SEO Mystery: How Another Niche Website Outranked Me?!

by Galyna on December 16, 2011

Today I discovered that one website that was below me in SERPs today is on #2 and it happened pretty fast because I checked rankings just recently and it was on a second page then.

So I started to dig how exactly this website is promoting itself and what exactly it did to outrank other websites.

Particularly what is it’s backlinking profile. Website had thousands of backlinks!!
Next question is WHAT KIND OF BACKLINKS they are? This way I would be able to determine how this guy is doing his SEO so I can learn from him.

I was surprised to see that most of those backlinks came from other niche websites. All PR1 an PR0 (that’s why he needed SO MUCH LINKS. I’d say 50-100 of PR3 and higher would be more than enough.)

Next I was keen to determine where he gets all those backlinks? As I’ve heard, – Google intend not to give value (or even penalize) websites that have backlinks all coming from the same IPs. But his backlinks were coming from 300 different IPs!

Another thing I was surprised to discover is that all websites that point their links to the given niche website are coming from webpages with weird looking structure. At least they look weird to me, I’ve never seen anything like that before. Check out the screenshot below.
See “tags” and then link? Those are not tags as you used to see them. Those are links to the niche websites like the one I’m solving the mystery about.

SEO Mystery

Ok. My guess it’s a blog network. I can’t tell what blog network but that’s my thought.
My first guess was that the guy has many niche blogs on different class IP addresses and he uses them to promote other websites.

Now that I wrote it all I don’t know should I even post it… Will they come for me? 🙂

By the way, this is why you should never tell people about your websites that make money.

One month later (UPDATE):

While I was trying to desperately find out what kind of link exchange program the website above was using (and yes, it is now clear to me that it is a 3-way link exchange), a month later I decided to check how that website was doing.

And …. it was NOT on the first page! It was on 5th page. Which in search engines world means – nowhere. I also checked other websites rankings.  Their SERPs plummeted too!

I guess Google finally found out and penalized such websites that were using shady tactics.

Conclusion: don’t participate in link exchange programs! Even 3-way links. If there is a blueprint exist, – Galyna might not find out but Google certainly will. It’s just a question of time. Don’t waist your efforts!

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 boync 02.06.12 at 5:50 am

hi??

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