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Looks like a pretty spammy site. Sometimes a spam site can rank for a time using black hat tactics, but is eventually discovered and taken down. Rankings also can fluctuate naturally for many reasons-- SEOs usually see a "honeymoon period" for new pages, where they rank really highly when they are first published, before dropping in rankings after Google sees how the page performs in the SERPs.

It likely means the page that the link was discovered on is now redirecting to another page. For example, a few of the links in your screenshot are from Google+, which no longer exists (all pages now redirect to a shutdown notice).

Don't see how it would impact rankings one way or the other... the amount of traffic a website gets isn't a ranking factor.

It does sound like a shady service though. People use services like these to increase the views on their ads (CPM) to defraud their advertisers or increase the view count of YouTube videos which can impact YouTube SEO.

Unless you're seeing a high volume of spammy links, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Every site is going to accumulate spammy links over time. It's just when there is a lot of them that they can lead to your site being negatively impacted. Unless you believe you're being penalized, I would leave it alone for now.

Lots of people speculate that website usability impacts search rank, but this hasn't been conclusively been proven. Improving your website experience is great for conversions and something you should definitely work to improve, but if you want to improve search ranking it's still important to focus on content & links.

In my experience, links take precedence over content. Mediocre content on a high domain authority site is going to outrank excellent content on a site with no links or poor links.

This is a completely separate issue than Penguin, which is an algorithm that mainly penalizes sites that are actively trying to manipulate rankings with poor links.

The definition of cloaking according to Google is "the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines." For that reason, there is some risk in showing Google a different page than what is being shown to your users in the test. Displaying different content based on user-agent is a red-flag to Google.

That being said, cloaking penalties are "manual actions", meaning they are manually applied by human reviewers on Google's team, so unless you are purposely trying to be deceptive, the risk of being penalized is low. Additionally, you can request reviews of manual actions via Google Search Console to appeal any penalties.

Another approach could be to use server-side redirects for the test, using 302 redirects and redirecting users bucketed into the test to a separate URL. The 302 redirect indicates to Google that this is a temporary change, and that they should retain the original page in their index. You can further reinforce this by adding a canonical tag to the test page and pointing it to the original version of the page.

Finally, for high priority SEO pages you may also consider using a client-side A/B test. Client-side A/B testing uses Javascript to dynamically change the content on the page, and is typically not indexed by Google.

Very cool analysis! In the past I've found it interesting to see how people have gotten to the top of the leaderboard, whether it's blog posts, thumb ups, or answers in the Q&A section.

I tend to focus my time & effort more on the links that we can obtain, rather than trying to analyze the value of a link a competitor has. It's impossible to tell whether hidden links or other black hat tactics are propping up a competitor's ranking, but historically speaking, sites like that eventually get penalized (even if it takes Google a few months or years to wise up).

I look at competitor backlinks sometimes to see if there are any tactics they are using that might be useful for my own sites, or other link opportunities, but aside from the occasional competitor analysis, it's a better use of my time to develop new link building campaigns for our site.

Thanks Malika! Our site does have high domain authority, and in general we tend to outrank our competitor and show up in the answer box, but for one specific query our competitor's site stubbornly continues to show up in the answer box above us.

I've updated the content quite a bit, but so far haven't seen any results. You mentioned backlinks-- do you have any instances where a page wasn't showing up in the answer box, and you were able to get it to show up solely through backlinking?

Thanks! Do you have any examples where you were able to show up in the box just by building more backlinks?

You shouldn't use the nofollow tag property for internal links. Doing so used to preserve your PageRank, but it was changed a few years ago so that links with nofollow just result in link juice evaporation.

But to answer your original question, the nofollow tags should have no impact on your blog. But do yourself a favor and remove the nofollow tags.

Anyone have any luck in optimizing your site to show up in the Google Answer Boxes that popup for informational queries? (for example: "what is seo?")

I've read many of the articles that have been written on the subject, and have been able to show up for many queries by a) ranking high organically, b) placing the question at the top of the page, and then answering it succinctly.

However, for one term a competitor continues to show up in the answer box instead of us, despite their site ranking lower organically in the search results.

Anyone have any experience/advice for replacing a competitor in the Answer Box? Thanks!

1. I would go with example.com/ca/. example.com/en-ca/ is longer and more difficult to type. A subdomain ca.example.com would not inherit the domain authority of your current site.

2. I would keep the original example.com. Moving urls results in a small loss of link equity, even with a 301 redirect, so I would avoid moving urls if at all possible.

If you have the resources, creating unique content around those product keywords can help you win. Re-sellers of products often just use the default manufacturer description, so if you can create unique content for your site you can stand out from the site. Adding additional content like product reviews, FAQs, instructions, etc. can also help with your rankings as well.

When evaluating competition, I would step outside of SEMRush and actually take a look at the pages that are outranking you. Do they have higher domain authority than you? Do they have more backlinks? Do they have more content? If you think you can do better on those metrics, then you have a shot.

Correct except for the nofollows. You almost never want to use nofollow links pointing to your own site. And try to put as much of the content you have on your product pages onto the category page.

The Open Site Explorer index is only updated once every few weeks, so newer links won't appear in it for a while. In terms of backlink analysis, honestly MajesticSEO and AHREFs provide a lot more data than OSE.

How are you implementing the password protection? What website is it for? It's hard to say anything without knowing the specifics.

If you are going to have the exact same content on all domains, stick with the .com and 301 redirect the rest of the domains to the main domain.

If you are willing to invest in different content for each domain, then you should have no problem. Just be sure to put the hreflang tags in the header of all the sites, so Google knows that they are related:

If this is an existing site, I would not change the URL structure just to include some keywords in there. The benefits of having a few keywords in the URL are outweighed by the risks. Even for a new site, shorter is typically better, like you said.

If you have a really large site with distinct categories, then having subdirectories makes sense. I would use dashes instead of underscores:

• evananas.com/organic-bananas/recipes
• evananas.com/non-organic-bananas/recipes
• evananas.com/plantains/recipes

Otherwise, just include the keywords in the page itself rather than creating a subdirectory just so your can have keywords in there:

• evananas.com/organic-banana-recipes
• evananas.com/organic-banana-benefits