Can you advise why my site get outranked by sites with way less authority and so on
-
Hello SeoMoz,
As a new member I first want to thank you guys for your service, seomoz is by far the best resource and toolbox I have ever found.
I have a question, or more of a request if you could advise me on what I do wrong.
I have a website: www.letsflycheaper.com with a Domain Authority of 80, and my target keywords are keywords like: cheap business class, business class flights.
My target page is: www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php.With all my keywords I am page 2 and I have a real hard time getting on the first page, but if I look at my competitors like: www.wholesale-flights.com with a Domain Authority of 'just' 50, crappy backlinks and so on, they are all on the first page with almost all of my keywords that I want to target.
What do I do wrong? Can you maybe give me a couple tips on where I should focus on more?
Hopefully you guys can help me...
Kind Regards,
Ramon van Meer
-
It depends on how long it will be before the new content is up -if it's a couple days, might as well leave it. If it's weeks or longer, it's best to change them, though honestly making the change one way or another at this point is not necessarily going to move the site in any significant way - it's difficult to judge how much, if at all.
-
Thanks for your reply Alan, yes you have a good point, my writer is now writing new content for those pages. A page for each mayor city with introduction on that city, tips for the business travel for that specific city and handy sites for the business traveler.
Do you think, that I should take out the "Business Class" out of the anchor text until I got the new content up?
-
This is much better from the previous over-saturation perspective. Here's my next question though - all those links in the lower part that still remain - they all use "business class CityName" as anchor text.
Except none of them points to a business class specific page. So how do you confirm to Google that "these pages really are about business class services", other than by using that anchor text from that one page?
-
Alan, I changed the www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php page, could you maybe take a quick peek if this is better?
Thanks!
-
Hi Egol,
Thanks for you message, I have the same gut feeling.... To bad there isn't a way to find out which links are possible devalued....
-
Domain authority of 80? That's incredible.
Just sayin' what comes from the gut...
... I would be wondering if some of the links have been devalued by Google.
-
The other replies here have been spot on so I will only add something on the side.
You need to use link building in the most natural form possible. Instead of trying to focus your links to /business-class.php you need to spread it throughout your website with a large variation of anchortext not forgetting about long tail keywords aswell.
-
Without enough links to the target page (a mix of keyword variations and generic non-keyword specific), the target page doesn't have enough off-site "trust" as compared to other sites when compared head to head.
yet if all you have was links to internal pages, that too would look unnatural, so always have some of your new links point to the home page.
-
Have another quick question, as far as finding high quality backlinks, is it better to link it to my /business-class.php page or to my main page?
Thanks
-
Hi Alan,
Thank you so much for your advise! I will defiantly will start working on those tips....
-
Looking over this real quickly and running the 2 sites listed, yours and wholesale flights, through OpenSite Explorer, I see that yours mostly has img alt links titled "Lets fly cheaper", some of your other high PA links are titled: "Ramon Van Meer", and "Cheap International Flights", none of which are your target keyword mentioned above.
Your Wholesale Flight competitor has links titled "Discount business class tickets", your desired keyword.
You would be better off with text, not img alt links. See if you can get those changed out.
-
Ramon
There could be several other factors however here's a quick hit finding:
1. Inbound Link anchor text spread
While you've got much more content and many more links, wholesale-flights.com has a much broader variety of inbound link anchor text related to "business class" than you do, including pointing to their home page. (OpenSiteExplorer.org is great for providing insights like this).
2. Internal keyword saturation
You've got an extremely over-saturated usage of keywords in your internal linking (all those links in the bottom third of your home page for example)
By not having enough inbound link quality relative to that specific phrase, and simultaneously having too much use on internal links, you're out of balance.
3. Core architecture flaw
When I go to your Business Class page, the entire top navigation is gone. As though you've made that specific page into more of a PPC landing page than a primary site page.
On that Business Class page, you've got section level navigation specific to Business class, with the top link labeled "home". Again, this communicates that this really isn't a core part of the main site, but some sort of isolated section. This then isolates this section improperly. Then on one of those sub-pages, not only are the top navigation links gone, so are the primary site footer links.
Yes, it's good, and important to maintain that section level navigation, yet it's just as important to communicate that it's a core section of the main site.
4. Section level content.
Other than the initial business class page, none of the other pages in that section have any substantial content to speak of - they're all very weak overall.
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
-
Can a duplicate page referencing the original page on another domain in another country using the 'canonical link' still get indexed locally?
Hi I wonder if anyone could help me on a canonical link query/indexing issue. I have given an overview, intended solution and question below. Any advice on this query will be much appreciated. Overview: I have a client who has a .com domain that includes blog content intended for the US market using the correct lang tags. The client also has a .co.uk site without a blog but looking at creating one. As the target keywords and content are relevant across both UK and US markets and not to duplicate work the client has asked would it be worthwhile centralising the blog or provide any other efficient blog site structure recommendations. Suggested solution: As the domain authority (DA) on the .com/.co.uk sites are in the 60+ it would risky moving domains/subdomain at this stage and would be a waste not to utilise the DAs that have built up on both sites. I have suggested they keep both sites and share the same content between them using a content curated WP plugin and using the 'canonical link' to reference the original source (US or UK) - so not to get duplicate content issues. My question: Let's say I'm a potential customer in the UK and i'm searching using a keyword phrase that the content that answers my query is on both the UK and US site although the US content is the original source.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonRayner
Will the US or UK version blog appear in UK SERPs? My gut is the UK blog will as Google will try and serve me the most appropriate version of the content and as I'm in the UK it will be this version, even though I have identified the US source using the canonical link?2 -
Review site using canonical tag in a puzzling way.
Have just been looking at a review site and they're using the canonical tag very strangely, to me. For example, they may have several pages of reviews of the same item - they use the canonical tag on page 2/3/4 to point back at page 1 - and yet there is no duplication between the pages. Any idea why they might be doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Best Practice for setting up expert author contributing to Multiple Sites?
If a single author contributes to multiple sites, should each site have its own author page (tying to the same single gg+ account)? Ex. One author > one gg+ account > multiple author pages (one per site) Or, should all sites publishing his content link to a single author page/bio on a single, main site? Ex. One author > one gg+ account > a single author page on one site (all other sites link to this author page) In this event, where would the 'contributor to' link point for the additional sites he is contributing to, the homepage? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
How to make an AJAX site crawlable when PushState and #! can't be used?
Dear Mozzers, Does anyone know a solution to make an AJAX site crawlable if: 1. You can't make use of #! (with HTML snapshots) due to tracking in Analytics 2. PushState can't be implemented Could it be a solution to create two versions of each page (one without #!, so campaigns can be tracked in Analytics & one with #! which will be presented to Google)? Or is there another magical solution that works as well? Any input or advice is highly appreciated! Kind regards, Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConversionMob0 -
Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?
I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain. To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!) Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided? Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0