How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
-
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011.
Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18.
An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are:
http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13
http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\
However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages.
Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority.
Our website is www.anteater.com.au
Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
-
Thanks for the info guys
-
If the links that are passing juice are media related, government related or edu type links then those can carry a ton of weight. They are worth Morty than a thousand crappy links combined.
-
Also, out of those 500 plus links they have coming in, they might have 10-20 really high quality links mixed in that are really passing juice.
-
Domain age can also be a factor. Also remember that when Panda was released an astounding 12% of sites were impacted. This either means the rest of the sites on the net are all white hat or just slipped through the cracks. Googles algorithm is by far one of the most advanced in the industry but the web is vast and it might take a while for your competitors to get caught for there tactics. I agree with EGOL, focus on your site. Social promotion and conversions. In time white hat will prevail.
-
I am not trying to be a wise guy... just saying what I would tell a friend or an employee... and the opinion that I hold for myself.
I think that you have discovered that the trust and authority numbers are not what google is using to rank websites. In fact google in the past couple of months has dramatically altered the way that they consider links.
Panda, nofollow, and google information never yet revealed make the link metric waters really muddy. There is a really good chance that lots of links have been made worthless... and others are depreciating assets.
I am betting my money elsewhere.
So, the most reliable way to advance the success of your website is to focus your efforts on increasing the appreciation of your website by your visitors.
Name the most successful sites on the web. This is what they do first and foremost leaving SEO as a five minute job for each page of content.
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
-
Posting same content to different high authority websites
Let's say 1 article piece is highly relevant to multiple states and we pitch this article across the different domains in those states. Each article piece will be tweaked to localize the content. I understand that Google devalues links coming from low quality, websites that are spun up, but what about links that are basically the same content (but localized), across different high authority domains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny1230 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Domain Authority
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason. One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Need assistance in improving SEO of website
Dear SEO Expert, We run a website www.guitarmonk.com. Moz has told us of some errors at our website viz.: Especially duplicate content etc and whatever in addition you suggest should be good for the website for certain relative important keywords. Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Guitarmonk0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0 -
Use of the Canonical Tag, Both Internally and Cross Domain
I've seen the cross domain canonical not work at all in my test cases. And an interesting point was brought to my attention today. That point was that in order for the canonical tag to work, the page that you are referencing needs to have the exact same content. And that this was the whole point of the canonical tag, not for it to be used as a 301 but for it to consolidate pages with the same content. I want to know if this is true. Does the page you reference with a canonical tag have to have the same exact content? And what have been your experiences with using the canonical tag referencing another page on a different domain that has the same exact subject matter but not the exact duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GearyLSF372
