Why Does This Website Rank?

[mwoody]

Hi,

I was looking over some mobile phone deals today and after search for Blackberry Torch Deals in Google UK I came across this site - http://www.phoneslimited.co.uk/Blackberry/9800+Torch.html

When I hit the page I was amazed it was ranking #1 because it literally just lists affiliate link after affiliate link.

The page has next to no unique content and keyword density is non existent.

In fact, the whole on page seo is just whack.

So why does it rank so well?  The site seems to rank well for a variety of similar keywords?

I think we could learn a lot breaking it down

[sferrino]

Because of the 5,937 incoming links compared to the 6 the next highest link has.

[Cyle]

Being able to do a competitive analysis is absolutely crucial for a SEO, so with that said I rather point you in the right direction and let you dig into it than just give you some answers.  Post back what you find and we will give you feedback on your findings.

When doing a competitive analysis you want to look at two things off page SEO and on page SEO you will want to know all the big ranking factors for them both.  I personally like to start with analyzing off page first because in my experience this is the biggest contributor to high rankings.  Use SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool to analyze the results for the phrase and start digging into it.  Here is a link to the keyword difficulty tool with your search phrase in it.  I know this is probably not the answer you want, but I feel like this will benefit you more in the long run than just a quick answer.

http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty/google.co.uk/results!Blackberry Torch Deals

[SteveOllington]

Yeah not counting the links to the domain, the page alone has many from articles, PR sites, and they've done social media stuff for it as ping.fm is in the list. Again that's link building having been done for the individual product page, then of course you get all the backlinks to the domain itself, i.e. the homepage which passes link juice internally.

The question should be more like, why wouldn't they rank?!

[sferrino]

Ya, the back-links are a little excessive, wonder who they are really competing against. Without spending time on it I'm betting there is another competitor that is also doing a massive back-linking campaign.

As Cyle stated, look at the different tools SEOmoz offers to do a full analysis of it if you plan to compete.

[mwoody]

A lot of those links are internal, but theres still quite a lot coming from article diredctories and press release sites.

I was just amazed to see a site like that surviving panda when its just reams of ads.

[mwoody]

Just looking at this again.

They have their blog setup at http://blog.phoneslimited.co.uk instead of phoneslimited.co.uk/blog.

Why would they do that?  It seems the blog posts do a lot of internal linking for the main site but i thought this was discouraged?

[jmueller]

There are a lot of different reasons why they chose this way to place the blog (software, hosting-limits, easiest out-of-the-box setup, etc..) It does not do too much "damage" though. Having a sub-folder is the best-practise but using sub-domain is the second best. It would be "harmful" if they used another domain, which is not the case.