Competitor Ranks Highly Despite LOTS of Duplication
-
One of my Moz campaigns tracks my main competitor. I can't get over the fact that this competitor continues to rank well despite having thousands of duplication issues while I currently have less than 10. Our websites are similar both structurally and product-wise.
The two images attached include OSE comparisons for the keyword "kraft envelopes". My competitor ranks #2 for the term, while I rank #9. I don't get why! And again, looking from a top-level perspective, MOZ shows that my competitor's website is full of duplication issues and other problems while my site is healthy as a horse. All responses are greatly appreciated.
-
Oh yes Andrew. You should invest some serious time to clean the link profile so that it looks natural and organic. We have seen dramatic improvements with clean link profiles.
-
IMHO, no link audit software can give you the whole picture of your link profile but a combination of all those can. We use almost all of them while carrying out a major backlinks check especially when dealing with penguin recovery.
-
Hi Andrew,
I meant, the competitor's website is much bigger and is driving loads of organic traffic for high search volume keywords/phrases.
"I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed. "
This theory is not a correct perspective. Even with more pages, the link juice will be still within the website unless you have a ton of out-bound links pointing to external websites.
There are a lot of other ranking factors that make the competitor rank ahead of you. If you look at organic search competition for your website in SEMRush, the competitor website is number one competitor for your website and if you look at the organic search competition for your competitor website, your website stands at 9th position. Please have a look at the ranking factors list provided in my previous post. Moreover, no matter how good a website is, it cannot rank for all the keywords/phrases in the niche. When I looked further down in the organic keywords data for both of your domains, its very evident that your competitor ranks excellently well for search queries with the term, 'envelopes' in them. Infact, they are the number one site in Google for almost all the envelopes related search queries. Their domain name must be playing a bit role in this along with other ranking factors.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thank you Moosa. I will be conducting a more thorough audit.
-
After more research, I realize my link audit consisted mainly of link removal for just my homepage. I will have to do more for all of my inner pages. Thank you!
-
Is AHREFs the best link audit software? I conducted a major link audit recently using a combination of OSE and webmaster tools but they clearly did not catch everything.
-
Thank you Devanur. We are aware of our poor URL structure and are considering a site-wide change to include separators in all URLs.
"The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index" - - why does this matter? I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed.
-
Moosa got it spot on. Just by looking at few parameters, we can't say that a website can rank high in Google. Here is something that can be handy while doing a comprehensive SEO audit. Though the list in there is not an official ranking parameters list, it can give you a fair idea about how and what things come in to play when it comes to search engine rankings. Hope it helps:
http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
One of the basic things that you need to understand is that Google uses complex mathematics (Algorithms) to rank a website against a query and there are around 200 plus signals and not all of them are widely discussed.
There could be several reasons which includes quality of content, title tags, linking domains, website structure, internal linking and the list goes on.
Keeping the Devanur’s comment in mind I can safely advise you to do audit your website again and fix the problem to make it more SEO friendly plus get links from high quality places.
Hope this helps!
-
Just another addition to the above. When I checked the backlinks using AHREFs for the jampaper page, most of the links come from Chinese domains. This might not be good if your target market is not China. You might want to look in to this.
-
Hi,
Before digging deep, the striking difference is the URL structure. Your competitor has a clean URL structure with hyphen as a word separator. Looking at your URL, it has no word separators and looks sub-optimal with too many words held together without word separators.
Coming to the duplication issues. Just because a site has duplicate content, its not bound to be penalized. The intention matters here than the duplication itself. If you look at the size of the websites. The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index and drives much more organic traffic.I looked at SEMRush data for both the sites and the competitor is a clear winner.
Moreover, the search query also matters a lot in this case and the competitor has it in the domain name. This also plays an important role. Those were my two cents and the first thing that I would do is to make the URL structure a little better.
Good luck friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Unsolved Mobile Rankings for me and competitors disappear in Moz but still ranking.
Hi, I'm trying to create an SEO report for my client however their mobile rankings have completely disappeared for Google Mobile rankings. Competitors rankings have disappeared as well. Could this be a Moz configuration issue?
Moz Pro | | baddjuju0 -
301 Redirects - But still duplicate content?
Our website domain website.com redirects to website.com/en (since it's in English). Therefore, all pages on website.com redirects to website.com/en. In my Moz analytics, it says I have duplicate content, and lists all of these pages. Didn't the 301 redirects take care of the duplicate content? Or do I still have to add canonical tags?
Moz Pro | | Taulia0 -
Why does SEO MOZ Pro scan your competitors keyword rankings?
I find the keyword rankings feature of SEOmoz Pro probably it's most useful feature. I was wondering why you can't see your listed competitors stats in comparison?
Moz Pro | | AndyMcSherry0 -
Rank Report Not Updating
The ranking tool indicates that a new rank report will be generated every Tuesday. My last report was on November 15th. It is now November 25th. It missed last week. Should I report something wrong or is this normal? How do I keep it updating on a weekly basis like it's supposed to? I checked in settings to see if I had done anything wrong and couldn't find anything. Regards, Dino
Moz Pro | | Dino640 -
Cities in Keywords Ranking Reports
So I've been in the habit of creating a master list of keywords concatenated with the city name so I can track my local rankings versus competitors. 1. Is this the correct thing to do to help hone in on who competitive my sites are ranking in the local market? 2. If so, by doing this the On Page reports seem to be totally screwed, because the searches I'm tracking (with city) vs the keywords I want to analyse for on-page ranking (without city), are different. What is the solution?
Moz Pro | | justlawonline0 -
Rank Tracker violate Google Guidelines?
I would like to find out whether the use of SEOMOZ rank tracker violate Google's guidelines. "Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
Moz Pro | | PGRob0 -
My rankings report is giving out wrong information
Hi, i am very puzzled about the rankings report. For some reason the past couple of weeks it is giving wrong information for example, my site www.in2town.co.uk the report says that the keyword gastric band hypnosis is eight in google on page one but when i have checked i cannot find it. It also says the word gastric band hypnotherapy is sixth place in google on page one can anyone please let me know what is going on
Moz Pro | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What time of day are keyword rankings updated
The keyword rankings in one of my campaigns update on Tuesday. It looks like they updated today but when I downloaded to CSV, some say last Tuesday. Is this because they didn't change or are they still updating? Today is Tuesday. i.e., do they update at a specific time and if so, what time?
Moz Pro | | mikescotty0