Possible reasons for being outranked?
-
Suppose you are being outranked for a keyword phrase by a competitor but you have a significantly higher page authority and domain authority. 9 out of 10 people would consider the content better on our page. We have more links pointing to our page from highly authoritative sites than they do.
What other reasons could explain why we are being outranked?
-
I'd say one thing that could be causing this is domain age. Is the competitor's site significantly older and more well-established? Another factor could be your engagement. What's your bounce rate? This is definitely part of Google's algorithm. Are people finding what they want? Do you have on-site search? If so, are you getting a lot of searches with "zero" results? One last thing could be the number of years you've registered your domain. If you've registered yours for 2 and your competitor has registered their's for 10, that could be a factor.
One last thing. Where is your site hosted? Are you on a shared server? What is the reputation of the other sites sharing that server? If your competitor is on a dedicated server and you are on a shared server with other sites with questionable or low reputations, that could be dragging your site down.
I know that's a lot of factors, but each one could make a significant difference. Hope that helps a bit!
Dana
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
-
'sameAs' Mark up for different spellings of a Product/Keyword, is it possible?
Hi There, I've seen that for social media profiles you can mark them up to be the 'sameAs', example below: - <code><scripttype="application ld+json"="">{ "@context":"http://schema.org", "@type":"Organization", "name":"Your Organization Name", "url":"http://www.your-site.com", "sameAs":[ "http://www.facebook.com/your-profile", "http://www.twitter.com/yourProfile", "http://plus.google.com/your_profile" ] }</scripttype="application></code> My question is can you do something similar for your product/keyword? For example when you can spell the word in different ways e.g. Whisky (English) or Whiskey (Irish/US). I've had a look at schema.org but I'm not sure if I'm headed down the wrong path? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jon-S0 -
Feedback needed on possible solutions to resolve indexing on ecommerce site
I’ve included the scenario and two proposed fixes I’m considering. I’d appreciate any feedback on which fixes people feel are better and why, and/or any potential issues that could be caused by these fixes. Thank you! Scenario of Problem I’m working on an ecommerce website (built on Magneto) that is having a problem getting product pages indexed by Google (and other search engines). Certain pages, like the ones I’ve included below, aren’t being indexed. I believe this is because of the way the site is configured in terms of internal linking. The site structure forces certain pages to be linked very deeply, therefore the only way for Googlebot to get to these pages is through a pagination page (such as www.acme.com/page?p=3). In addition, the link on the pagination page is really deep; generally there are more than 125 links on the page ahead of this link. One of the Pages that Google isn’t indexing: http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb/430-20-lb-laser-bond-22-x-650-1-roll.html This page is linked from http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb?p=5, and it is the 147<sup>th</sup> link in the source code. Potential Fixes Fix One: Add navigation tags to the template so that search engines will spend less time crawling them and will get to the deeper pages, such as the one mentioned above. Note: the navigation tags are for HTML-5; however, the Magento site in which this is built does not use HTML 5. Fix Two: Revised the Templates and CSS so that the main navigation and the sidebar navigation is on the bottom of the page rather than the top. This would put the links to the product pages in the source code ahead of the navigation links.
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Are backlinks the reason for my site's much lower SERP ranking, despite similar content?
Hi all, I'm trying to determine why my site (surfaceoptics.com) ranks so much lower than my competitor's sites. I do not believe the site / page content explains this differential in ranking, and I've done on-site / on-page SEO work without much or any improvement. In fact I believe my site is very similar in quality to competitor sites that rank much higher for my target keyword of: hyperspectral imaging. This leads me to believe there is a technical problem with the site that I'm not seeing, or that the answer lies in our backlink profile. The problem is that I've compared our site with 4 of our competitors in the Open Site Explorer and I'm not seeing a strong trend when it comes to backlinks either. Some competitors have more links / better backlink profiles but then other sites have no external links to their pages and lower PA and DA and still outrank us by 30+ positions. How should I go about determining if the problem is backlinks or some technical issue with the site?
Technical SEO | | erin_soc0 -
IP redirect possible SEO issues?
Hi I help manage a small eCommerce business that sells worldwide. We currently have 4 stores www.tidy-books.com (US site) www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) www.tidy-books.eu (EU) www.tidy-bboks.com.au (AU) We have auto redirect based on the country of your IP. The .com is the route address though. Currently I have decided to focus all my energies with link building etc on .com as it seems to carry the most weight and being a very small team we don't have the resources for separate campaigns for all websites at the moment. Whilst I've done on site SEO with country in mind i.e for US kids instead of children. I'm just wondering if you can see any pitfalls in this approach, Ideally I would like to have a team focus on each store separately and have them as separate domains but with the IP redirect we at least rank well in Google for the .com and the customers gets sent to the relevant store. Any thoughts would be great
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Competitor outranks us, even though we are better in every measurement
I run a site www.rent.com.au. We are a realestate portal that is dedicated to the rental market across Australia. We have been adding more content to our site and now have close to 80% of all realestate agent listings in Australia. Over the past few months we have spent time on: Canonicalisation of our search result and property pages Updating titles and descriptions to match key terms Adding a internal link structure to promote the capital cities of Australia Yet despite this work there are sites which are much smaller, have less traffic, and haven't changed for years outranking us for terms like: rental properties perth houses for rent perth One of these site is rentfind.com.au. Looking at the competitive domain analysis between us and rentfind we are better in every measurement. I have compared our backlinks and there isn't too much difference with who is linking to us. My conclusion is that there is something wrong with the way we are organising our content for search engines. I think that it could be because of our search drill-down from our home page, but before I do anything drastic it would be good to get some feedback on what we could be doing wrong.
Technical SEO | | Rent0 -
A possible hit by panda
Hi there, on the panda update a few weeks ago i noticed i dropped 8 places for a very competitive keyword. All my content in the site is unique and quality. Its also not published elsewhere. I think the update did knock this one keyword down for me - no others got hti though. Perhaps the landing page got it? too many mentions of the keyword? however i didn't think i spammed it on the page, perhaps jsut mentioned once or twice - any ideas? Any help aprpeciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
One good reason why i should have a mobile site map
Good evening from I can just about keep my eyes open 7th cup of Coffeee David, Ok I'm adding a mobile sitemap to a mobile site. Whilst I know this is important the client wants one good reason why he should have one integrated into http://www.innoviafilms.com/m/Home.aspx I'm so knackered I cant articulate one, could some one put me out my misery and give me one good reason I should toil away with mobile xml; sitemap? Resource: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648 Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Outranking a competitor when their domain name is the keyword
Hi I'd just like to ask the opinion of my fellow members here : We are currently ranking second for a very important keyword and would obviously like the top spot on the SERP - the site that is ranking first has the domain name as the keyword phrase(along with a good amount of quality links from a variety of domains) - now I know it is possible to outrank them since I do remember reading about this in one of Rands posts(I think it was the whole white hat black hat one he posted recently) - bascially we have more domain authority, slightly less links but from double the amount of root domains and a higher page authority too! Does having the keyword as your domain make THAT much of a difference when we are(imo) quite close in terms of great content and link profiles(and all the onpage factors) ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DanHill0