How is it possible that this site has a higher page authority than my site?
-
Judging by open site explorer, I'm crushing my competitor in every imaginable way. And yet, somehow they have a higher page authority than me and, consequently, are ranking higher than me. How is this possible? My site is on the left:
-
That's interesting, and thanks for the insight on that ratio. I had a feeling the quality of the links might be playing a factor. I have one sight sending me literally thousands of links, and even though the site is very high authority, and I'm paying them top dollar, I'm beginning to suspect the link juice coming from that site is not good.
-
Hmm, are both domains roughly the same age and authority? Also, there might be a collection of additional page or domain factors that your competitor is excelling at but don't appear on most SEO analysis tools. To try to identify some potential ways the competitor site might be gaining an advantage, try checking this infographic for some less often looked at ranking factors.
Regards,
Chris Wilson
-
That makes sense. They're definitely beating me on domain authority. So I guess I just need to get more quality links to more pages on my website.
-
Thanks Chris. Strange thing is: I received a B for the keyword I'm being out-ranked on, and my competitor received an F.
-
Scott,
I'm not sure if its the right answer but here is what we found.
Our compitation out ranks us at times as well, so we did some research into the ratio MozT/MozR in your case 5.42/4.38=1.23744 your compeditors MozT/MozR is 5.37/4.23=1.2695
So their ratio is much higher than yours which we presume means that somone may have more links but their just junk links as shown by the ratio. You can see this ratio come into play at MOZ Tools rank checker.
We will kill John Deere in everything but still rank lower because of their MozT/MozR ratio.
-
Hi Scott,
Though a good guide for how well your page is building rank, the open site explorer is not going to tell you how well you are optimizing on-page for your desired keywords. It is possible that your competitor is out-optimizing you in terms of on-page efforts. Check the On Page Keyword Grader to make sure you are doing everything you can on the page to help you rank for your desired keywords.
Hope this helps,
Chris Wilson
-
What are the domain authorities of the two sites? If that page is on a domain with higher authority, though it has fewer external and internal links, the internal links the page does have may be passing higher amounts of authority.
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
-
Page Tracking using Custom URLs - is this viable?
Hi Moz community! I’ll try to make this question as easy to understand as possible, but please excuse me if it isn’t clear. Just joined a new team a few months ago and found out that on some of our most popular pages we use “custom URLs” to track page metrics within Google Analytics. NOTE: I say “custom URLs” because that is the best way for me to describe them. As an example: This page exists to our users: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Ram_HD/2012/photos-interior/ But this is the URL we have coded on the page: cars-trucks/used-cars/reviews/2012-Ram-HD/photos-interior/ (within the custom variance script labeled as “var l_tracker=” ) It is this custom URL that we use within GA to look up metrics about this page. This is just one example of many across our site setup to do the same thing Here is a second example: Available page to user: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Cadillac_ATS/2015/ Custom “var l_tracker=” /cars-trucks/2015-Cadillac-ATS/overview/ NOTE: There is a small amount of fear that the above method was implemented years ago as a work-around to a poorly structured URL architecture. Not validated, but that is a question that arose. Main Questions: Is the above implementation a normal and often used method to track pages in GA? (coming from an Omniture company before – this would not be how we handled page level tracking) Team members at my current company are divided on this method. Some believe this is not a proper implementation and are concerned that trying to hide these from Google will raise red flags (i.e. fake URLs in general = bad) I cannot find any reference to this method anywhere on the InterWebs - If method is not normal: Any recommendations on a solution to address this? Potential Problems? GA is currently cataloguing these tracking URLs in the Crawl Error report. Any concerns about this? The team wants to hide the URLs in the Robots.txt file, but some team members are concerned this may raise a red flag with Google and hurt us more than help us. Thank you in advance for any insight and/or advice. Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | usnseomoz0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I've been hit by every update and have spent thousands of $ and hundreds of hours trying to survive. Survival looks doubtful if I can't get turned around in 4 weeks or less. I have found adwords and google errors and fixed them. Alexa says us-nano.com is the best ranked site. I used my moz bar and they are doing everything wrong, keyword stuffing, no H1's tags, poor design. How are they ranking & I'm not? My duplicate meta tags are from this week when I added alexa and bing ID's to my header to verify my site ownership. http://imgur.com/a/I1bsw I1bsw
Reporting & Analytics | | cheaptubes0 -
Google Analytics Set-Up for site with both http & https pages
We have a client that migrated to https last September. The site uses canonicals pointing to the https version. The client IT team is reluctant to put 301 redirects from the non-secure to the secure and we are not sure why they object. We ran a screaming frog report and it is showing both URLs for the same page (http and https). The non-secure version has a canonical pointing to the secure version. For every secure page there is a non-secure version in ScreamingFrog so Google must be ignoring the canonical and still indexing the page however, when we run a site: we see that most URLs are the secure version. At that time we did not change the Google Analytics setup option to use: "https" instead of "http" BUT GA appears to be recording data correctly. Yesterday we set up a new profile and selected "https" but our question is: Does the GAnalytics http/https version make a difference if so, what difference is it?
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB1 -
Weird visitors to my site
Hi, I am in the process of disentangling myself from a dodgy SEO company. At some point they set up another GA account on my site without consulting me. I replaced the tracking code with my original account on my wordpress site, placing the tracking code on the dashboard. There is a box in the dashboard for you to do this. For some reason the account he created is still giving me analytics but from mostly one url :forum.topic55622342.darodar.com. It has marked it as a referral? When you click it it redirects to this site : http://activities.aliexpress.com/computers_channel.php?aff_platform=aaf&sk=vV3B2RJYB%3A&cpt=1421321021096&null There have been 218 visits from this "referral" in the last month and also 2 direct visits to a clients online gallery (i'm a photographer). I am guessing the code for this new account is still on the site somewhere? Funnily enough in the first month I was getting targeted by spam using my contact form and I was a bit perplexed as to why. We had to put captchas on the contact forms which I was loathe to do as its another step for a client to have to go through causing resistance. Has this link got something to do with it? I have recently disavowed a lot of toxic links he created, so maybe they had something to do with it? Best wishes. David.
Reporting & Analytics | | WallerD0 -
No Google Analytics code on page BUT reporting is active
How could Google Analytics be reporting data if my pages don't have the GA code on them? Mike
Reporting & Analytics | | Mike_c0 -
Is it possible to have too much content?
Is it possible to have too much content? If so, how do we prove (or at least get evidence) one way or the other to whether we are being adversely affected in the SERPs? The only way we could think of is to publish a lot less for a week or two, but nobody is willing to risk it. Numbers wise we are publishing an average of 125 articles a day, with an archive of around 300k fwiw thanks 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Fammy0 -
Best way to handle duplicate title on Home page?
Moz reports two links to the same Home page ad duplicate titles ... http://myhjhome.com/index.php
Reporting & Analytics | | ElykInnovation
http://myhjhome.com I'm not sure if I should just 301 redirect http://myhjhome.com/index.php to http://myhjhome.com, or if there is a better way to handle that? Or should I comb the website and make sure all links to the Home page dont include index.php? Just looking for some extra help here, learning as I'm going, thanks!!0 -
Page Views Plummeted
Since using SEOMoz to diagnose and address issues with my site www.esecaucus.com, my page views have plummeted while my number of visits and unique visitors has remained intact. Does this mean that previously the amount of page views were artificially inflated by some kind of technical error in the site?
Reporting & Analytics | | Nobody15330770827560