How this competitor is ranking with low quality backlinks?

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blackisgold

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One of our competitors is ranking at the top of the
Google results in the UK for a very competitive key phrase.

Their backlink profile is made of low quality links from affiliates, directories, aggregators, hosting websites, search results etc.

Their backlinks types are:

Do follow: 21 referring domains
No Follow: 21 referring domains
Redirect: 93 Referring domains
Not site wide: 133 referring domain

Total: 269 referring domains

This website's on-page optimization is horrible! No high quality content found on the site.

Can you help me understand why do they rank so well in Google UK?
 
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Hard to say without having a look, but by the high number of redirects, I'd say there is a lot more than you see at first glance/tier 1.
 
starki said:
Hard to say without having a look, but by the high number of redirects, I'd say there is a lot more than you see at first glance/tier 1.
Click to expand...

I have to agree with starki. There is probably more than meets the eye.

You should keep in mind that Google uses over 200 parameters other than links to rank sites. Maybe you shold consider if other things are effecting the rankings.
 
The first thing that springs to mind is the 93 redirected domains.
The site could easily be merged between plenty of old sites, thus preserving and combining their link power.


On a side note:
Vague questions like these will never yield answers that haven't already been provided in similar questions.
You clearly didn't do your research nor did you provide us with enough info to give a conclusive response.

Do a little more background work next time before asking your question.
 
The quality of their link building would be good I guess.Thats the reason they can do well
 
Thank you all for your replies, some of them make a lot of sense especially the PBN and the merged between plenty of old sites.
The domain I'm talking about is 21.co.uk that ranks at the top of the Google SERPs for "Online Casino" as well as for "Online Casino UK".
Is there anything else I can conclude about what made this domain to rank so well?
 
Very simple here,

Your competitor must have hidden quality ones away from robots.

Peace,
VXS
 
maybe they hidden some links from public viewers or my primary opinion is : those redirects have some crazy power for their website from 93 domains :) its that obvious .
 
looking at the robots.txt doesn't look like they are hiding links from crawlers:

# robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /ajax/
Disallow: /no-script
Disallow: /login
Disallow: /register
Disallow: /not-found
Disallow: /mobile
Disallow: /keepalive
Disallow: /settings
Disallow: /logout
Disallow: /?m=1
Disallow: /?d=1
Disallow: /*?adref=
Disallow: /*?btag=
Disallow: /*?aff_id=
Disallow: /*?tid=
Disallow: /*?CampaignID=

On Ahrefs I can see that they have 132 RD which is more than you have said.

The redirects you are talking about is from affiliate programs hiding the external link using something like Pretty Link.

They could be spamming these redirect URLs to pass on authority through these but I would have to look into it deeper.
 
Thank you all for your replies, some of them make a lot of sense especially the PBN and the merged between plenty of old sites.
The domain I'm talking about is 21.co.uk that ranks at the top of the Google SERPs for "Online Casino" as well as for "Online Casino UK".

referring-pages.jpg organic-traffic.jpg

I've noticed that the amount of the referring domains almost doubled in two months and the amount of organic traffic they get grew six fold in two months.
Is there anything else I can conclude about what made this domain to rank so well?
 
Last edited:
Thanks Black Cat, I now see in Ahrefs 147 RD, most of them are 302 redirects and thus do not pass link juice... so it's not clear at all how
these RD help them at all.
 
Ambassy said:
The first thing that springs to mind is the 93 redirected domains.
The site could easily be merged between plenty of old sites, thus preserving and combining their link power.


On a side note:
Vague questions like these will never yield answers that haven't already been provided in similar questions.
You clearly didn't do your research nor did you provide us with enough info to give a conclusive response.

Do a little more background work next time before asking your question.
Click to expand...

See my reply here:

"Thank you all for your replies, some of them make a lot of sense especially the PBN and the merged between plenty of old sites.
The domain I'm talking about is 21.co.uk that ranks at the top of the Google SERPs for "Online Casino" as well as for "Online Casino UK".
Is there anything else I can conclude about what made this domain to rank so well?"
 
I could take a look if you want. Usually when you can't spot any strong links, they have a hidden PBN. However, 133 ref domains does look like they might have some legit popularity so I can't say for sure without looking at the profile.
 
My opinion is also the same. Maybe they use hidden links for backlink process
 
blackcatburgular said:
looking at the robots.txt doesn't look like they are hiding links from crawlers:

# robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /ajax/
Disallow: /no-script
Disallow: /login
Disallow: /register
Disallow: /not-found
Disallow: /mobile
Disallow: /keepalive
Disallow: /settings
Disallow: /logout
Disallow: /?m=1
Disallow: /?d=1
Disallow: /*?adref=
Disallow: /*?btag=
Disallow: /*?aff_id=
Disallow: /*?tid=
Disallow: /*?CampaignID=

On Ahrefs I can see that they have 132 RD which is more than you have said.

The redirects you are talking about is from affiliate programs hiding the external link using something like Pretty Link.

They could be spamming these redirect URLs to pass on authority through these but I would have to look into it deeper.
Click to expand...

Don't go by that, there are so many other methods to hide the crawlers. There is an IP based crawler blocking which may not be seen by anyone else other than the admin himself and IP provider. He is definitely blocking the crawlers and smart enough to hide that too :D

Else, the rankings are temporary and will go away in some time.

Definitely, they are hiding the backlinks.

EDIT: Just asking, have you seen Gambling Networks or Casino PBNs, they do a good job in hiding things from open internet except Google. Some even block yahoo and bing, ask me :D
 
Last edited:
I just notice they do some other shady Black hat tactics, for instance, look at the following url suffix:

/money.php?q=21-co-uk-casino-review

Look it up in Google and you will see plenty of similar pages.

The title meta tag of the page is "21 co uk casino review"

The content is alternating between two content pages and there are texts mentioning their domain name
but doesn't appear on the visible side only on the view source in the code, for instance the following text:

"Before that other 21 co uk casino review has his pages on the transaction you may enter yet taken through..."

So it's some kind of hidden citations.
 
robots.txt is not the only way to hide PBN, they can do it using htaccess, the easy way to check is to pick one site you found suspicious, that looks like part of pbn, try loading it using ahrefs user agent and you will see.
 
this is a good thread. So it looks like you need to build your self a high tech pbn to compete with this casino company. Is online casino legal in UK? the gangsters keep getting busted here for running them in the US
 
Ahrefs and the like do not report all available backlinks, not even those not blocked by users from crawling. Plus, if you add special links blocked from them, you get an idea.
 
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