Yeezy vs Adidas - the big mistake Kanye West made
Kanye West slammed Adidas for ranking higher on Google, but experts shed light on why it happened – and it is all due to clever technical tactics many business owners underestimate. Adidas’s – now unpublished – Yeezy web page should have ranked lower on Google than Kanye West’s Yeezy.com, were it not for three big advantages: physical stores near the searcher’s location, a better-structured website and far more sites referring to Adidas. SEO experts share how other business owners can avoid Kanye's mistake and start ranking higher on Google.
This is according to experts at the search engine optimization (SEO) agency SEOProfy, who explain the technical reasons that might have sparked Kanye West’s discontent at the order of Google results when users search for “Yeezy.com”. Though Google’s ranking algorithm is everchanging and requires much experience-based guesswork, SEO specialists can identify factors that improve where a website appears on Google results. In this case, domain authority, website structure, monthly traffic, keyword relevance, and store locations would have impacted Yeezy.com lower ranking, below Adidas.com, when Americans search for “Yeezy.com” via Google. Researchers used statistical tools like Ahrefs, Similarweb and the Wayback Machine.
Adidas Has Higher DR
As of January 8th, 2025, Yeezy.com has a domain rating (DR) of 52 out of 100, compared to Adidas.com’s 87 DR. This credibility metric suggests how much authority a website has and how many other websites refer to a particular site, so the more linked references a website has, especially from reliable sources such as news websites, the higher its DR score is. In this case, Adidas’s homepage is significantly more authoritative than Yeezy.com, meaning it has a general advantage in search results not only over Yeezy.com, but even over its US competitors like Puma (84 DR), New Balance (80 DR), Asics (82 DR), Reebok (79 DR), and Footlocker (77 DR).
A website’s DR score is directly affected by the number of backlinks, which refers to websites pointing towards said site. Besides volume, the more prestigious the websites that include the link to one’s website, the higher that site’s DR becomes over time. In the past two years, Yeezy.com counted around 4,000 backlinks of varying authority, compared Adidas.com’s significantly higher 32.3 million backlinks.
Yeezy Website Structure Needs Improvement
There are important structural elements missing from the Yeezy.com website which affects how highly Google ranks it. It requires significant work on things like a site map, clear navigation, regular content updates, using relevant keywords in its text, which is currently minimal. Adidas’s website is thoroughly built from an SEO point of view.
Adidas Has 14.7 x Higher Traffic
Yeezy.com had 1.82 million visits in December, 56% of which came from American users. Meanwhile, Adidas.com had 26.74 million visits, with the US driving nearly three quarters of its traffic that month (74.62%). “Yeezy” is Adidas’s fourth most popular search term that brings users to its website organically (i.e. not via ads). It is the 36th most visited fashion and apparel website in America. For comparison, Yeezy.com is only the 1,149th in the same category. Overall, Adidas.com has 14.7 times more traffic than Yeezy.com.
But Yeezy Ranks Higher Specifically for “Yeezy.com” Searches
Adidas gets 161,000 monthly traffic for “Yeezy” searches compared to just 61,000 visits for Yeezy.com itself. However, when someone Googles “Yeezy.com”, it is indeed the Yeezy.com website that Google should rank first, with 23,068 monthly visitors from this inquiry. Meanwhile, Google lists Adidas in second position for this search, which attracts 14,071 monthly visits. More specifically, people looking up “Yeezy.com” are organically shown the news.adidas.com/yeezy website as a secondary result. Technically, this gives Yeezy.com some advantage, but it seems all the other factors outbalance it, especially the searcher’s location.
Adidas Physical Store Closer to User’s Location
Kanye West’s screenshot appears to be a redirect towards Google’s Shopping section, where priority seems to be given to the user’s proximity to physical stores. In this case, because Yeezy has no own physical stores, Adidas’s Oxon Hill store, in Maryland, was close enough to the person searching for “Yeezy.com” to rank higher.
Adidas Yeezy Page Deleted
Interestingly, the Adidas web page in Kanye West’s post is no longer available. Accessing news.adidas.com/yeezy on January 8th, 2025, rendered a “Page not found” error.
It is unclear when it was last active, but the most recent cached copy via Wayback Machine indicates the page was active at least until August 29th, 2024. The last time a credible source linked to this page was on November 6th, 2023, from Fortune magazine. At 11:46, London time, the www.adidas.com website was not working, including using a US VPN address.
“While lack of physical Yeezy stores may be an ongoing disadvantage, there are medium-term solutions that could dramatically improve Google ranking, traffic and sales,” says Andrew Shum, Head of SEO at SEOProfy. “Kanye West’s website would rank higher if his team implemented several structural changes to the Yeezy.com website and worked on having other credible websites, like news institutions, not only mention Yeezy, but include a link to their homepage. Our analysis has found no indication that Adidas is using paid Google ads to rank higher for Yeezy in the past five years, with the last traces of advertising dated to December 2019.”