At a bit of a loss as to poor rankings
-
I have a site in the UK, with these metrics:
- 15 years old
- 500 pages in sitemap, but Majestic says 186,000 indexed URLs ?
- DA of 45, PR of 3
- 1000 links from 200 linking root domains, across from 150 IP's (from OSE)
- 33,000 links in OSE when I use the compare tool and look at the "links to this root domain" section
- 24,000 external links according to Majestic
- 350 shares, 2,000 tweets, 60 +1's
- Median PA of linking root domains (from OSE export) = 20
- no Moz on-page errors, or webmaster tools issues
The above metrics are better than 2 competitors who have only just launched, have fewer links, lower DA, etc, and are ranking for keywords like "wedding entertainment", "corporate entertainers"
Our site is www.superted.com
-
Why doesn't OSE show 33,000 links when I select "links to this root domain". Why will those links only be shown when I do a domain comparison in OSE?
-
I'm thinking our anchor text distribution is the problem. We have very few links containing the keywords want. Also maybe our sitemap is an issue as it only lists 500 of our pages? But given our domain age, DA, etc... surely anchor text / site map isn't the only issue here?
Any hints would be awesome.
-
Wowsers... nice response.
Thanks for spending the time on writing all that out
I'll re-work the site structure, taking all comments on board!
-
I think there are generally three areas of weakness for this site at the moment;
- Brand Strength - searching google.co.uk for "superted" or "super ted" and the site is no where on the SERPs, instead you get stuff about a TV show --> http://screencast.com/t/Am735xTr0 - and so if you're going to have the same brand name as another thing out there (even if you came before the TV show) the fact you are not ranking for your own brand means Google does not weigh the "brand" very strongly. The build this up you need
- lots of strong profiles on the web (Google Plus, social, etc) all clearly connecting back to your site
- recent mentions in reputable publications
- people searching for your brand name or branded terms and clicking on your site in the SERPs
- (sidenote: I just realized a while later the "brand" name might also be "the entertainment directory" and you do show one result in the SERP for that --> http://screencast.com/t/hy2wi88VFQtH but this also seems weak and unclear.
- Keyword Targeting / Architecture - I know it would be desirable to rank for "wedding entertainment" but it's really hard to even find a page solely dedicated to "wedding entertainment" that answers that specific query for the user really well. Instead, you have to dig many clicks in to even find such a page and when you do, it's "wedding bands" not wedding entertainment" --> http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands - what I would do is some really thorough keyword research and align it with architecture - this is a pretty involved process, you can't fix it overnight, but in short;
- You're first do very in depth keyword research - my intuition tells me a site of this magnitude would result in probably 10,000 keywords minimum.
- Then you'd prioritize these by many metrics - search volume, current ranking, conversion potential, competition etc
- Then here's the key - you'd look at top keywords that do not have a singular page focusing on answer this user's query better than any other page on the net
- You'd have to work through a process of aligning keyword opportunities with best site architecture - this may mean building new pages, this may mean removing pages that don't provide value for you or users.
- User Experience - When I land on the homepage it is a terrifying experience. There are so many options, and it is not clear what direction to go in.
- The "hamburger" menu option is probably not clear that it's even there to most people. When I do click on it, there options are overwhelming and clicking on an initial option just brings us to another set of options.
- Then trying the search bar, I expect to get a normal search result - like a list of "wedding bands in ___" but instead I just got a form to fill out, which is surprising and doesn't seem immediately helpful.
- When you click "play" on the video in the slider, the video starts playing but then the slider also starts moving so not only can I not seem to watch the video, I can't stop it from playing once the slider kicks in.
A common oversight I see, is that the site is organized from the site owners perspective not the shoppers perspective. In other words, your basic categories are "bands" "look alikes" etc - but a user would _start _with "I need entertainment for a wedding/party/event ..." - the user starts with the need (X event, situation etc) and would like to see options - so I would consider organizing the core structure of the site around "wedding entertainment" "party entertainment" "corporate even entertainment" etc - think of the categories of events and needs the user has and show them the listings from that perspective.
To answer your questions;
1. I believe the comparison numbers "total links" are including internal links - which there are a lot of.
2. I don't think anchor text is as much of an issue as the other things mentioned above. The sitemap is also not the biggest issue in my opinion. If I were to boil it down it would be site architecture / keyword alignment coupled with user experience.
-
No, but if I highlight a page it may give it more Google signals than the intended page you want to promote and that's just annoying
And Google has confirmed it does crawl naked links (links without anchor just written on a page) even if it says they are treated as nofollow it is still a signal.
-
Is it a problem if google crawls this thread?
Thanks for your insight into this!
-
I found this page http://www.superted.com / wedding-entertainment
I put a gap between the slash in case google crawls this thread.
re: first comment, I searched for that because I did a Google site query and there seem to be a lot of similar things coming up, I cant remember what I was looking at at the time that brought that up exactly, but it does seem like there could be a potential quality issue.
-
Interesting.
Why did you search for: "Find event ideas, wedding entertainment or party ideas" ?
When I do it, I get the same result and also the google message about some results being omitted.
Maybe all those pages are considered "keyword stuffed" by Google?
You said you noticed one of them had a page. How do you mean?
There is a landing page for weddings:
http://www.superted.com/wedding-entertainment.php
But no external links to it yet.
-
one thing I did find interesting is if you search for "Find event ideas, wedding entertainment or party ideas", Google comes up with a whole bunch of pages but none of them have that content on them, It has renamed all the descriptions.
It would seem that Google does not think your descriptions are good enough for serps. This shows there could be some content issues on the site.
Have you though of creating two main categories for "wedding entertainment" and "corporate entertainers" work on creating great content for them? I noticed one of them had a page but the content was really not what you want to show on it.
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
-
Possible google sandbox issue? Organically ranking page 1 for our number 1 keyword, but page 5 sometimes 6 on google?
What are some things I can look into to figure out why google is ranking us on page 5 sometimes page 6, with some slight rank boosts to rank 36 from 48 but then falls right back. While Yahoo and Bing rank us page 1 consistently, without these big drops back. I use google search ( webmaster tools ) daily, fix 404s and make sure to fetch new content I create. Our site is within the Sandbox issue time frame, google 1st indexed the site about a year and a half ago, the site has been through various SEO service checks, and has had those issues fixed ( some bigcommerce won't allow, such as full sitewide ssl and a few other small factors ) but all the big stuff was handled or will be 100% handled after this redesign is complete. But just still seems we're stuck in the google hole again. We do use adwords, but no clear signs as to why we'd suffer such hardships with google ranking, only thing we don't have optimized in terms of on page optimization from moz is keyword in url, of which will be changing within the next month or two, as we're rolling our a new redesign with SEO 100% at the forefront, nice url paths, with keywords in their url, much more responsive site that uses less resources. But before we release this redesign, I'd like to find out what toe we stubbed of google's to give us such a ranking blackeye... We don't have that many backlinks, and I know these are a huge factor, however, building quality backlinks it's harder than walking on water at time and on the same level as spinning hay into gold. Any ideas community...
Competitive Research | | Deacyde0 -
Alexa Rank
Ok, I have a pretty good Alexa Ranking of 159K and have been online for less than a year. What my question is why is my Alexa Ranking so much better than all of my competitors who get way more traffic and have been online for years. The only thing that seems to be going slow is my page rank is still barely .98, while competitors are higher although they have lower Alexa Rank. What am I doing right to get good Alexa Rank?? What can I do to rais my PR and Domain Rank? Competitors for example
Competitive Research | | realmccoy1010 -
My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there. I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12. And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes. It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least. So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful. I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess. We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
Competitive Research | | harrybingham0 -
SERP rankings consistency
I have a website which is showing different serp rankings. On one computer, he's on the first page, on another, he's second page and another person from outside our office sees him ranked differently. What would account for the inconsistency in rankings?
Competitive Research | | priceseo0 -
Why would a site with virtually no external links and low authority rank very high?
Hey there: I'm not sure anyone's going to be game to answer this but... I have designed, done on-page optimization for and done ongoing content marketing and linkbuilding for a local fitness site. The site is about nine months old and I am attempting to achieve rank for the keyword "personal trainers in philadelphia." We've made progress; having taken a new site from +100 to 19 in about four or five months worth of content creation and linkbuilding on a very modest budget. I'm not complaining. What has me confused though is that there are one or two sites that are ranking very high for this keyword string with considerably shoddier metrics than our site and I'm wondering how a stock WP theme site with very few inbound links can rank top five for a reasonably competitive keyword? Our site is http://vtrainersinc.com. The site I've noticed that ranks top five and seems to have an inferior SEOMoz profile is bodycrafters.net. Anybody got any ideas as to why these things seem to occur? I have this feeling this site has stumbled upon a magic SEO elixir which I'd like to get my hands on!
Competitive Research | | splatdude0 -
Confused about sites ranking when compared to each other
I'm looking at the keyword "snow guards" for two competitor websites: snogem dot com (SG) snoshield dot com (SS) I've been watching these two for about 4 months. SG stays in the top 5 SERPs consistently, while SS bounces around from 15-20 on Google. I've looked at the competitive link comparison and SS appears to have a much better link profile when it comes to DA. Page specific metrics in OSE show SS with a higher mozrank, moztrust, internal followed links, linking root domains, total linking root domains, and linking C Blocks. It appears to me that SG has many more links, but their links seem to be many site wide exact match keyword links, and paid for advertisements on a major site in the metal roofing industry. Honestly the linking profile of SG surprises me that they rank so much higher than SS after the Panda/Penguin updates. I have two questions: 1. When competing against these sites, should I model SG's link profile? I'm nervous to because of my previous statement thinking they will get hit with Panda/Penguin like updates. 2. What would it take to bounce SS to competing with SG on the first page? Is the number of links the only thing this site is missing, or is there something else to focus on.
Competitive Research | | kadesmith0 -
How is otr ranking?
With the only content a list of links to realaudio files, how is the website, otr ranking?
Competitive Research | | newmon0 -
How many Page Rank 8 sites are there?
Anyone have any estimate of how many Page Rank 8 sites are out there? Best, Steve
Competitive Research | | Aggie0