How come this site does so well?

[PottyScotty]

Hi Guys,

It's bugging the crap out of me why this site does so well http://www.stagedinburgh.com/ when I look at it's link profile its so weak and terrible plus many links comes from  the sites they own. Somehow the site out ranks many sites for search terms like edinburgh stag party, edinburgh stag do, edinburgh stag weekends.  Am I missing something?  They seem to only have links from 13 domains and they aint great.

What am I missing?

[TomRayner]

Hi Mark

The site-wide links from those domains you mentioned would probably be giving a lot of juice, plus the on-page optimisation is certainly geared to those keywords (perhaps more so).

However, there might be something more to this.  In the robots.txt file, they are disallowing a file called: Disallow: /spiders.txt.  In the spiders.txt file, you've got a list of a whole bunch of web crawlers on the net.

Now, it's a guess, but I'm wondering whether the website is using the .htaccess file to block some crawlers, such as OSE and Majestic, from looking at its link profile.  So there could be a bunch of links that are not being seen.

The thing is, this is all speculation - which is why I always advocate not to spend too much time focusing on competitors.  It's definitely frustrating and sometimes more frustrating than helpful.  Looking at competitors can provide some takeaways and quick wins, but if there are none on display, as in this case, accept defeat and move on.

Not much help I know, but hope it does somewhat.

[DougRoberts]

"Now, it's a guess, but I'm wondering whether the website is using the .htaccess file to block some crawlers, such as OSE and Majestic, from looking at its link profile.  So there could be a bunch of links that are not being seen."

Tom, surely this would only block such crawlers from identifying outbound and internal links from their site - not the inbound ones. OSE is showing the inbound links so it doesn't appear to be blocked. The spiders.txt file is used to help identify bots rather than block them.

Looks like lots of on-page optimisation there! Compare it to this one which has better PA/DA but just look at the on-page:

http://www.chillisauce.co.uk/stag-weekends/edinburgh/

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

This is an odd one for sure, and a really crowded space with a ton of EMDs and PMDs so a lot of noise. But I have a few hunches just after looking around a bit.

1. Their site is visually blazingly fast compared to chillisauce.

2. Their site is one of the few I could find, where the entire domain is hyper-focused on "stag in edinburgh" - and has the benefit of the homepage being the page to rank or match topically for those types of keywords. Whereas chillisause and some others are broader focused in what the site is about - and so architecturally, or linking, perhaps not as easy for Google to rank/credit those types of pages within the site, in this case, and as Doug pointed out perhaps their on-site is not so strong.

3. User metrics could be playing a role - CTR in serps etc. They actually stand out as being the least spammy of most other results, and have a shorter domain name (less spammy looking).

But yeah, there's plenty of anomalies - all exact match anchors for linking, less links, a borderline spammy/keyword-stuffed website. Has this site done well for a really long time?

-Dan

[PottyScotty]

Sorry for slow response kids school holidays have started! Yeah Doug i thought their on-page was well stuffy, almost spammy but some how they still get away with it.

What i have noticed on a few tests we have done in May / June is how quickly I can get a new site to rank for 2 or 3 keywords and stick in a matter of weeks.

Bang goes my theory of building one great website and it's back to building micro sites specific and not have all eggs in one basket.

Tom I know I should not get wound up by it, but when you spend 10 years on a brand / site to be beaten by some crappy sites it's hard to swallow, like anchovies

Dan yeah the site has ranked high for a while, and I see his other sites doing well, I may wake up one day and he gets hit across his network but to date that's not happened and I am not sure he is actually breaking any Google rules.