Struggling to understand certain website strategies

[stealyourheart]

Hello BWH Community

I have been trying to understand how a certain website operates its traffic. All the conventional white hat seo strategies that I've learned, somehow do not apply to this site and I cant wrap my head around it. They have no real content, dont make use of <h> hierarchy and still manage to pull insane amounts of traffic. Lastly I have been pondering all this time what the hell is going on and wanted to see if someone with a wider knowledge can ease my curiosity. My guess is that they are using some kind of black hat seo strategie, that I can not see with "regular" tools such as Ahrefs, Sistrix, ScreamingFrog and so on. The website in question is the following: 24vapestore.de.

They have a sister site which has even more traffic with the same "nonexistent" content: elfbargermany.de

I would appreciate any contribution and help on this personal matter of mine. I just wanna know what I'm missing here...

Best regards
SYH

 

[barozrexha]

Hello BWH Community

I have been trying to understand how a certain website operates its traffic. All the conventional white hat seo strategies that I've learned, somehow do not apply to this site and I cant wrap my head around it. They have no real content, dont make use of <h> hierarchy and still manage to pull insane amounts of traffic. Lastly I have been pondering all this time what the hell is going on and wanted to see if someone with a wider knowledge can ease my curiosity. My guess is that they are using some kind of black hat seo strategie, that I can not see with "regular" tools such as Ahrefs, Sistrix, ScreamingFrog and so on. The website in question is the following: 24vapestore.de.

They have a sister site which has even more traffic with the same "nonexistent" content: elfbargermany.de

I would appreciate any contribution and help on this personal matter of mine. I just wanna know what I'm missing here...

Best regards
SYH

Hey SYH,
I had a quick look at both sites, and I get what you mean, their traffic seems way out of proportion for the lack of solid SEO structure or content.
From what I can tell, it might be stuff like programmatic SEO, cloaking, or shady backlinking, but honestly, I’m not 100% sure. This feels like something beyond what basic tools like Ahrefs or ScreamingFrog can show clearly.

Someone more experienced with black-hat tactics or advanced SEO auditing would probably be able to dig deeper here. I’m curious too now, so hopefully someone can shed more light on it.

 

[Steptoe]

TBH I think they have plenty enough content, strong enough supporting links, and a pretty obvious network of self-owned T1s. Nothing advanced.

You can get away with a lot more in non-English language SERPs.

 

[stealyourheart]

TBH I think they have plenty enough content, strong enough supporting links, and a pretty obvious network of self-owned T1s. Nothing advanced.

You can get away with a lot more in non-English language SERPs.

Thank you for replying to my post! Appreciate the effort. So there is no shady stuff going on? It just baffled me that they are so dominant. Can you elaborate what a T1 is?

Thanks again

Best regards
SYH

 

[Steptoe]

Can you elaborate what a T1 is?

Separate sites that are mainly built to provide supporting content about the niche and link to the main money making websites. These can be used as buffers when building links.

 

[SaulCode]

They even got away with the recent update. Lots of german sites got hit

 

[Maria Dom]

I have been trying to understand how a certain website operates its traffic. All the conventional white hat seo strategies that I've learned, somehow do not apply to this site and I cant wrap my head around it. They have no real content, dont make use of <h> hierarchy and still manage to pull insane amounts of traffic. Lastly I have been pondering all this time what the hell is going on and wanted to see if someone with a wider knowledge can ease my curiosity. My guess is that they are using some kind of black hat seo strategie, that I can not see with "regular" tools such as Ahrefs, Sistrix, ScreamingFrog and so on. The website in question is the following: 24vapestore.de.

They have a sister site which has even more traffic with the same "nonexistent" content: elfbargermany.de

I would appreciate any contribution and help on this personal matter of mine. I just wanna know what I'm missing here...

Yeah, I’ve seen cases like that usually points to cloaking, bot traffic, or heavy PBN/backlink manipulation you won’t catch with regular tools. Could also be traffic injection or expired domain tricks. Definitely smells like black hat.