authority. You don’t know how much authority transfers, nor do you know how much each page has.
You don’t know if 50% of those pages have zero organic clicks. You don’t know if those backlinks have been ignored by Google over time or are sitewide.
Ranking is about relevance, authority, CTR, and clicks. Clicks and CTR history are a big part of the puzzle, and sites that have been ranking for a long time are hard to move.
@Donna
I always love your insights on problems and questions posted on this forum. SEO has so many shades of gray that it’s important to have critical thinking, curiosity to learn, and voices of reason and knowledge to point the way.
<3
Two ideas come to mind:
- They have better word-of-mouth marketing, leading to direct website visits, which Google may favor for some reason. (Though it kinda undermines their need to exist, so I don’t know…)
- Google is unpredictable and does what it wants.
Without seeing the domain, here’s my guess:
Cloaked backlinks—this guy is likely getting his juice sent to his domain, or a specific part, secretly through various means. He’s been around for a year and a half and he’s already climbing; that tells me he’s got the money and connections to someone who knows what they’re doing.
It’s a lot like money laundering; you have to clean the cash so the authorities don’t catch on. I mean, you see those ‘we don’t use PBNs, honest!’ backlink sellers you get ads for? You ever wonder where they get the backlinks from? Month after month, client after client?
I’m sure I’ll get in trouble for that one, but those who know, know.
@Rangton
You think by means of something like a 301 redirect? Their existing backlinks are spammy and low quality, and most are those ones that backlink sellers put on your site to be seen.
chatitout said:
@Rangton
You think by means of something like a 301 redirect? Their existing backlinks are spammy and low quality, and most are those ones that backlink sellers put on your site to be seen.
301 redirects are just one tool in the toolbox, my friend, and that isn’t straightforward. Study the history of the internet, how search engines communicate, crawl, and view different protocols and subdomains.
You can believe me or not, but based on what I see daily, Google is not the all-seeing, all-knowing entity we were led to believe.
Keep this in mind—the backlinks you see zeroed out? You typically find those links after they’ve been pointed to the money site for a period of time. Most PBNs juice domains like a heart pumping blood through a circulatory system.
My best advice—look for patterns of behavior. Most people running actual SEO operations and not ‘content… really good content’ have patterns you can quickly spot once you know the rules of the game (how prefixes, subdomains, servers, backlink tiers actually work).
@Rangton
Oh yeah, make sure your antivirus is up-to-date and working. A lot of people running PBNs sometimes booby-trap their source links.
—stares in k.html—
I think the incredible amount of detail you provided will take us some time to digest, so don’t be discouraged if it takes a while for us to come up with an answer.
WriteWandererWes said:
I think the incredible amount of detail you provided will take us some time to digest, so don’t be discouraged if it takes a while for us to come up with an answer.
Yeah, I know it’s very general. I just didn’t want to seem like I’m saying anything bad about them and link them because my whole point is strictly out of curiosity, not about them personally. It’s in the luxury car rental market in South Florida if that’s what you’re looking for.
It isn’t the backlinks. The internal content architecture and having the right keywords as anchor text can help lower authority in a niche. How can you tighten up the keywords and navigation to your key pages?