Hi,

I'm an experienced SEO with over five years experience.

I have been given the task by a client to investigate a handful of
competitor sites.

Most of these sites have been like reading an open book, bar one.  The
site in question is taboo.co.uk.

This site seems to ride high in the search engines for most of the
keywords in the sex toys industry (top 10 in most cases).

The thing that is baffling me is that I cannot work out why!

I can see that they have employed some grey hat techniques but these
alone do not warrant the positions they seem to hold.

Can I please request the assistance of a fellow SEO who may be able to
see something that this site has done that I have missed?

Many thanks.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 17 Mar 2005 17:25 PST

webjockey-ga,

I'm not sure what you had in mind re:your comments about "grey hat
techniques", but one of the main things that struck me about the
taboo.co.uk site was how clean it looked...especially relative to so
many other sites in a similar business.

No pop-ups, no text/keyword stuffing, no invisible white-on-white
stuff going on, etc.  Perhaps they just rose to the top (or near to
it, anyway) from not being penalized for trying too hard to game the
system.

Anyway, what are the grey hat things you noticed?  Let us know as much
as you can, as it will raise the odds of getting the answer you're
seeking.

Thanks,

pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by webjockey-ga on 18 Mar 2005 01:51 PST

Hi Peeps,

Thanks to all who have commented so far.

pafalafa - to answer your question - the grey hat techniques I noticed
are some mild spamming of blog/guestbooks, nothing major.

-----------------------------------------------------

sellyourpagerankcom - thanks for the lesson in cloaking.  I am
familiar with this technique but would never employ it for my clients.
 Also I do not think Taboo is using cloaking.

I guess the conclusion to be drawn from your answers is that there is
nothing going on with this site that I have not already found out for
myself.

Thanks anyway - any further comments would be welcomed.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 18 Mar 2005 07:18 PST

wj-ga,

Sheesh!  I hate to pass up the opportunity to answer a nicely-priced
question like yours, but I'm not sure what information we can provide
at this point that you don't already seem to have.

Let your client know that Cleanliness is next to G*dliness...and might
also get them a nice SERP listing.

Let us know if there is anything else we can do for you by way of
providing an answer to your query.

All the best,

paf

To reduce repetitve information, could you point out some of the gray
areas you have already spotted?  Would love to help disect this with
you. I do like the fact that they have over 400 known backlinks to the
site, and lets face it- their page names all including the keywords
gives double duty as it put the keywords in there are a "description"
and a http link. Their meta tags even go as far as to rate images to a
adult content