The SEO community is scratching their heads around the drug rehab niche and how it performs in the Google organic search results. In short, the results for some sites are unstable and all over the place. But it is not only for the drug rehab area, other niches have seen this unpredictability for specific sites as well.
Let me say that I am a bit unsure if I should cover this, being that I think the specific site in question might be trolling the SEO industry (just a gut feeling and I guess it worked).
In short, one SEO pointed out how a small site on a .today TLD saw amazing rankings in Google for a short period of time for incredibly competitive terms. Now, the site is no where to be found. It is like they found some way of ranking sites for competitive terms for short periods of time.
Dejan said:
This is one of the most interesting events in a long time and nobody has a firm clue like we're all beginners in SEO :-)
— DEJAN (@dejanseo) January 14, 2019
A few days ago, we saw this tweet:
Within days https://t.co/d52vSRLtYO is totally owning the SERPs.
— Eric Marchionni (@EricMarchionni) January 12, 2019
Ahrefs is reporting 37k keywords & they hold #1 for 26k of them:
"drug rehab" + city
"rehab center in" + city
Always #1. Insane.
Thoughts? @dejanseo @glenngabe @Marie_Haynes @rustybrick @CyrusShepard @ViperChill pic.twitter.com/aokMGkpfrF
I am going to share the steam of tweets from the community:
cocaine rehab, cocaine detox, fentanyl rehab xx, all detox and rehab keywords ect. everything that he has on his pages. its like on page seo just become the main factor but just for this domain and a handful of others.
— Earl Grey (@syndk8) January 13, 2019
Looks like it started to drop in visibility according to SEMrush as of yesterday. My initial feeling was that another domain was redirected there, but I don't see that yet. Also interesting that others in the niche didn't see volatility. Could be an anomaly that G is correcting: pic.twitter.com/y6AqulsbcC
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 13, 2019
Checking the competing domains over the past few months does shows drugabuse .gov dropped in early January (e.g. it used to have a double listing for "addiction"). And asam .org is seeing some crazy volatility over the past few weeks, another competitor search-wise at least. pic.twitter.com/oWJxjBZOOQ
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 13, 2019
no. its not blackhat in any way. google describe it as a bad data push. this is not unusual for drug rehab. the serps are crazy
— Earl Grey (@syndk8) January 14, 2019
Certainly feels like these SERPS are either being manually adjusted, or are subject to different rules than most. I would imagine that it will take a few months to settle and become more immune to manipulation.
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) January 14, 2019
Right, that's what I was saying yesterday (see my tweet below). It looks like Google started that correction as of Saturday and now it's dropping more. I've seen that from time to time in other verticals as well. Site spikes out of nowhere, then drops. https://t.co/L1aHWHH6qx
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 14, 2019
well this is what drug rehab is like and has been for a while. its just this was an extreme example and people noticed it. this is why what people say about seo makes no sense to me.
— Earl Grey (@syndk8) January 14, 2019
I really think something is unusual - maybe something most SEOs, including myself, do not know about. A way to fool Google, at least for a short period of time. I don't think it is drug rehab niche specific but normally the really competitive spaces see these types of things first.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
