I am stumped on this one... SEOs Assemble! *blows seo horn*

[MirandaP]

Hi guys,

I am having a little trouble with one of my sites. I am trying to rank for a particular keyword, which is the same as my domain name.

I have the keyword.com and my competitor has the keyword.co.uk

Please see the screenshot below to show our back link comparisions. I don't understand how the mozrank and moz trust are calculated as I am getting beat here.

They rank first in Google UK and I rank 10th.

Both of our sites are well seo'd by professional companies so I am baffled how, with this profile and a diverse set of anchor text links, I am getting beat.

I would really appreciate any help and advice on this guys...

Thank you

backlinkcomparison.jpg

[rufusb]

From you look of your link profiles, there’s is stronger, it seems to point that they have better internal linking to the page they are ranking and over all higher quality links to the site which is why they have higher MozTrust and MozRank.

That said if your ranking 10th there is probably more of an on-page issue happening here than an off page one, if you want send me a PM with more details and I’ll see if I can give you any pointers.

Thanks
Rufus

[wojkwasi]

I noticed you have a lot less internal links - what is the anchor text distribution of these and what % are from body content as opposed to nav/footer/sidebar links? Compare against competition - this can sometimes be an overlooked factor

[DavidKonigsberg]

Looking for the achor text percentage of the keyword etc

[MirandaP]

I have attached another scrren shot from SEOmoz reports, I am 10th.

rankings.jpg

[SL_SEM]

When you have a higher mozrank, but are getting beat out it always seems to me to come down to anchor text distribution and in your case it might also be location based URLs.

For the location point, if you are doing a search on google.co.uk, I have to think Google is going to give more weight to the URL that is using "keyword.co.uk" than "keyword.com". This is just based on how I have seen their rankings come back for other region specific google sites.

As for the anchor text let me give you an example.

I have people beating out my site for terms like "Dedicated Server Hosting". They have 524 linking root domains, and I have 2,500+.

Unfortunately 99% of my link text is my brand name, and not the keyword I would want to rank for. 80% of their terms ARE keyword specific, and this is what gives them the boost for that term.

So this may be a case where your keyword diversity is hurting you when compared to the other site.

If you take a look at the profile they have, and dig into the sites the first thing I would do is check to see if the links are obviously paid links or article spam links. If so then you should go report them :).

Other than that it looks like you might have your work cut out for you.

[DavidKonigsberg]

Run a full analysis and compare the anchor texts of the top 10 spots and see how they differ from yours (you can do this by running the keyword analysis and then asking for a full report)

[Desiree-CP]

This is probably the answer you are looking for.

Rather than just focusing on page level metrics you should look at the domain level SEOmoz metrics as well such as DomainAuthority.

For example, in your screenshot you have a higher PA than your competitor.  However, if your DA is lower than your competitor then there is a high possibility that the links you are acquiring are low quality and don't provide much value to your domain as a whole.

As Maximise suggested, you will need to dig a little deeper and determine what types of links your competitor is getting and you are not.

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, go ahead and PM me. I will review them and let you know what I think.

[MirandaP]

A lot greater,

they seem to targer two versions on their keyword and they have a few token www.keyword.co.uk/ thrown in their too.

We have about 15 - 20 different keywords being targeted iincluding url.

[DavidKonigsberg]

Whats your anchor text distribution vs the competitors?

[MirandaP]

No unfortunatley not

[Thommas]

I assumed its the one from your profile.

[MirandaP]

I haven't told you my keyword or url

[Maximise]

Purely from a link profile point of view (I haven't looked at the quality of either sites onsite optimisation) I would say that their link profile is of a much higher quality than yours.

Their MozRank is much higher than yours (remember that this is a log scale). You have 4 times more external links than they do, 10 times more total linking root domains, 7 times more C blocks. Despite this they still out rank you in MozRank and MozTrust. This probably indicates that their link profile consists of high quality links from trusted websites while your links are of a much lesser quality (could even be considered spammy).

I think you need to focus on obtaining high quality links from quality websites. This is just a suggestion from quickly looking at the link metrics, you should do some in depth comparisons of the links going in to both sites. I hope this helps.

[Thommas]

I've just checked on  google.co.uk and you're #1

[MirandaP]

Yes both sites are in the UK

[Thommas]

Hi

Is your site UK based? It could be down to location. UK based sites  often rank better on google.co.uk

[MirandaP]

Thank you for this...

I can provide any information requested

[charles1]

Here's info on:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

Without looking at your competitors back inks and yours +  your on page SEO it's difficult for anyone to really provide you with any advice.  So provide more information and you will receive better advice.

[MirandaP]

Age

.co.uk - 5 years and 6 months

.com - 9 years 9 months

Age of back links - I do not know, I know that the .com has had professional white hat link builders employed for 3 years +

Size of sites:

.co.uk -1,230 indexed pages by google

.com - 539 indexed pages by google

Their site is updated as often as mine, but my homepage remains static for length periods. Their homepage has a 'lastest posts' section. This is the only fresh content on their homepage.

The rank higher for a number of keywords.

If you have time, I could send you the 2 urls on pm

[TalarMade]

I don't really have an answer but just wanted to give you a thumbs up for the Ron Burgundy reference

[NakulGoyal]

What about the age of the 2 websites as well as the age of the backlinks to them ? 
Also, I am sure you have already, but I have to ask: Have you targeted to get links from sites that are linking to your competitor ?

How large is their site vs yours ? Is their site updated regularly ?

Other then your primary keyword, do you outrank them on a lot of other keywords ?