Hey everyone. When I searched Bing for our website, one of our competitor’s sites appeared at the top of the results even though I only entered our URL in the search box. It turns out our competitor is using AXS tracking which I also just installed on our server coincidentally. When I clicked on their 1x1 image auto-generated by the AXS script, this is the code that came up in the file (in the ax.pl file):
See how www.bing.com/search is in there, followed by our site URL? I’m new to this and would like to use this same tactic, except I can’t figure out how they did it. Did they use our domain URL in their Google AdWords account? If not, how I can use the same procedure so that our website comes up whenever people search for our competitors? That is, when they search for our competitors’ actual URLs (it’s a very niche market) and not just keywords. AXS doesn’t have support so I really appreciate people taking the time to respond to this.
Thanks!
btw, the actual URL-parsed version (harder on the eyes):
But…what…huh…? What do you mean they are not “using” my url but just targeting it? I don’t see any of our urls OR keywords in their meta tags. Are they doing this in Google AdWords? I’m new to this so an explanation of HOW they did this would be greatly appreciated, not just commentary. I would like to know specifics on the hows Thanks.
I think it is not just because of the code they have used. Some how bing has its own algos and there is any possibility that you and your competitor has alot of duplicate contents or other material that lead the Bing to show the result you saw at that time.
@pentawebexperts. We don’t have any duplicate content with our competitors. While I do appreciate peoples’ comments, is there anyone out there that can tell me HOW they’ve done this? I would like to use the same tactic. Just wondering why people don’t answer forum questions but instead choose to comment on things without being helpful. Would love a helpful reply
If you did a search using your URL and then clicked on the link to their site, then your URL would show up as the search string in their stats… right? That seems too obvious, am I missing something?
I have this problem also. It might be a different cause than you think. My competitor is using my URL as a keyword in his Title and Description Tags. The reason he is out ranking me is he has a couple of different websites and a ton of incoming links. Most of the incoming links are from U-Tube videos “a Google product”. And he has built a hell of a website. I was here first and #1 ranked for several years before he came along. But you have to hand it to him he’s a pretty smart kid.
Regardless of the cause of your problem (your competitors might use the words of your URL in your web somewhere or just building backlinks with your url keyword in the anchor text), maybe you should make a “reputation defender” strategy (creating blogs, social networking, press releases, etc… in order to move the your competition web to the second page of the SERPs).
Not sure their ranking has anything to do with the AXS tracking. They are obviously a more optimized site for the search phrase you are referring to, which in this case is your own domain name or business name. It’s hard to comment without knowing the business names or domain names. However, any optimized site will easily show up for it’s keywords. You may have chose a business name or domain name that is very competitive already and has many well-optimized sites. Again, it’s hard to say without knowing your niche but the best answer is that you have some SEO and linking to do.
From my experience it is very hard for a competitor to outrank you on a query consisting of your URL like “ourwebsite.com” in your example. I would be also interested in this specific case. First thing I would look for is to see if they builded backlinks with my domain as anchor. The fact that all this is happening on Bing makes it even more interesting as it could give some insights about how Bing is ranking.
A document leaked from Google pointed out that when searching for “ourwebsite.com” the website in question is a vital reply so it is always ranked first.
