Is my client's site penalized and if not, why are other lesser quality sites ranking with lower metrics than my client's?

[Deacyde]

Hello,

I'm trying to explain to a client, as to why certain websites that appear in the top 50 listings for a keyword are there when they don't have very good backlink profiles, and for this keyword, seems you need a high PA above 20 or DA above 25, just to page for page 2 - 3.

Running a full SERPs report, I have seen that backlinks to the page that's ranking seems to be as high of a factor as PA, followed by DA and overall backlink profile. Having a high score in one of these 4 areas seems to increase your ranking. However, going into page 3 and beyond, seems that things kinda take a weird turn.

After comparing the client's site to those ranking on page 2 I could see that all of them had better PA and more links to the page ranking for that keyword, so page 2 I understand why we don't rank on yet.

However, looking at page 3, I see that the client's site in question has better PA, DA, links to page and overall links to domain. Which leaves me to think we have a penalty that's keeping us ranking 50 or beyond. Since our metrics across the boards for what MOZ is showing as ranking factors.  The more odd issue is that looking at the line graph, shows right at the time we implemented sitewide https our ranking for this one keyword dropped, while rankings for our other keywords increased.

Am I to assume it's a keyword density penalty? What penalties are there with a outcome of ranking limits?

[Deacyde]

Thank you for the responses, upon further investigation, I did a 5 year data grab and looked at the organic traffic in general, then found another graph that shows google algo updates in coloration to those monthly organic traffic totals and saw that Google Panda hit us a few times back in 2012 and we seem to never have recovered from it.

Which tells me we still have something going on with this site related to panda, but what doesn't make sense is one keyword we try to rank for seems to be affected while other keywords we can increase rank with.

As far as content is concerned, I've created a few completely new guides and even a handbook for users, content wise this site gives more to users than most sites, in fact, haven't seen other sites even have the level of helpful content geared towards the customer other than manufacturers.

Is it possible to be hit with a panda penalty for one keyword for ranking? Or would that only happen from an over optimization issue? Reason I ask is that is for our big keyword ( which is a two word phrase ) with an (s) at the end we're page 7, without the (s) we're page 5. But for our secondary keyword, that uses one of the words from our big keyword, we rank page 3 for both variations with and without (s).

[GlobeRunner]

It's always extremely difficult to diagnose exactly what's going on when you don't have any specific URLs to refer to. However, you mentioned that it appears to be one keyword or one particular page--not a lot of pages or all the pages on the site. So, I don't think it's a penalty on the site. Rather, it may just be some "over optimization" for that particular keyword or that one page.

What I would focus on is the anchor text pointing to that page. I would look at the anchor text of links to that page, and then to the pages that are ranking to see what the differences are. Also, while I do like OSE, you have to realize that all of these link data tools have different ways of crawling, and may not pick up on all the links. It's best to consult several different backlink tools, along with Open Site Explorer.

[EGOL]

When you are competing with websites that have DAs in the 20s, superior page optimization, a title tag that elicits clicks, and even more verbose content can make a big difference in the rankings.  These sites are competing on their page assets rather than on the authority of their domains or their backlink profiles.  So, looking at backlink metrics might not be informative.

In these situations, I would improve my content so that it is far superior to the competition and then work on promoting the website.