Someone knocked me out of #1 at Google!

by marblespc3

Posted: 14 years ago 18 replies

I had the top organic listing at Google for "marbles forum" but I just found a newbie on the scene took it! They are "m arbleforum.blogspot.com" (I embedded that space there in case the owner uses Google Alert)

This looks a lot like the niche blogs for sale here. Is that what it is? They took my top spot for "marbles forum" and bumped me to #2!! (I'm guessing with their URL, there isn't a lot I can do?)

How about changing my URL to www://marbleforum.landofmarbles.com, would that help? Or is it best not to change the URL of my forum? (Doing so would render countless links to the forum dead in the water?)

Can anyone share thoughts here? What would you do? (I've been at this 12 years and only relatively recently landed the top spot for marbles and many related keywords like marbles game, marble game, how to play marbles, game of marbles, marble rules, game marbles and (no longer) marbles forum, so it's especially upsetting this newbie knocked me down. It's their domain name isn't it? Can I hope to compete with a site that has my targeted keyword phrase in their URL?)

#google #knocked

Mark Blaze 14 years ago

It's simply because they used a blogspot blog to do it!

Just simply go and get some more backlinks or eve go and make a blogger blog yourself and then you can get backlinks to that to keep the traffic coming in for now and keep him down below you.

DO NOT CHANGE YOUR URL!

Mark Blaze
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- Elle Holder 14 years ago
  
  Anyone can beat anybody out of a Google ranking. All it takes it a little work.
  
  No one owns their spot on Google.
  
  If this site beat yours, it simply means that Google feels it's better than yours--at least for now. How is their on page SEO? How is yours? Do they have high quality back links? Do you?
  
  There are lots of reasons they could have beat you, and changing your URL isn't going to change that. Not necessarily. You need to do your research. Study their site, their back links, and everything you can. Then do yours better. If not, this will just keep happening.
  
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  seobro 14 years ago
  
  I have the same problem where one of my forums is stuck at number two on Google. However, this blogspot blog is beating you on Yahoo, so that is not good. Try to get more links. Also, you can do something sneaky. Get an adwords ad for "Marble Forum" and see the exact number of people that are coming to your site from that keyword.
  
  Perhaps many are hitting that back key and you have a high bounce rate. There has to be a reason.
  
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  Liam Hamer 14 years ago
  
  It's hard to advise you on what to do as you haven't really mentioned what you're doing already. Instead of being worried about another site beating you into second place, you should see this as a little challenge - a challenge you will be up to.
  
  Use the free suite of tools at The Most Effective SEO Software - SEO PowerSuite Tools to help you improve your on and off page SEO. Have you done any of the following in terms of off page SEO?
  
  Press releases
  Blog commenting
  Social bookmarking
  Rewrite/spin articles and submit to many directories
  Profile backlinks
  
  Forget about the other site - if you do things the right way(i.e good onpage SEO, quality/varied links around the web) then you'll get the number 1 spot back. Good luck
  
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Mark Blaze

14 years ago

Originally Posted by ElleJ

Anyone can beat anybody out of a Google ranking. All it takes it a little work.

No one owns their spot on Google.

If this site beat yours, it simply means that Google feels it's better than yours--at least for now. How is their on page SEO? How is yours? Do they have high quality back links? Do you?

There are lots of reasons they could have beat you, and changing your URL isn't going to change that. Not necessarily. You need to do your research. Study their site, their back links, and everything you can. Then do yours better. If not, this will just keep happening.

That's not entirely true!

If you actually looked and checked then the main reason they rank higher is because of the authority of the blogger blog they are using, other than that they have about 100 more backlinks to the exact page!

All you need to do is get about 100+ backlinks to the www.landofmarbles.com/phpbb/index.php url and then you should be back on the top!

Good luck

Mark Blaze

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digitalstar 14 years ago

Any one can occupy first position any time.. To keep your website on first place start building more relevant backlinks regularly. Use blogposts, article submissions, profile creations,.. etc for building your backlinks.
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SuzanneH 14 years ago

And don't forget, if somebody is looking for marble forums, that first link is not necessarily going to give them what they're looking for. There's no forum there. They'll then go to the next link (yours).

One thing I would do is make sure that "marbles forum" is in my title tag, which you don't have. Your title is : "LandOfmarbles.com Community Forums - Powered by vBulletin." I don't know if that title tag is helping you in any other way, so, of course, you know best whether the title tag should be changed or not. Just an observation...

Suzanne
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Michi Kono 14 years ago

If you want to beat your competitor, you need to study them first... so I did quick research for you (as i couldn't help myself looking into it...) and this is what i found:

Your competitor (marbleforum.blogxxxx.com) has 171 backlinks to their home page at this stage and they are consist of:

Total Backlinks:

03 backlinks from PR3 sites
08 backlinks from PR2 sites
10 backlinks from PR1 sites
150 backlinks from PR0 sites

Anchor Texts (Marble forum):

4 backlinks from PR3
7 backlinks from PR2
13 backlinks from PR1
131 backlinks from PR0

As you can see, it's obvious that your competitor is almost solely targeting the keyphrase "marble forum".
Also their site is well onsite-optimized for "marble forum"...

So if i were in your shoe, this is what i would do to win the top position back:

Onsite optimization:

1. Add "Marble Forum" in the current website title, preferably right at the beginning.
i.e. Marble Forum | LandOfmarbles.com Community Forums...

2. Add "Marble Forum" in the current meta-description.

3. Add "Marble Forum" to the home page (the header title section - use H1 or H2 tag if you can).

4. if you can, mention "marble forum" just few times somewhere in the content and perhaps in the footer section (bold) while not compromising the readability (you need to take care of human readers first).

Offsite optimization:

You currently have about 120+ backlinks to your home page and quite a few backlinkas are coming from PR1-4 so that's good.
But the problem I see is you hardly have any anchor text links using "Marble Forum".
So I'd suggest you to focus on building more backlinks (for both quantity and quality) using "marble forum" as an anchor text.

Of course i cannot guarantee but I think you will get back to the top if you can do the things mentioned above.

Hope it'll help.

P.S. You don't need to be No. 1 to get good traffic. Sitting on No.2 is pretty good as well and since your site is well established forum, i don't think you would loose much traffic.
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tjcocker 14 years ago

Originally Posted by marblespc3

(I've been at this 12 years and only relatively recently landed the top spot for marbles and many related keywords...)

Wow. Well clearly you weren't very serious, so why do you care all of the sudden? Start learning or go back to waiting a decade to get your ranking back.

:p
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- marblespc3 14 years ago
  
  I've bought into the belief that landing the top spot was a near impossibility, then voila! I found myself there. I've been through 2 SEO companies; SEO Matrix and FoundEffect and felt jerked around by both. I use Miva shopping cart, and I don't think either SEO company had experience with it, but they both said they did. SEO Matrix wrote me an article which it said would be published on the net, and I never found it anywhere but on my desktop. I would really like to hire a reliable company, but I have no idea how to separate the scammers from the good guys.
  
  Can any of you reccomend anyone? As I've mentioned, I work a full-time job so my time is at a premium. (I'm about to leave for the day now). There simply has not been enough of me to spread around.
  
  Lian said "It's hard to advise you on what to do as you haven't really mentioned what you're doing already."
  
  I assume you mean in the way of SEO. I read recently to register my domain long-term, so I registered it 10 years. I've trade links with related sites only for some time. I use Google Alert to note the site's linking to me. Every day there is a few more, but they are linking to my home page, which I guess is what I want. The forum is kind of a "left-over" from my "doing-this-as-a-hobby" days. Since migrating to Miva, the focus has been more on sales, but the forum is so popular with collectors I can't take it down - and I don't think I'd want to.
  
  I did some optimizing at a specific page everyone was linking to, "How to Play Marbles," sprinkling keywords throughout - that page ranks great.
  
  Also, when I migrated to Miva, I bought a mod or two that was for SEO, but personally I never used them. When I hired SEO companies, I wanted them to use it, but I'm not certain that they did.
  
  Bottom Line, don't think I'm not trying to stay on top of things, but it is hard as I work full time for FDA, and operate MegaGlass.com, LandOfMarbles.com and MushroomVillage.com and am always working on more. I have 2 other domains I bought to develop, and I just can't even get to them. I'm entirely self-taught also, you guys would run circles around me. I gotta go to work, but when I can I will go through this thread more carefully and implement things that were suggested.
  
  Maybe I don't have so much to worry about though - I've only lost the #1 slot for "marbles forum," I still appear to be the undisputed king of Marbles But I'd like to stay there, and this newbie is looking pretty polished so I worry.
  
  Thanks
  
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jasonmorgan

14 years ago

Can any of you reccomend anyone? As I've mentioned, I work a full-time job so my time is at a premium. (I'm about to leave for the day now). There simply has not been enough of me to spread around.

I would recommend you look into what Terry Kyle and Tom Goodwin are offering. They can also set you up with an outsourcer if you need it.

You'll get the advice and backlinks you need for under $200.

Look 'em up in the WSO section.

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Fini shell 14 years ago

You simply place it as advertisment at the bottom
Write topic
then description and then give your link and landing page should be appropriate to that content. That's all you win the race against Google
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- marblespc3 14 years ago
  
  Does the fact that they are a blogspot blog confer link juice to them? Their PageRank is 2, but blogger.com (which blogspot.com forwards to) has an 8. LandOfMarbles.com has a 4, the LOM forum is a 3.
  
  Mark said "Just simply go and get some more backlinks or eve go and make a blogger blog yourself and then you can get backlinks to that"
  
  I plan to Blog with vBulletin 4 Publishing Suite which is being installed as we speak. Will a Blogger/Blogspot Blog confer greater link juice than software hosted on my own server?
  
  "SEOBro" said "Get an adwords ad for "Marble Forum" and see the exact number of people that are coming to your site from that keyword." I did just add an AdGroup targeting "marble forum" and "marbles forum" and will monitor that...
  
  Liam said "Use the free suite of tools at The Most Effective SEO Software - SEO PowerSuite Tools."
  
  Liam also asked if I have tried any of the following:
  
  Press releases - SEOMatrix wrote a press release for me, but I never found it anywhere online, despite their saying they would publish it.
  Blog commenting - I'm guessing this is something I will do once I have vB 4
  Social bookmarking - I use "AddThis" to share content at social networks, is this what you mean? vB 4 also has social networking tools
  Rewrite/spin articles and submit to many directories - I've collected marble-related articles in my own archive for years. I can definately rewrite/spin content; how would I submit to directories?
  Profile backlinks - not sure what this is, can someone please explain?
  
  digital star mentioned "profile creations..." Is this related to profile backlinks?
  
  Suzanne said "One thing I would do is make sure that "marbles forum" is in my title tag, which you don't have." Good point. I will contact my developer today about tweaking this.
  
  Michi, thank you very much for putting effort into my little dilemma! Much appreciated and I will digest all you said later today!
  
  tjcocker, I wouldn't say I wasn't serious...I just assumed landing the top spot at Google wasn't worth the effort of trying. I haven't read a lot leading me to believe I had a good shot at it. Then lo and behold I was there (and I wasn't actively trying to be #1 at Google, just my mindset all this time was to become the one-stop source for all things marbles, and I guess I did it). Now that I've been knocked down I think it's only natural to want to regain my place as king of the hill
  
  Fini, you said "You simply place it as advertisment at the bottom." What are you referring to? You went on to say "Write topic then description and then give your link and landing page should be appropriate to that content."
  
  You sound like you are describing the creation of an AdWords ad maybe? Please clear me up? I don't get your meaning...
  
  Thanks all of you very much for your 2 cents. I really appreciate it. I will follow through on all you suggested!!!
  
  -Peter Caparelli
  
  Thanks
  
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Michael Gavre 14 years ago

If it makes you feel better, you are still #1 when I check in Google.

Michael
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valdivz 14 years ago

it was me who did it..
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- Black Hat Cat Banned 14 years ago
  
  No one even searches for "marbles forum".
  
  Whatever you do, don't change your url. It's not necessary. You dropped from 1 to 2, not 1 to 799.
  
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Shevd 14 years ago

If you want to improve your rankings the simple way to do it is to build more backlinks to your website. There is a number of ways to do is such as social bookmarking and article submission.

Hope that helps
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TheRichJerksNet 14 years ago

Do not change your URL ... Build backlinks to your url..

Bookmarks, Post on Web 2.0 Sites, Post Articles and etc ... All its takes is some backlinks and you can have the top spot back.

James
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Someone knocked me out of #1 at Google!

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