How did they rank that site?
Hello to the Wealthy Affiliate community! I trust you are all having a good and productive day. I just wanted to ask a question today to the community today, this is something that I have noticed lately and I would love to hear your opinions...
As you may or may not be aware I like to test different ideas and strategies for improving search engine positions. I also like to try and see how other sites have gained good ranks too. I don't build backlinks other than from social media sites or any of the shady stuff that some people have tried in the past. I mainly concentrate my efforts on building good content, getting comments and internal linking.
Although this strategy has worked pretty well up until now, there is something that I have noticed lately and I can't work it out... If any of you have seen my website you will know that I promote Wealthy Affiliate, along with a couple of other sites and my site is in the internet marketing niche.
As you know, in order to get a good amount of traffic you need to rank highly in the search results and although I have a few page one positions there is someone else that seems to be getting the no.1 position on a regular basis.
Because I had seen this site on several occasions I decided to take a closer look...
The site is called "Muncheye" and it does very well for a lot of internet marketing product search terms.
Take a look at these two screenshots showing top positions and top two positions in the second screenshot...
The site is a product launch website and is basically a list of release dates for marketing products with descriptions and a link to each of the products. Users are able to sign up to the site and create their own page.
So you might be thinking, well this website must have some awesome content to keep getting all these top positions in the search engines right?
Well, that's the part that really confuses me...
This site uses the same page template over and over again for each product that it lists. The pages have VERY little content, the pages do not have a great deal of internal linking apart from on the home page, very few images can be seen and every single page has a cloaked external affiliate link to a product page.
Take a look at a typical example...
This totally confuses me because this site is ranking very highly for a lot of internet marketing products and it appears to be doing the complete opposite of what we are trying to achieve here at Wealthy Affiliate.
I don't believe that backlinks are the way forward any longer, I believe that they do more damage than good, although there are people that disagree. Recently Kyle wrote a post about external backlinking and I totally agree with it.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/kyle/blog/are-back...
Now I'm not suggesting for one minute that we are doing things the wrong way, far from it. But I would really love to hear your opinions on how this site is getting such great results when they appear to be doing the complete opposite of what we are taught.
The only thing that I can see that could be giving Muncheye the edge is the amount of pages that are on this domain. The home page of this site has approximately 250 links pointing to internal pages. Could the volume of pages on this site be enough to outrank everyone else?
What do you think? I would love to hear your opinion!
Have a great day,
Andrew
Recent Comments
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Here's why. Muncheye.com has received 563,400 visitors last month. Google equals popularity with quality content.
I got these stats from:
http://www.trafficestimate.com/
Also I read Kyles piece about back links and to me it said do not make back links a major focus of your traffic plan.
If I can get my links or a guest post on a high traffic site I am going to give it a shot, but not spend most of my time on it.
These are just my opinions and, believe it or not, I have been wrong before. I think it was in 1994. That's a joke. Smile.
Barry
Hey Barry. Thank you for your input. Yes I believe that you are quite right with what you are saying here. That's a lot of traffic and it does make competing against these guys very difficult.
I don't do any sort of link building but I know some of the top bloggers use guest posting on high quality blogs for quality traffic and links. So long as you aren't going out and getting low quality links from anywhere you can, I think your ok. Guest posting is a good move if you can get on the right sites.
One thing that irritates me about the authority sites and guest posting is that they put out these page long instructions on how to get a post on their sites and then when you put in the time and follow the instructions to the letter they do not even respond. How rude.
They remind me of Google. Which changes the rules more than I change underwear. Still plodding along. Good luck.
Barry
I know exactly what you mean Barry! Although I have looked into guest posting a couple of times, I was put off by the long list of things I had to do and not do just to be considered. It might be a really good way to get more traffic but I just don't have the time to mess around with this stuff at the moment.
I don't think plodding along is such a bad thing so long as you keep moving forward!
All the best,
Andrew
If you type links:muncheye.com it shows 31,700 links. If you look on https://www.facebook.com/MunchEye/ they have 4,911 Likes.
So perhaps the ranking success is a mixture of backlinks and social media activity?
Yeah you could be right. i just had a look at the Facebook page and they are adding a ton of content to each post that they publish, there are tons of links on Facebook all pointing back to posts within Muncheye. I think that has got to be it. I find it amazing how well this site is doing with such a thin site.
Thanks for taking a look at this, I really appreciate it!
But thanks for reminding me about MunchEye. Could be good to keep an eye on it for products to write reviews about.
No problem! I have used it a few times, they have a lot of JVZoo stuff on there. There is doubt that this site is quite useful and that's probably one of the reasons its doing so well. These guys must be making a fortune from affiliate sales because each page has a cloaked affiliate link back to the product page. Quite a brilliant business plan!
Sometimes resource sites and other sites like this one still gets a lot of link juice because of the amount of links that may be pointing to them and the amount of links pointing to other similar sites.
Might be a known entity online that a lot JV people and internet marketing professionals go to for reference, but they also may have other factors going for them:
The age of the site
The content they are posting
History of having tons of backlinks
And ultimately traffic.
Honestly, the more traffic this site has, the more prominent they are going to be on certain keywords.
I also did a training on spying on other websites as well..... How To Spy On Other Websites
Thank you for your help on this, I really appreciate it. I think the Facebook page is definitely a major contributing factor here as Marcus has pointed out. Like you say there could also be other contributing factors. I guess a site like this could well get a lot of traffic and time spent on the site as internet marketers will use it as a resource for finding products to promote. I'm still amazed at how well this site is doing though!
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Hi Andrew,
Based on the provided screenshot, it looks like you are wondering why the site in question is ranking for a product name ’12 week mastery’ right?
Because if you Google ’12 week mastery review’, the site is nowhere to be found.
But what is this!? YOU are!
Look: http://take.ms/0LK5g
So, why is this happening and why does this site rank?
Because it is a IM Product launch website where folks can submit their products to list of their site.
Even though the content itself is thin, the volume of content & traffic is vast thus why it is ranking for the product names.
So, you are asking Can it be Beat?
Absolutely! No site is immune to competition and being outranked.
And HOW do you outrank it Jay!?
Focus on the review element because people are far more likely to search [product name] review than just [product name].
With that said - you’re on the right path.
[mic drop]
Thanks Jay, I really appreciate your input into this. Hopefully I will be able to maintain that position for the review keyword. It just baffled me how these guys were beating everyone with such little content. But now I can see why this site is ranking.
Thanks again!
Andrew
Excellent comment, Jay.
Andrew, one thing to keep in mind, that there is another website that has very short posts but which ranks very well:
Twitter.
Well said, Jay!