This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Arvin, who lives in Vancouver, Canada.
“One of our competitors gets a ton of backlinks from irrelevant posts, including forums like apache.org (and many other .edu sites too). After an update like Penguin But why does Google consider it a relevant backlink?”
Ervin, we are a sports loving family.
I currently have 4 kids on 7 teams.
I love the lessons sports teach children.
And one of the big lessons I try to teach my kids is to never blame the referee for a loss.
I have never seen a sporting event where the referee’s call never affected the outcome if one of the teams did better.
This lesson also applies to SEO.
If you know how to play the SEO game, your competitors (or even Google or Bing) shouldn’t be your main concern.
Focusing on your competitors’ SEO instead of improving your own SEO is a frustrating waste of time.
But as an SEO, it’s important to understand the factors that influence each keyword’s ranking.
as everyone knows
Unless you work at Google, you can’t tell why one site ranks higher than another.
You can guess.
You can try to understand the algorithm by running sophisticated mathematical models.
But the bottom line is that you can never know for sure.
In fact, I’m not even sure people who work at Google can clearly explain why one site ranks better than another.
This algorithm is so complex that no one can crack it completely.
How do you know the links are related?
There is no way to know if links created by competitors are counted by Google.
Google knows more than tools can tell you.
None of the many backlink analysis tools on the market today can tell if Google counts your links.
These tools use data gleaned from their own analysis to determine if a link is relevant or harmful.
Your competitors may be spinning their wheels and wasting tons of money buying links that have absolutely no effect on your SEO.
On the other hand, one piece of content or a simple link from a strategic site could be boosting your site’s ranking.
Focus on Competitor Strengths
When you look at the “bad” things your competitors are doing, you may miss the tactics that can get you to the top for keywords you can’t rank for.
Instead of looking at all the things you think they are doing well, look at what they are doing right that you are not doing.
Prospects often come to me screaming that the farce of an “inferior” company ranks above them, but the real reason for the ranking is usually perceived fraud and has nothing to do with
But usually finding the real reason, or at least what I think is the real reason, reveals techniques that should double this lead.
Competitors may have stronger content on a particular subject.
Your competitors may be using technical SEO techniques better than you.
It could be a thousand things.
Bottom Line – When doing competitive analysis, focus on discovering what your competitors are doing better than you.
Instead of focusing on how your client is cheating, look for techniques you can fix for your own use.
Especially if you have no intention of cheating yourself.
And I advise against doing so.
Other resources:
ask SEO is a weekly SEO advice column written by the industry’s top SEO experts, curated by Search Engine Journal. Have a question about SEO? Please fill out the form. You may find the answer in the next #AskanSEO post!
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