Why do some sites perform great but show no data on the tool bar?

[tonyflorespsa]

Hey everyone,

Been a paid member for 3 days and this is my first time posting

I have a quick question about competitive analysis with the MozBar.  I do not want to point out the exact website (unless that is something cool to do on this forum), but there is a site ranking for a single keyword in the local 7 pack in slot one, which is also slot one for the SERP entirely.  When I go to look at the page in more detail, the MozBar is showing no DA, PA, anything at all, and the Open Site Explorer is showing no links internal or external.

I know that the page has to have at least some of these elements populated in order to be ranking for a term this competitive, so why is the bar not showing anything?  The bar works GREAT on other sites below this one.

Thanks for any help!

[tonyflorespsa]

Thank you to both of you!  I am going to emphasize my efforts on citations for the moment.  It is great to have people on here willing to help relatively new people like myself.

[MattAntonino]

This is my favorite question on the forum, I think.

Ok, so let's start from the beginning:  I wrote a post on why Moz metrics may not show everything.

The gist of it is simple: there are a lot of factors in SEO and you're considering only a few.

For instance, I can rank a site on the 7-pack (as your example) without building a single link. It's done through citations, which are sites with your business name, address, phone number, and website address together.  The link doesn't have to be active but if you confirm with Google Places, build a few quality citations - for some keywords that's enough and you can rank that way. I took someone from "Average Position: 300" in Google Analytics to page 1 for their main keyword in less than 7 days this way.

Second, it may not be their only site or their first site.  If I build 10,000 links to example.com and then I close example and open example1.com and 301 redirect example.com to example1.com, Moz will show blank metrics but I will get a lot of the "ranking power" of that previous site.

Finally, you can't see all the links.  Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, SEO SpyGlass, Webmasters Tools, Google search - they all return different results.  Moz has a particular type of result they return and a particular type they miss (or skip) every single time. I can build 2500 powerful links to your site and purposely not let a single one be picked up by Moz. I just know which sites Google likes that Moz doesn't.

Make sense?  Lots of reasons. They could be killing it with basically a handful of links from a powerful site.  They could be doing everything right on-site and have a few citations... there are always sites Google seems to pass through to test and see if they get clicks. These spots are practically "reserved" for results that don't make sense if all you do is look at the numbers.

(Three sites in the top 10 for "Viagra" have an extremely low PA/DA (1).  I would suggest 301s are in place there.)

[yeagerd]

I am not sure what you are seeing or the conditions but I have noticed that sometimes when cdn's are used you will actually be sitting on the subdomain or another domain all together when you click on the page.

Some caches can make the same thing happen sometimes.

Make sure you are sitting on the actual page when it pulls up.

As far as the opensite not showing any links, if you copy n paste from the address bar and have any variation of the page, it will not read correct.

Make sure you have your actual desired url, is my advice as SEO juice will follow the canonical meta but the tools will not.

That is all I can think of anyways.