Detailed ranking question for the pros
-
Hi Community,
We've been struggling with the search engine ranking of our SEO optimised homepage for a number of months. I'm going to provide an overview of the page stats in hope that somebody might have a suggestion as to what the problem might be or where we should be focusing our efforts. I have also provided the stats of our main competitor as I have no idea why they are ranking so high based on the stats provided:
URL in question: https://mysite.com
- On Page Grade for our targeted keyword: A
- Domain authority: 36
- Page authority: 45
- Root Doman Links: 57
- Total Links: 634
- SE Ranking: #17
Competitor URL in question: https://competitorsite.com
- On Page Grade for same targeted keyword: A
- Domain authority: 32
- Page authority: 43
- Root Doman Links: 28
- Total Links: 919
- SE Ranking: #1
Another strange this about our homepage is that a second tier page on our site is actually ranking higher in the search ranking for the Targeted Keyword (#9), even though this page has not been optimised and has an On Page Grade of F.
Does anybody have any suggestions of what we might be overlooking or what the issue here might be?
-JF
-
Thanks Netrepid - that might be a last resort in order to just boost up the internal page, but at this stage I'm trying to get to the bottom of why the homepage is ranking so poorly and why the internal page is ranking better. Once we understand what the issues here are then we can probably put together a better plan to optimise and fix both of the pages.
-
Hi Sheena,
I'd like to post a direct link but I've been told that it opens you up to getting a lot of contact from agencies/freelancers looking for new biz (not a bad thing though!). Also, I recognise that some competitors may have their eye on the forum so we'd just prefer to keep it private at this stage - at least until we figure out the issues!
Would it be OK if I PMed you with info in case you might be able to see any glaring issues on the site upfront?
-
Cheers AMHC,
I took a look at the trust flow and I see that our competitor does have a slightly higher trust flow than us. However, the trust flow of our internal page (which ranks higher than our homepage) is 17 whereas our homepage is 23. Taking into the fact that the On Page Grade and the back link profile for our internal page is much lower than the homepage, it's really confusing as to why it might be ranking higher. Any other thoughts on that?
-
I say optimize the internal page to an 'A', put a keyword rich text link from the homepage to that internal page in content, and get some co-citations for either your homepage or your internal page to match the link profile of that top ranking page.
And when that's done, add a reciprocal link from that internal page back to the homepage and see if you can get that bumped up in the SERPs, too.
Might work, might not. But it's worth a shot.
-
Sheena is spot on. Google has over 200 ranking factors. A tool that I like is Majestic SEO and it's trust flow metric. Quite often, when I can't figure our why a site is outranking us, they have a higher TF than we do. I rely on Moz's DA/PA and Majestic's CF/TF, and they are usually pretty accurate when used together.
Here's one other factor - DA/PA/CF/TF needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Majestic and Moz have their own Bots, and don't crawl and index nearly as thoroughly as Google does, and they also crawl more slowly. I've seen some studies that show that Majestic and Moz only pick up 1/3 of your actual backlinks. If your competitor has some awesome links that were missed by Moz and Majestic missed, this could also be the answer.
-
There are a thousand possibilities as to why they're outranking your site. I know everyone tries to keep their sites private in here, but for such a specific inquiry, we really need to see the pages in question. Kind of a 'help us help you' situation.
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
-
.htaccess Question
Hi,I have a website www.contractor-accounts.co.uk that has an .htaccess file that strips .php and forces a closing brace /. The site is now over 6 months old and still has a very low ranking with MOZ also rating the site as DA/PA = 1 which seems to indicate some sort of issue with the website. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this site is ranking poorly as much of the onpage SEO has been completed to a level of 90%+ for specific keyterms so I'm probably either looking at routing of the framework of so other technical SEO issues possibly? Any help much apreciated... <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c=""><ifmodule mod_negotiation.c="">Options -MultiViews</ifmodule> RewriteEngine On # Redirect Trailing Slashes...
Technical SEO | | ecrmeuro
# RewriteRule ^(.)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
# Redirect non-WWW to WWW...
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^contractor-accounts.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.contractor-accounts.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] # Handle Front Controller...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]</ifmodule>0 -
Ranking Drop
hey guys, I know there is always someone here asking this questions, but I have done my fair share of investigation and have not come up with a cause. my ranking dropped from page one to page 2 or 3 last sunday in time span of 4 hours. After that I read that google was updating panda with 4.1, but don't know why I got hit exactly. my competition is all clear and some have even gained rankings, and mine dropped even though my domain and page authority increased as well. any ideas would help. I already checked all the obvious ones (such as spam, links, content, etc)
Technical SEO | | s-s1 -
Odd Ranking Page - Contact Us
Hi Everyone, So I have a client and when they are logged in the "Contact Us" page ranks as the number 1 page. She sends me screenshots when she is looked in through the corporate Google account, in a panic because of this...I am guessing she is frequently visiting the contact us page while logged in, which is why this is happening but I can't think of any other reason. From a ranking factors perspective there aren't any reasons for this. There are barely any links pointing to this page. I just don't know what to tell her. I can't duplicate it.
Technical SEO | | runnerkik0 -
What Would i do to get my site ranking high?
Hello Friends, I need your help please tell me what would I do to get my site ranking high in Google search engine. When I start my work on my site my work blog commenting , social bookmarking, keyword targeting etc.… But now the scene is completely changing. Now I am working on just guest blogging. I don’t understand that what would I do next after the guest blogging. Because I think there is now just one way to promote your site VIA guest blogging. Now please tell me is there any other option to work and get high ranking?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
An Easy Question - Backlinks
Hi guys, I know this is an easy question and I'm already quite sure of the answer for it but it would be good to get some other views. This website - http://www.collapso.net/ have 261,923 backlinks to our website according to Ahrefs. They have 1000's of pages like this - http://www.collapso.net/countiesnew/Cork.html which link to our site. 43.95% of the backlinks to our site are from these guys but we've been fortunate enough to never receive any warnings via WMT or ever experienced drop offs in traffic. My question is - Do we have this site remove all the links to our site or leave them alone? Given there's such a large quantity of links, I'm not exactly sure what the impact would be on us. My instinct says get rid of them. Although part of me questions what such a massive drop in our link profile would look like to Google.
Technical SEO | | MarkScully0 -
Increase Search Ranking for CEO
Hi guys My company CEO is concerned that when her name is googled pictures of a glamour model appear in the image results area. The glamour model shares a second name with our CEO and this is why the model's images are appearing. I have been asked to rectify this situation. My CEO has a linked in page and twitter account which are underused but no personal page on our company website. I was thinking of buying the url for the CEO's name and optimizing a small site for her name with bio etc and links to twitter, lined in etc. Would this be the best strategy? Thanks Gavin
Technical SEO | | gavinr0 -
Duplicat content affecting SEO Rankings
We have one main site called buypropertyanywhere, it is a database it holds all the data for all our property websites. One of our most popular sites is housesalesbulgaria, which takes the data from buypropertyanywhere in regards to bulgarian property and display it. The same with housesalesturkey it takes the data in regards to turkish property and display it. We think because buypropertyanywhere and housesalesbulgaria has the same data it has high duplicate content . We think this is affecting the SEO rankings for housesalesbulgaria. Google is looking at housesalesbulgaria as if a copy of buypropertyanywhere. So therefore should we SEO buypropertyanywhere soley and link it to housesalesbulgaria through the articles and content we put on the site. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Feily0