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?
-
Thanks for both of your responses!
@IrvCo_Interactive I do have a Webmaster Tools and I do not have any warnings. But I do see 70 errors under Search Appearance > Structured Data, all regarding Missing: author and/or Missing: updated. I will look into what that's about.
I am working to fix the weird subdomains coming up in Google for our site. We never used these domains and someone suggested to me that this might be a result of a wildcard A record in my DNS. This other Moz article mentioned to use .htaccess to 301 these, so that might be the fix I use: http://moz.com/blog/find-your-sites-biggest-technical-flaws-in-60-minutes
I am not quite sure what I need to do to make sure my site's internal structure is solid, I just set it up in ways that seemed intuitive from a user perspective. I'm sure there are articles out there on this subject though.
@Moosa Hemani Indeed that site http://www.hvhtek.com/associates/surfopt/surfopt.html does use a few paragraphs from our site. What tool did you use to identify that this duplication was out there? I have done almost no work on link building and neither has anyone else, so in a sense what we have now is our natural link profile. But our site has been around for a long time so we may have gathered some bad links anyway.
-
There are literally tons of factors that are involved when Google ranks a site so this can be anything other than just links and quality of content. There are other factors like on-page optimization, site architecture, how you have been discussed on other websites, social media and much more…
I give a quick look to your website and here are the following things I witnessed in a one go!
- Duplication of Content
I believe there are two different websites were you are using the similar content, I just checked one page and Google says the content that is available on the website is more or less similar to the content available on this URL: http://www.hvhtek.com/associates/surfopt/surfopt.html
I believe this page also represents your company but technically they are two different domains containing duplicate content.
The idea is to have a unique and quality content on the website and this can help you improve your organic visibility.
- Links
In my honest opinion, links are playing their part too!
Open Site explorer said you are getting 182 links from the 10 root domains, probably you should increase the links from the root domains and if you are using tactics like blog commenting or forum posting to get links then consider avoiding it as this will hurt your rankings instead of building it.
Many of the links are no follow (probably coming from blog comments). It is important to have links from diversified areas and not all should be no followed or do followed.
Keeping the link profile as natural as possible is a way to go and outrank your competitors from the desired key phrases.
These are the quick analysis, I believe digging the website in detail might help you caught more areas where your attention is needed. There can be multiple factors that are playing their part and as a whole you are not been able to rank above your competitors and win organic traffic!
Hope this helps!
-
There are hundreds of ranking factors, so essentially what you are asking is the entire process of SEO.
Do you have Google Webmaster Tools for your site? That might be a good starting point. It's not just the quantity of links but the quality as Google sees it. Open Site Explorer is a great tool but you should check to see if Google has any warnings or alerts in your account.
I also like to look at how Google indexes a site. You get interesting results when you type in site:surfaceoptics.com into Google. Is the order of the pages what you would expect? Are high value pages coming up above low value pages? If not maybe your own internal linking on the site needs to be rethought. Do the email servers need to be indexable by Google? (pop, smtp, mail, mx, etc.) That seems a little wonky to me. I don't see that too often. You should maybe block those with a robots.txt file or something?
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
-
Is content on widget bar less 'seo important' than main content?
hi, i wonder if content on widget bar less 'seo important' than main content.. i mean, is better to place content and links on main cotent than on wordpress widget bar? What are the pros and cons? tx!
Technical SEO | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
New Site maintaining rank on old URL's
Hi I have a new website going live which has a different page names etc i.e. the old site had pages that are ranking called aboutus.html and the new site is called about.php What is the best approach to maintain the rank and also on orphaned pages Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Don't reach to make our site back in rankings
My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78 Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now. Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized. We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages. I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us. We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem. In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks. We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized. I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
Technical SEO | | andromedical
thank you0 -
What's the latest on Title Tags?
What is the latest on what Google is looking for? Keyword one, Keyword two? Sentences with the Keyword in them?
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Has Google stopped rendering author snippets on SERP pages if the author's G+ page is not actively updated?
Working with a site that has multiple authors and author microformat enabled. The image is rendering for some authors on SERP page and not for others. Difference seems to be having an updated G+ page and not having a constantly updating G+ page. any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
Https-pages still in the SERP's
Hi all, my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content. Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow> I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up. Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index? Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))... thanx in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
404's and duplicate content.
I have real estate based websites that add new pages when new listings are added to the market and then deletes pages when the property is sold. My concern is that there are a significant amount of 404's created and the listing pages that are added are going to be the same as others in my market who use the same IDX provider. I can go with a different IDX provider that uses IFrame which doesn't create new pages but I used a IFrame before and my time on site was 3min w/ 2.5 pgs per visit and now it's 7.5 pg/visit with 6+min on the site. The new pages create new content daily so is fresh content and better on site metrics (with the 404's) better or less 404's, no dup content and shorter onsite metrics better? Any thoughts on this issue? Any advice would be appreciated
Technical SEO | | AnthonyLasVegas0 -
Ecommerce site with currency selectors giving dupe content?
Hi everyone,
Technical SEO | | BeachDude
One of my ecommerce sites uses BigCommerce. They have a feature where you can add different currency buttons to change the currency that the customer can shop as. This is great because if people from the UK visit our site, they can change the currency to their own rather than US. It just ads a variable on the end of the URL string to change the currency. However, in my webmaster tools I noticed that I think i am getting a bunch of duplicate content. For example, it thinks i have duplicate title tags for the following: domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=1
.domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=2
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=3
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=4 I thought about adding "rel=no-follow" but unfortunately I don't have access to this file to edit the code. Any suggestions?0