How is this possible?

So I'm trying to rank for niche that didn't look difficult at all. But now after a while, I'm starting to notice that a lot more than I thought is going to be needed. The weird thing is that the sites that are topping the list has just directory links, and not very good ones. So I tried finding out if they used a PBN, but only found one site which was pretty bad. Then at the bottom of the first serp there are sites with pretty big and powerful PBNs. But they haven't bothered to diversify anchor text, and it's consisting of 80-90% keyword anchors, and on top of that they are using seo-hosting for their PBN. What really bothers me though, is that one of the sites that are ranking above me has just straight up blasted his MS with 10 000 GSA links (these are also maybe 90% keyword targeted anchors). His TF/CF is 15/40... How can this site still be ranking? Could it be because it's not for english sites and keywords, and therefore not examined as thoroughly? So "anything goes" with non-US country specific searches?

If I were you, for such a spam niche, I would go for 301 redirects from expired Country specific TLD domains with amazing backlinks!!!

We often forget that every niche is different. Not only in difficulty but ranking factors as well.

taketheride said:

So I'm trying to rank for niche that didn't look difficult at all. But now after a while, I'm starting to notice that a lot more than I thought is going to be needed. The weird thing is that the sites that are topping the list has just directory links, and not very good ones. So I tried finding out if they used a PBN, but only found one site which was pretty bad. Then at the bottom of the first serp there are sites with pretty big and powerful PBNs. But they haven't bothered to diversify anchor text, and it's consisting of 80-90% keyword anchors, and on top of that they are using seo-hosting for their PBN. What really bothers me though, is that one of the sites that are ranking above me has just straight up blasted his MS with 10 000 GSA links (these are also maybe 90% keyword targeted anchors). His TF/CF is 15/40... How can this site still be ranking? Could it be because it's not for english sites and keywords, and therefore not examined as thoroughly? So "anything goes" with non-US country specific searches?

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Interesting thought there. I had never thought about the anything goes. Are non English sites not examined as good?

LoftPower said:

Interesting thought there. I had never thought about the anything goes. Are non English sites not examined as good?

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I believe that non-english speaking countries are not as much under the microscope. It takes a lot of effort to analyze how sentences are built up and the patterns that are used. Different languages structure sentences in different ways, and I doubt that G is able to identify spun content equally good in every language if it's not just straight up word-synonyms. I don't think they pay as much attention to link building in other languages either, that would otherwise have been penalized a long time ago. Since english is their main language, it's more difficult to accurately evaluate the context of anchor texts and links.

For example, the keywords that I was working on are used in my language and they are kind of "real words", but when you write them in a word processing program it marks them as misspelled or non-existant, because there is no official and correct spelling determined for them. So even though this is a real money keyword, it might be considered as a brand name in their eyes. And therefore they might get away with a much greater anchor text ratio. But these are just my thoughts, not sure if it's correct.

It happens, you start seeing the actual difficulty after you start ranking. There are many different factors Google uses to rank pages.

taketheride said:

I believe that non-english speaking countries are not as much under the microscope.

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I mostly use churn and burn techniques to rank my sites, and rank sites in different European countries, Bulgaria, Romania, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Poland and a few more, and when my sites get hit, they all tend to get hit no matter what the country.