8500+ seomoz errors and still rank one for high traffic keywords

[Splashme-139191]

I plugged a competitor into the campaign manager that is ranking #1 for many target keywords like "sprinkler parts" (18k broad, 720 exact) and "sprinklers"(550k broad, 4400 exact) and #2 for "sprinkler"(1mil broad, 8100 exact).  This site has over 8500 errors on SEOmoz - I have spent a good deal of time fixing errors on all of our client websites and have gotten them down to 0 errors.

I am just wondering if I have been wasting my time and if the errors that SEOmoz reports on even make a difference.  How can a site rank for such high traffic keywords when it has 4k duplicate content and 4k duplicate page title errors?  The site has 75 linking root domains according to opensiteexplorer.  any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

[jimmypader]

I'm curious to know your site and the competitor in question.

I, like you, feel like I've been running into walls and wondering how they got in the road.

check out this thread and let me know if you think it's relevant to your situation:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/aged-sites-or-5-year-old-seo

[RobMay]

I think in some way or another - we all do!!

[RobMay]

I would check to see if the reporting is accurate on the competitor site/URL. Run checks to see if their duplicate content is actually 'duplicate' or if the reporting tool is just fooling you or mis-reading the data. Always good to do manu al checks.

Do that by grabbing text from the site and placing it in " " for exact match phrase search. Do you see the actual URL, and a duplicate say (like Druapl www.mysite.com/node/12345) below it .. if so, then it's pretty much slam on that there is duplicated content affecting that site.

Just 1 thing you can do to help research it out.

[Splashme-139191]

Thanks Mike.  It is close to exact match, but I have always heard that is a very small ranking factor.  Also, the SEOmoz errors are all red and dup content. quote from dr. pete "Panda made duplicate content part of a broader quality equation – now, a duplicate content problem can impact your entire site...no longer an isolated problem" if there are 4k+ problems on one site that should matter right?

I guess I have just been running up to a lot of walls lately where sites are outranking other ones that don't seem like they should be.  For example if you google "sprinklers" sprinklerwarehouse.com comes up first and orbitonline.com comes up as the second to last SERP on the first page

sprinkler warehouse - 538 external links and 71 linking root domains

orbitonline.com - 744 external links and 117 linking root domains

I always hear and read that links from other sites is one of the most(if not the most) important ranking factors.  yet I constantly see sites outrank others that have less links.  any thoughts on why this would be?

[Thos003]

Confession... I have a lot of errors on my site.... Still manage to rank.

[3States]

I think there's probably a lot more going on with your competitor than you can see with the SEOmoz error reports. You have to take into account several things about your competitor, like:

• the site's age
• the domain name (is it an exact match domain?)
• the ranking pages (are they subpages or the home page that's killing you in the SERPs?)

Some of the errors that get spit out of the SEOmoz tool are pretty negligible. For example, if you run a fairly well-developed blog on your site, chances are good you don't do a custom meta description for each post. You can if you want to, but most people just ignore it. This alone can spit out thousands of error messages. The same result will happen with duplicate content. My guess is if you look at those errors, the majority will include a URL with /blog in there somewhere.

It doesn't sound like you're in a very competitive niche based on your keyword numbers, so the top results will be able to rank well with all those mistakes.

Mike