• Register
• Login

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Competing with untouchable competitors

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 23, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

There are very few sites I cannot outrank in my most competitive queries. Who outranks me today is not nearly as relevant to my point as who has outranked me for the last two years. Rankings fluctuate but if over two years’ time you haven’t knocked the top dog out of the number 1 slot you’re up against some tough competition.

I’ve been able to take number 1 away from some long-reigning champions but not always. And it’s never been easy.

There are three common qualities of untouchable competitors:

1. They are large content sites
2. They have large backlink profiles
3. They are more specialized than my sites

Specialization doesn’t mean they cover fewer topics than me.

A search engine’s idea of topicality may differ from mine or yours. In practice, I define site topicality by the number of queries the site dominates. With Xenite I dominate over 100 targeted searches. The vast majority of my toughest competitors dominate far fewer queries.

In the commercial Web most large content sites don’t dominate very many competitive queries, but they can dominate many thousands of uncompetitive queries. Think of how often you see Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, IMDB, Business Week, Forbes, and other larger content sites near the top of obscure queries about people, books, movies, etc.

I dominate the query for Understanding Middle-earth, part of the title for one of my books, not Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You, my readers, could be cruel and link bomb the book sites above my page but that would render the query unnatural and useless for illustration. As the author of the book I feel what I have to say about it is more relevant than what a bookseller has to say. I hope you agree with me.

Of course, not every author knows as much about search engine optimization as I do. If you search for Ender’s Game you should see HatRack.com (Orson Scott Card’s Web site) in the top ten but it won’t be anywhere near the first position. And I actually talk about my book on my Web site, whereas most authors just republish the jacket blurb or press release that appears on many other sites.

I specialize when it comes to my books.

Given a competitive query about upholstery nails, why does one site outrank all others. The mistake most SEOs make is to look at the search results, grab the domain names, and start checking for backlinks (or simply look at the cache and see who uses the expression on their page most often). That is what I call “snapshot analysis”. It tells you something, it gives you a picture of what is happening in the SERPs today, but one picture does not tell you the whole story.

Who ranked first for “upholstery nails” a year ago? Who owned the query for upholstery nails two years ago? Who was the first to dominate the query? Who is making the biggest effort to market their upholstery nails site now? Who will be investing the most resorces into dominating the query a year from now?

If you watch a competitive query over a long period of time, you’ll learn one of two things: whether there is an unbeatable champion and how much the competitors care about the query. If they really care about it they won’t stop optimizing, adding content, redesigning their pages, etc. If it’s just another throwaway query, another grab at the long tail for them, their content pages won’t do much.

ThomasNet appears in many commercially competitive queries (including the one for “upholstery nails”) but they’re not seriously chasing that kind of deep relevance. They are a large content site that offers a lot of specialized categories (including one for “upholstery nails”). But given the fact that they have a lot of content, a large number of backlinks, and specialized categories, do they meet all three of my criteria for being unbeatable champions for upholstery nails?

No. Because my third criterion was not simply specialization. My third criterion was that a site had to be more specialized than my own. Now, I’m not competing for upholstery nails (not even with this blog post, where I’m intentionally beating the expression to death — if you watch the query you’ll see whether this post can invade the name space). But though I am not competing for “upholstery nails”, other people are.

If the guys above ThomasNet are really unbeatable champions (and I have competed in queries where there have been as many as 4 or 5 unmovable sites), they have content that is more specialized than ThomasNet’s content. It’s not just that they beat the words to death on their pages. People will find their content more useful, more relevant, and they’ll click on it, link to it, recommend it, etc.

In a natural query, even one that is optimized, specialization usually wins out in the dominance game. You cannot dominate a query in one week. You cannot dominate a query in one month. You dominate a query by consistently ranking in the top 5 results — preferably in the top 2 results — over a long period of time. How long is a matter of personal preference but I would not consider a listing to be dominant if it has held a top position for less than six months.

There are many commercial Web site operators who have lost their dominant positions after 3 or 4 years of maintaining the top position. Those people are understandably upset, but they may have achieved what could be called “shallow dominance”. That is, they may have depended on link anchor text rather than on content. While it has not been true in every case, over the past six months I’ve looked at quite a few long-time champions who had been unthroned and found that they were content-lean and cheap-link heavy.

Many of these sites had also just undergone redesigns, and the redesign process can break link profiles, streamline content, disperse content across less relevant pages, and do other things. But most of the sites also showed an alarming number of backlinks in the Google Supplemental Results Index. Google in effect ripped a lot of anchor text away from a huge number of sites.

Champion sites like my own, that specialize in specific topics and dominate queries on the basis of content rather than links, have not moved. Have I lost any rankings over the past six months? Yes. I have lost position in some of my older queries, and in a few I still care deeply about. But so have other sites. We’ve all lost some link anchor text. But we didn’t vanish overnight and lose all our Google referrals. In fact, Xenite consistently gets over 20,000 Google referrals a month (most from a handful of competitive queries where we at least rank well).

Being untouchable begins with the one thing everyone agrees is important for great rankings: offering valuable content that people want to find, want to recommend, and cannot find elsewhere. When you’re the new kid on the block you struggle to gain visibility for that high value content but once you’ve obtained visibility your quality will gain traction.

Becoming visible in a competitive query requires an SEO advantage. I gave some obscure advice to another SEO recently that perhaps I can elaborate on a little.

If the other guy’s horse is faster, you need to run the race on a track of your own choosing. In the other SEO’s case, their firm was having trouble moving content past an unbeatable champion. The domain is very powerful, very “authoritative” in the search engine’s estimation.

But when you are faced with that kind of competition you still have options. Remember, if what you’re doing today doesn’t work, try something else. If the other guy has a 1,000 page site and you’re unable to get past him with a 1-page “site” or even a horde of 1-page sites, look at whose content is more specialized. Can you retool your content or create new content that places particular emphasis on the topic?

Specialization is as diverse as the expression of thought on the Web. Everyone specializes in something. But Pizza Hut specializes in pizza. So do Dominos and Papa Johns. But are you seriously going to tell me that Wikipedia does? Sorry, dudes. That dog won’t hunt.

You can run the race on someone else’s Web site, where their content is favored. Or you can run the race on your Web site where your content is favored. Where do you think you’re going to obtain the best advantage? What are the four things that really determine search results rankings?

1. What you do with your site
2. What other people do with their sites
3. What the search engines do with their data
4. What people search for

You have the most control over what you do with your sites. You can specialize more than the next guy as long as he is not trying to specialize more than you. But I also learned a long time ago that if a query is really competitive then searchers are smart enough to look for a variety of content. They’ll use other queries to get past the unbeatable champions. If you cannot dominate query A, find the query B that you can dominate.

In the final analysis you are your own worst enemy if you assume you cannot beat the other guy. You have time. You can still become the unbeatable champion.