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Comment by weird-eye-issue | Hacker News Reader

Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for:

Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k

These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale.

For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" which has 207k searches per month in Norway and is rated as 0 (out of 100) for being easy to rank for. Usually when a keyword has that amount of searches it would be incredibly hard to rank for, I've never seen anything like this. So what is happening here looks like they are just taking advantage of a market with really low competition keywords.

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Interia is a large polish web portal, from what I could find. Norwegian people doesn't know it, but polish people might. There is probably around ~2 % polish people in Norway. It also ranks as #1 for me. It's in polish too, so basically only ~2 % of Norway would understand it.

However, the weird thing it that it steals content from articles, and then outranks them. Most pages seems to be boosted, maybe as a result of it being new. (Most content is just hours old)

Could you check these too? (exactly the same thing, but newer, it seems) www.mariesofie.dk nem-varmepumper.dk

Clearly reused domains.

The keyword data was based on searches in Norway alone, it is an order of magnitude higher in Poland. In Norway almost anybody could rank for that keyword if they tried due to the difficulty being different based on location and language.

Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool.

But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad wasteful.

You need a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush for competitor analysis and keyword research. One trick with Ahrefs if you want to be frugal is to pay for the $7 trial and use it as much as possible during the trial to do your keyword research and cancel. Technically if you are efficient enough that trial could get you months worth of content at least.

ahrefs is the best in the business.

Ahrefs is the best data source but this is the most frugal approach

Depends what data you mean. For backlinks this might be true but they have noticeablely less keywords than SEMRush

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