Site #2 beats site #1 in every aspect?
-
Hey guys, loving SEOMoz so far and will definitely continue my subscription after the free trial.
I have a question however, which I am really confused about.
When researching my primary keyword, I have found that the second ranked site beats the top site in every single aspect, apart from domain age, which is almost 6 years for the top one and 6 months for the second.
When I say every single aspect, I mean everything. More authority for the page and domain, more links, more anchor text links, more authoritive links, more social signals, more relevant links, better domain (although second ranked site is a .net), better MozRank, better MozTrust etc....
I have noticed though, that in the UK SERPs, those sites are switched, so #2 is actually #1.
Could it be that the US SERPs just haven't updated yet, or am I missing something completely different.
-
When you're looking at 200+ ranking factor, there's a lot we can't account for even across all of our metrics. A few possibilities:
(1) The #2 site's links are being devalued, for some reason, due to quality issues.
(2) There are geo-targeting signals out of whack or focused outside of the US market. If the site is ranking #1 on Google.co.uk and has a clear UK connection, that could lower it's value on Google.com slightly. It's not the kiss of death, but it can make a difference.
(3) The #1 (currently on Google.com) site has recent activity that we're not aware of yet (link-building, especially).
(4) As Joshua said, #1 could be targeting inbound anchor text better.
(5) As Brandon said, #1 may have an advantage on user signals.
I don't think that Google currently "sandboxes" new sites in they way they may have once. What I think we're seeing is a grace period where new sites get a chance to rank while Google evaluates their link profile. If, after a couple of months, those links look spammy, the site may drop. In most cases I've seen, though, that's not a #1 vs. #2 sort of thing.
-
Darrenspeed
I think if you take both Brandon and Joshua you will likely have your answer. Brandon went where I went when I first saw the question. Are you giving the searcher the info they are looking for in a way that makes them want to keep reading? When I read Joshua's response I had to say he, too, was correct.
There have been many times when I kept telling myself how we were beating a competitor and caused myself to miss the flaws in our site. So, Forget who is first and whether or not they are dating Larry Page, focus on getting your page to perfect or flawless. Even if the page is about Chinese Gambling Sex Herbs, put in an info graph and list the top three myths about Gambling Sex Herbs. Then make sure you have spot on Title Tags, H1-H2, alt text, great linking program, quality backlinks, etc.
As to domain age, there is the place where that will have an effect...for a very short time frame. If a new domain comes out with great content, gets lots of traffic, social, and back links, domain age will not over weigh the other factors for ranking. -
More relevant links is an interesting concept and probably where the problem lies. Which links are Google counting and what is the anchor text? and does the link profile look natural?
In my experience, not ranking for a certain keyword usually comes down to needing more links with a mixture of exact and partial match anchor text from a variety of sources. Try investing in some better web directories like BOTW, get a couple of blogs to write about you and release a PRweb press release with sufficient linking.
Internally you may also want to write a few more articles on that specific keyword and link them all through to the central page, thus funneling relevant link juice internally as well as externally.
Let me know how you go
-
Sorry that I forgot to mention this.
Both sites have A grade according to Moz.
Both sites are 1 page sites, no inner pages apart from the About and Contact obviously, however the #1 site uses adsense whilst #2 does not.
Maybe the bounce rate of these sites also play an important factor, but I would consider both of them, to be quite poor.
-
@darrenspeed, when you listed the factors where #2 dominates #1, you didn't mention anything about on-page content. Consider this scenario:
Google actually jumps the current #2 to the #1 spot, but Google also notices that well over half the people that visit the site go back to Google within 20 seconds and perform the exact same search. This would signal to Google that the page's content doesn't fully satisfy its users. So it goes back to putting the other page on top, and notices that only 25% of the visitors go back and perform another search for the same keyword. Therefore Google waves it's magic wand and says, "yea, verily I declare #1 to be better than #2."
Other than the domain age, it is the only other plausible explanation I can come up with. Compare the content of both pages and get back to us. I'll be interested to see if it is a domain age issue, content issue, or possibly something else.
-
Wow, thanks for the quick reply.
I did think about the domain, but couldn't believe that the domain age alone would make it rank stronger, because the #2 site has a tons more of everything.
Luckily I just bought a 2 year old domain to compete for this keyword, although I hear that the domain age is weakened when it exchanges hands.
Thanks again.
-
It is definately due to the young domain. The younger one has just quit the sandbox period and going upwards while the older one has yet gained trust in google's eyes so google will have it's time to collect user data to be sure that it is better from a user aspect to switch those rankings.
If a better site could beat another one in the moment of becoming better I would be very happy, I wouldn't have to wait so much to harvest the fruits of my efforts.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
Rankings disappeared since Penguin 2.1 - course of action?
One of my sites that has always ranked 1st page on main keyphrases is now between pages 4 and 10 on them, I'm guessing it's been hit by Penguin 2.1. Can anyone offer advice? Here's the link profile: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.hgoodwin.com Any advice greatly appreciated. UPDATE - Open Site Explorer only shows 95 links. I've checked my links in Google Webmaster Tools, and there are a lot more - 717! The vast majority I don't recognise and look dodgy. How could that happen, and what's the best course of action - is disavow the way to go? I don't even want to click some of those links. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
Depth of Links on Ecommerce Site
Hi, In my sitemap, I have the preferred entrance pages and URL's of categories and subcategories. But I would like to know more about how Googlebot and other spiders see a site - e.g. - what is classed as a deep link? I am using Screaming Frog SEO spider, and it has a metric called level on it - and this represents how deep or how many clicks away this content is.. but I don't know if that is how Googlebot would see it - From what Screaming Frog SEO spider software says, each move horizontally across from Navigation is another level which visually doesnt make sense to me? Also, in my sitemap, I list the URL's of all the products, there are no levels within the sitemap. Should I be concerned about this? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location. I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance. What would your recommendation be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lagunaitech1 -
Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow. Are there any potential SEO problems here? What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Can you explain why the site is dropping off Google every other week?
Can anyone offer any insight into why since the Google Panda update www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com has been fluctuating on Google so much? One week it's ranked as it used to be, the next it's nowhere to be seen? If you take a look at the screenshot of our traffic, this is the traffic after 75% loss (dropped in two stages) you'll see we get traffic for a week and then nothing. This has been happening for months. Some points that might be involved: Around the same time the SEO guys suggested setting the canonical url to www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com (before there wasn't one so traffic was coming from www. and non-www). A lot of the original urls have been consolidated and rel="canonical" added throughout The "pages" of results all have had a rel="canonical" set to page 1 Could it be that the www is competing with the non-www despite the 301 redirects. We're doing everything we can to help this client (and have reduced their site errors from the millions to low tens-of-thousands) so it's not filling them with confidence when their site just keeps plumetting! What's also irritating/odd is that some of their competitors -who used to be ranked lower and have sites which contradict every rulebook still rank high. Hopefully you can spot something we've missed. Tim I8PNL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimGaunt0