How did NexTag.com Survive the Algorithm Update?

[Dan-Petrovic]

After going through numerous post-algo update articles I find one price comparison site to have gone though unscratched - NexTag.com

Question: What contributed to their success? Was it sheer domain authority, content quality, unique toolset... or something else?

[MatthewEgan]

The top three gainers from the farmer update was Amazon.com, eHow.com and NexTag.com.

There is a pretty complete article on the visibility changes here from SELand.
http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173

NexTag specifically is a very old property, going back to 1999.  The authority built up from being one of those older properties has to carry a lot of weight.  The majority of the losers from the farmer update are content farms, but where we see eHow survive I'd wager comes from eHow being the origin of many pieces of the content that is being farmed out.

This, to me, relates to Local Search.  Sites like Localeze are the source of much scraped data that other directories use to show addresses, business categories, etc.  So Localeze as the source for this data has authority, where the individual pages that it enters data into does not have that same authority, and protection.

Duplicate content can be tracked to an origin, the time the post was made, the time Google first crawled it, etc.  So in NexTag's case, being the origin for so many things, I'd say it was safe.  NexTag is also very trusted by Google, they have had a Google Shopping relationship for years because Google, and this is just my observation, but Google feels they can trust NexTag's system to deliver a viable product when their links are clicked.

I'd wager also that NexTag had a much better link portfolio than the losers, so those trying to copy the NexTag model were shot down in favor of the original provider.

Again, these are my best guesses based on the data.  Hope it helps.

Cheers,