How I reverse-engineer winning sites

In my last email, I shared how you can find over 100,000 sites that had traffic increases after Google’s September HCU with Site Stats Database.

I mentioned that you can reverse engineer these winning sites to find out what strategies are working to rank well on Google right now.

But how do you actually reverse engineer a winning site?

That’s what this email is about. I’ll share my exact quick ‘n dirty approach to reverse engineering winning sites using a few tools.

Find a winning site

This is the first step.

One great way to quickly find an endless amount of winning sites is to use Site Stats Database. Simply sort the database by traffic change. You can even filter by a specific niche.

Whether you use Site Stats Database or not, you’ll want to verify traffic is currently on the upswing using this free traffic checker from Ahrefs which shows the traffic trend over the last 6 months.

Once you’ve found a site, you can begin reverse engineering. The order of the following steps doesn’t actually matter much.

Compare to an earlier version with The Wayback Machine

I’m going to use the Birdzilla website as an example.

I want to compare the current site to an earlier version of the site back when traffic was much lower.

So, I pop the domain into Ahrefs and see this:

I’ll pick a random day in March 2023, as that’s right before the first traffic upswing.

Then, I’ll plug the birdzilla.com URL into the Wayback Machine.

I’ll select 2023, then pick March 16th and click the timestamp link.

And there we go, this is what the site looked like back then:

The next step would be to document any changes I can find. In this example, there are too many to list and I might not even try (unless I wanted to be realllly thorough). I can clearly see the biggest (visual) change is that the site went through a major design overhaul.

Next, I’d try to find out when the design change took place. After checking a few dates on the Wayback Machine, I can see it happened sometime between March 29th and April 4th, 2023.

Interestingly, that’s right when traffic first started to ramp up. So, it would seem the redesign is partly - or possibly wholly - to thank for the rankings increase. But we’re not done yet!

Analyze the site on Ahrefs

Next, I’d use Ahrefs to see if there were major changes made to the site content, or if it picked up a bunch of new backlinks.

You can easily check those two things with Ahrefs Site Explorer. Just check the boxes for “Referring domains” and “Organic pages”:

As you can see, there was a big spike in organic pages (content on the site) in late March and early April, at the same time the design change was made.

Then, starting in mid-June, a bunch of pages were deleted. As you can see from the graph, traffic started really going up at the exact same time a bunch of pages were deleted.

This tells me the team behind Birdzilla thought it would be a good idea to prune a bunch of content - and evidently, they were right.

Content pruning is where you delete a bunch of pages that you don’t think are helpful, or that don’t fit with your website’s topic. It’s an effective way to tighten topical authority and reduce the amount of unhelpful content on your site.

And when done right, it works. Really well.

It only took me a few minutes to find a major redesign and content pruning operation, which both had a huge positive impact on rankings.

Just looking at the traffic graph told me nothing. I had to dig a little to find the real insights.

Are you starting to see the power of reverse engineering?

Investigating the second traffic spike

The second traffic spike happened at the exact same time as Google’s March Core and Spam updates were announced.

This can only mean that Birdzilla is doing a great job in Google’s eyes.

Now, let’s get a bit more granular and find out which pages are contributing most to the latest upswing.

I’ll go to the Top pages report in Ahrefs, click Compare pages, and set the Compare with date to March 4th, 2024:

It appears that several of the top articles saw upswings, but the red line (an article targeting the keyword “can peacocks fly?”) is the most drastic.

The top pages report isn’t very useful if the upswing is due to an algorithm update as is the case here, but it can be extremely useful to investigate random spikes in traffic that don’t align with an update.

For example, I’ve found a few sites that appear to have recoverd from the September HCU, but when I check the top pages report, I can see the traffic spike is because of one or two pages targeting wildly off-topic, easy keywords like “5 cups to oz” (which, by the way, drive virtually no traffic because Google accurately answers the query right away).

Check backlinks

Never forget to look for anomalies in the site’s link profile. Sometimes, a spike in traffic can be attributed to a spike in powerful links, like in this example:

If I see any spike in referring domains, I always check the backlinks report in Ahrefs. In the example above, a bunch of links from large news publications were added in late October. Those news publications are notorious for parasite SEO. It worked for the above site until the March updates.

Here’s another wild traffic and link graph:

This looks like a brand new site that Google absolutely adores…

But the truth is, a large site 301-redirected all pages to a new domain in mid-February after suffering a continual traffic decline from the September HCU:

I figured that out by going to the Backlinks report in Ahrefs (for the site in the initial screenshot).

The top links were all 301 redirects from the site above with the massive post-HCU traffic decline:

So, that crazy traffic spike is simply due to a website migration. Nothing crazy after all.

But that’s why it’s important to check the Backlinks report. You might find interesting things like this that would explain why a site is suddenly doing so well.

And, you might even discover some juicy backlinks to get for your own site.

Check social following

If the site links to any social media accounts, check how many followers they have.

Many of the winning sites I’ve analyzed have massive followings on social media.

I talked more about this in a tweet yesterday:

With that said, plenty of winning sites don’t have a big presence on social media. Birdzilla, for example, has 2,400 followers on Instagram, and far fewer followers on their other social accounts.

Check for AI content

Google is trying to crush mass produced, unhelpful AI content, so another thing I like to do when reverse engineering a site is to see whether the content is AI generated.

Not surprisingly, I usually find AI generated content on badly hit sites, and human written content on thriving sites. But that’s not always the case.

To detect AI content, I use Originality. While it can sometimes throw false posititves, it’s usually spot on.

There you have it, my quick ‘n dirty method of reverse engineering websites.

I could go into a lot more depth, but this email is already quite long! Hopefully you got some value from this and can see why reverse engineering is so useful.

Thanks for reading,

Ian

P.S.

Expect more frequent emails from me. They won’t all be long-form like this. But I have tons of fascinating things to share, so I may as well start sharing them! 😀 

Reminder: The lifetime plan for Site Stats Database is currently 33% off. Buy access now before I raise the price.

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