Does social media presence + inbound links outweigh bad SEO?
-
Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us for keywords that we're targeting. The SEO errors are duplicate content, titles, and 404 errors. We've successfully nailed down much of our SEO issues to a bare minimum, although not eliminated them completely, so we're at a loss as to why we aren't gaining much ground.
From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence. Can it be inferred from this that an active social media presence and large inbound link count outweigh bad SEO practices? What else should we be looking for to help pinpoint why we're not gaining rank with the keywords we're targeting?
-
If you were hit by Panda... Google was telling you that your content was not up to their expectations.
**Now we're bouncing between the top 10 and the top 30. **
That probably means that you have not recoved from Panda. I would be working just about 100% on content. If you improve the content then you might get more links and more social shares. People like to great sites, people share great sites.
-
So the take-away that we should be looking at is worrying less about perfecting our technical SEO and focusing more on just creating a healthy and attractive user experience?
-
We were hit pretty hard by Panda in 2012 and have been struggling to regain lost ground since then. Previous to that point, we were ranking in the top 5 for all relevant keywords. Now we're bouncing between the top 10 and the top 30.
Regarding the duplicate content, they're (the competitor's) created by parameters and dynamic content as is natural for ecommerce stores, but not canonicalized. Our links come from relevant sources, but it's a matter of around 150 links for us and depending on the competitor, 1,500 to 19,000 links. From what I've seen, many of their links appear relevant as well but I haven't had the time to comb through all of them.
What would you define as over-targeting or hyper-targeted? Is that the same as keyword stuffing? If so, we do have issues with that given as an niche ecommerce store many of our products share at least one keyword that we're targeting.
-
Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us...
Some tools report SEO "errors" that don't mean anything. Sometimes I think that just report a big load of errors for an "apparent value" effect.
From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence.
This makes perfect sense. Bet your money on it. People love them and their site so much that they are linking to them, socializing with them, etc. If you don't have this then I would be looking at what you are doing to make visitors happy.
I think that making your visitors really happy is worth thousands of some of the SEO "errors" that are reported. It's great that you cleaned up your errors. Now you can work on pleasing your visitors.
-
There are numerous factors that could be doing this. Have they been around longer? Do they have any .Gov or .Edu backlinks? Are the tons of links that they have all from relevant sources? Do they have a better array of linking domains than your site does? Do they appear to be driving a lot of referral traffic from social media to their site? Are all those duplicate content pages you see actually created by parameters but canonicalized to the proper pages? Has your site ever been impacted by an algorithmic or manual penalty? Do your links come from relevant sources? Are you over-targeting your pages to keywords at the detriment of user experience? Is the anchor text of your backlinks all hyper-targeted or is the distribution more natural? And 404s aren't necessarily a bad thing if they're relevant 404s.
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
-
What impact does multiple links from the same c-block have on SEO?
Recently there's been a move made in my company to only allow backlinks from websites on different c-block IP addresses. The most links we have from one c-block is 15. There is a wide variety of other IP addresses linking to our site as well. My question is - do we need to be so restrictive with using websites from the same c-block as long as the neighbourhood is good and we're not linking sites with full identical IPs (matching d-block as well)?
Link Building | | LawMarketingYLF0 -
Spammy links
Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
How Do I Know which links are bad?
Hi All I have currently got a Manual Action on my Webmaster Tools account due to some unnatural links and I am in the process of seeding out the poor links with a view to having them removed or disavowed. Other than looking at each link individually to see if it looks relevant or spammy. Any ideas on how I can gauge which links are bad and which aren't??
Link Building | | Pete40 -
Do footer links pass less link juice?
One of my best inbound links for PA and DA happens to be a footer link, curious if it's less valuable or has any value at all.
Link Building | | Theskimonster0 -
What are inbound links worth after Panda and Penguin, since a site ranks for the NATIONAL keyword "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS!?!?
ARE INBOUND LINKS TODAY ALMOST WORTHLESS??!!? After having been the KING of SEO, down to the toilet? Today I got a great sample from a fellow SEO professional showing a site, rockymountainfurniture.com rank for "outdoor furniture" with ONLY 7 INBOUND LINKS FROM 3 DOMAINS and a domain trust of 14!!!! ON A NATIONAL, VALUABLE, HIGH QUERY VOLUME KEYWORD!! I was stunned, but is this the "NEW SEO WORLD" we live in, so we should skip spending hundreds of hours on link building? There are over 32 different types of inbound links but this is much MORE than a radical change, this is turning SEO as it was up-side-down. Any input, thoughts, ideas?
Link Building | | yvonneq0 -
SEOs and web developers frequently leave links to their site in the footer of their clients' sites. Does this negatively impact the site with the links?
Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site? Has anyone experienced problems doing this?
Link Building | | KatMouse2 -
How do I know if an inbound link offers value?
Is there a way to find out if inbound links that have been pointing to my site for a year or more are still offering value to my site. I know the value decreases over time (especially press release and blog article links), but it would be nice to know how much value bring to a site.
Link Building | | BradBorst0 -
SEO Tool to search mass URLs (for link qualification)
Hi, I have been using OSE and have a compiled list of backlinks to my competitor's sites. The next step would be to go through and qualify all of these links for a link opportunities for my client's site. To save me a lot of time, I require a tool that will search all of these pages (say 1000) for specific keywords in tags or body content. A search query might be - site:(URL list) intitle:directory site:(URL list) "add site" etc Any ideas would be great. Thanks.
Link Building | | DigitalLeaf0