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According to Traffic Travis one of my competitors websites is ranking #1 usually and always in the top 10 on page 1. However also according to TT they have Page Rank of 0, Page Authority of 1.00, BL 0, BLS 0, EDU/GOV 0, DMZ is X'ed, so he isn't optimized properly for that, but Title, Desc and H1Tag are checked so he is optimized for that.

And his site was just created on September first according to website worth rank dot com which also shows he has 7 inbound links and although he has no other backlinks he does have around 15000 Technorati Backlinks.

Any ideas how he is doing this? Could it be those Technorati Backlinks? If so what are those?
  • Profile picture of the author realseowarrior
    Don't rely on SEOmoz's data. It takes ages to update. Sometimes even more than a couple of months.

    As about the ranking , there are no secret links . Just get good high PR contextual links and you can outrank him/her. AS about timeframe , one month is not less time to rank an easy keyword.
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    • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
      Originally Posted by realseowarrior View Post

      Don't rely on SEOmoz's data. It takes ages to update. Sometimes even more than a couple of months.

      Thanks for the quick reply!

      As about the ranking , there are no secret links . Just get good high PR contextual links and you can outrank him/her. AS about timeframe , one month is not less time to rank an easy keyword.
      By SEOmoz do you mean the Traffic Travis data? How would I get some good high PR contextual links? What is a contextual link? LOL As for the time frame and keyword, its not really an "easy" keyword per se.

      Well I don't know you tell me About 1,040,000 results in quotes, I don't think that is too easy. The thing that attracted me to it was seeing how badly other sites were optimized and were still ranking, even over high authority sites and sites with hundreds, thousands and even millions of back links.

      Any ideas?
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

        Well I don't know you tell me About 1,040,000 results in quotes,

        The number of results in the index has NOTHING at all to do with the level of competition. Nothing.
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        • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
          Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

          The number of results in the index has NOTHING at all to do with the level of competition. Nothing.
          I thought it did according to everything I have been learning about keyword research. Can you explain further? Thanks again.
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          • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
            Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

            I thought it did according to everything I have been learning about keyword research. Can you explain further? Thanks again.
            Ok. Purple elephants with big pink balls shows 1.5 million results in the Google index.

            Do you think that many people are trying to rank for that term?

            If you want to use quotes, "norm is a god" has 471,000 results. Are 471,000 websites really trying to rank for such a stupid phrase?

            No.

            Whoever you are learning about keyword research from clearly has no idea what they are doing. I would stop listening to them.
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            • Profile picture of the author realseowarrior
              Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

              Ok. Purple elephants with big pink balls shows 1.5 million results in the Google index.

              Do you think that many people are trying to rank for that term?

              If you want to use quotes, "norm is a god" has 471,000 results. Are 471,000 websites really trying to rank for such a stupid phrase?

              No.

              Whoever you are learning about keyword research from clearly has no idea what they are doing. I would stop listening to them.
              Exactly!! Check this out on google "he went out" . 207,000,000 results. Must be an extremely competitive keyword right?? You are being mislead my friend.
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              • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
                Originally Posted by realseowarrior View Post

                Exactly!! Check this out on google "he went out" . 207,000,000 results. Must be an extremely competitive keyword right?? You are being mislead my friend.
                Maybe I wasn't clear, sorry about that. I didn't mean that because it was a high number something is good competition. I meant that when doing keyword research when you find what you think is a good keyword using the Google keyword tool then you search that term in Google with quotes and the lower the number for the competition on that the better. Of course that is not all there is to keyword research but am I doing that aspect of it correctly?
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      • Profile picture of the author realseowarrior
        Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

        By SEOmoz do you mean the Traffic Travis data?
        Page authority is an SEOmoz metric. Now i guess if TT extracts it from OSE then backlinks too. Anyways each software gives different data. SEOmoz is slowest of them all. IF you really need to check recent backlinks go to majesticseo or ahrefs.

        How would I get some good high PR contextual links? What is a contextual link?
        DO guest posting on high Pagerank blogs. Or get your own high pagerank domains. A contextual link is a link surrounded by content unlike blog comments , forum profiles.

        LOL As for the time frame and keyword, its not really an "easy" keyword per se.

        Well I don't know you tell me About 1,040,000 results in quotes, I don't think that is too easy.
        Well the statements like those make me laugh. I pity those who judge the conpetition by results in quotes. You have my lol for that [/quote]

        The thing that attracted me to it was seeing how badly other sites were optimized and were still ranking, even over high authority sites and sites with hundreds, thousands and even millions of back links.
        High chances that they wont last for long then although their are many other posibilities too.
        Any ideas?[/QUOTE]
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        • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
          Originally Posted by realseowarrior View Post

          Page authority is an SEOmoz metric. Now i guess if TT extracts it from OSE then backlinks too. Anyways each software gives different data. SEOmoz is slowest of them all. IF you really need to check recent backlinks go to majesticseo or ahrefs.



          DO guest posting on high Pagerank blogs. Or get your own high pagerank domains. A contextual link is a link surrounded by content unlike blog comments , forum profiles.



          Well the statements like those make me laugh. I pity those who judge the conpetition by results in quotes. You have my lol for that


          High chances that they wont last for long then although their are many other posibilities too.
          Any ideas?[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

          Cool. Great suggestions. I checked majesticseo or ahrefs and oh yeah he is definitely backlinking.

          I am interested in how you judge competition because the quotation method is the main one I know. I am very interested in learning better more accurate methods if you are willing to share. Thanks in advance.
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          • Profile picture of the author realseowarrior
            I am interested in how you judge competition because the quotation method is the main one I know. I am very interested in learning better more accurate methods if you are willing to share. Thanks in advance.
            To you and all the other people who are asking a question first time i would like to tell you that warriorforum is a huge pool of information (though more garbage) you just need to search it out. If you are gonna ask something there are high chances that it has already been asked more than once here on WF. SO just search..

            If you don't know how to search , i will tell you . As in this case for op:

            go to google and hit this: site:warriorforum.com how to judge keyword competition
            Read all the info , there is lots of it.
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            • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
              Originally Posted by realseowarrior View Post

              To you and all the other people who are asking a question first time i would like to tell you that warriorforum is a huge pool of information (though more garbage) you just need to search it out. If you are gonna ask something there are high chances that it has already been asked more than once here on WF. SO just search..

              If you don't know how to search , i will tell you . As in this case for op:

              go to google and hit this: site:warriorforum.com how to judge keyword competition
              Read all the info , there is lots of it.
              I agree and I always search first. I was just wondering your personal method of judging competition.
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              • Profile picture of the author realseowarrior
                Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

                I agree and I always search first. I was just wondering your personal method of judging competition.
                There are tons of ways. I for one check the top 10 pages for the keyword i want to check the competition for and i look for:

                1) Their pageranks: Tell me if hey have enough backlinks
                2) If majority of those 10 are pages from yellowpages or the liks (tells me low competiton, they are poorly optimized)
                3)If i have time i make a thorough backlink analysis. How many High Pr links, what anchors etc (If you keyword is important enough this work is worth it)

                Their may be other methods too but those three things give me a good feel of the competition.
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                • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
                  Originally Posted by realseowarrior View Post

                  There are tons of ways. I for one check the top 10 pages for the keyword i want to check the competition for and i look for:

                  1) Their pageranks: Tell me if hey have enough backlinks
                  2) If majority of those 10 are pages from yellowpages or the liks (tells me low competiton, they are poorly optimized)
                  3)If i have time i make a thorough backlink analysis. How many High Pr links, what anchors etc (If you keyword is important enough this work is worth it)

                  Their may be other methods too but those three things give me a good feel of the competition.
                  Thanks very much. Do you just use the tools mentioned in this thread for all of that?
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

    According to Traffic Travis one of my competitors websites is ranking #1 usually and always in the top 10 on page 1. However also according to TT they have Page Rank of 0, Page Authority of 1.00, BL 0, BLS 0, EDU/GOV 0, DMZ is X'ed, so he isn't optimized properly for that, but Title, Desc and H1Tag are checked so he is optimized for that.

    And his site was just created on September first according to website worth rank dot com which also shows he has 7 inbound links and although he has no other backlinks he does have around 15000 Technorati Backlinks.

    Any ideas how he is doing this? Could it be those Technorati Backlinks? If so what are those?

    A couple of things.

    First of all, EDU/GOV backlinks are a stupid metric to even look at. They carry no special rating. PR of the page is pretty worthless to look at too.

    Also, no backlink checker is going to find all of a site's backlink. Most only find a small percentage. I would check a couple of different backlink checkers to get more accurate information. Run it through SpyGlass, OSE, and Ahrefs.

    Another thing to consider is that internal links are very powerful, but really are not counted by backlink checkers.

    Lastly, ranking is all relative to the competition. Although he may not be doing much to try to rank for the given keyword, his competitors may not be either.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Everything Mike said above.

    On those internal links since they don't get counted by any SEO tools they could be pumping up the authority on a ranked page (internal supporting pages). Ranking pages with internal pages is an easy way to mess with a competitions mind (lol).

    That's how I get double/triple SERP rankings from pages on the same domain for a single keyword, pump up 1 page with links, then piggyback off that page to help rank the other 1-2 pages for the same keyword. The main reason it works is Google is a freak about relevancy, which is the whole point of the SERPs to begin with.
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    • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      Everything Mike said above.

      On those internal links since they don't get counted by any SEO tools they could be pumping up the authority on a ranked page (internal supporting pages). Ranking pages with internal pages is an easy way to mess with a competitions mind (lol).

      That's how I get double/triple SERP rankings from pages on the same domain for a single keyword, pump up 1 page with links, then piggyback off that page to help rank the other 1-2 pages for the same keyword. The main reason it works is Google is a freak about relevancy, which is the whole point of the SERPs to begin with.
      Wow that's cool! Thanks! I am really new to this can you explain that process step by step if you don't mind? If not now just when ever you have some time. Thanks again!
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  • Profile picture of the author starfall
    I have always been puzzled by this and why some seemingly unrelevant pages appear in top results. I heard about many sites which went to top results only because their authors created REAL value with no backlink building.
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  • Profile picture of the author Suir1980
    Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

    However also according to TT they have Page Rank of 0, Page Authority of 1.00, BL 0, BLS 0, EDU/GOV 0,
    On every single one of my sites, I block robots like Majestic, OSE, Ahrefs, etc. via .htaccess so my sites all have 0s, too. I do it to prevent competitors from spying on my sites (like what the OP is doing). Don't believe all those 1s and 0s because he could be blocking robots/spiders, too.
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    • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
      Originally Posted by Suir1980 View Post

      On every single one of my sites, I block robots like Majestic, OSE, Ahrefs, etc. via .htaccess so my sites all have 0s, too. I do it to prevent competitors from spying on my sites (like what the OP is doing). Don't believe all those 1s and 0s because he could be blocking robots/spiders, too.
      But if you block robots and spiders then doesn't that prevent Googles spiders from crawling and hurt where you rank on the page?
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

        But if you block robots and spiders then doesn't that prevent Googles spiders from crawling and hurt where you rank on the page?
        No, because you can block individual bots/spiders, you don't have to block Google. Google could care less about other sites that are collecting their own data for SEO.

        Anyone can have a bot/spider, it's the servers, bandwidth, maintenance, etc... that get expensive.
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        • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          No, because you can block individual bots/spiders, you don't have to block Google. Google could care less about other sites that are collecting their own data for SEO.

          Anyone can have a bot/spider, it's the servers, bandwidth, maintenance, etc... that get expensive.
          Ah so you just block those specific robots. Cool idea. Any chance I can get a bit of instruction on how to do that? Total noob here. Thanks.
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      • Profile picture of the author Suir1980
        Originally Posted by Blackman75 View Post

        But if you block robots and spiders then doesn't that prevent Googles spiders from crawling and hurt where you rank on the page?
        No, I block everything else except the Googlebots. I have 176 entries on my .htaccess. I tried doing it via robots.txt before but I noticed that some bad robots were ignoring it. With .htaccess, they can no longer ignore this. The hardest to block is SpyGlass since they don't ahve a static bot name but you can block them via IP (although it also changes every now and then).
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        • Profile picture of the author Blackman75
          Originally Posted by Suir1980 View Post

          No, I block everything else except the Googlebots. I have 176 entries on my .htaccess. I tried doing it via robots.txt before but I noticed that some bad robots were ignoring it. With .htaccess, they can no longer ignore this. The hardest to block is SpyGlass since they don't ahve a static bot name but you can block them via IP (although it also changes every now and then).
          Can you provide your list? I can PM you with my email. Also if I add duplicate entries will it cause a problem? I have added some but would like to be more protected. Thanks in advance.
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