Explaination for very odd SERP

[jgenesto]

I am not sure this is the right place to ask that question, but I would really love to have a few explanation of why, all of a sudden, one of our competitors is starting to out rank us on very competitive terms/queries.

Up until a few weeks ago, we were #1 on a lot of queries "job etudiant <city>". (job etudiant = job student in french).  These keywords are considered competitive by SEOMoz (54% according to the ranking tool).</city>

Very recently, a competing website started to systematically rank #1on each of these terms. What's really disturbing is that I don't see any obvious reason this competitor would rank above us (at least per SEOMoz's standards).

For example, on "Job etudiant Paris", their page authority is 1 (ours is 43), the have 0 domain linkin root domains (vs. 6 for us), their domain authority is 46 (55 for us) and 144 domains linking to their domain (805 for us).

I do not think we've been penalized in any way as our relative positions (compared to other websites) are unchanged. But I feel that this website is doing something obvious that we're missing. Can anyone tell us?

I have performed a complete audit in the "ranking analysis" tool, and I'm happy to share more details if anyone wants them.

[jgenesto]

Gamma,

I believe you tested woith Google.com and not Google.fr, because, with the latter, they are indeed #1.

I'll wait for a complete OSE crawl (is there a way I can trigger that?).

Now, we have a higher root domain seomoz rank and trust, we have keywords in the url, we have an A on the "on page" optimizations. And we've been #1 for years on this query... there must be something else which brought them to #1 in such a short time!

[jgenesto]

The competittor is studentjob.fr.

The pages for which they are ranking well are "landing" pages: like this one http://www.studentjob.fr/info/jobetudiant_paris

They provide a lot of useless information about Paris in an approximate french, which is what worries me. I assumed Google (fr) would be able to detect this kind of things quite easily.

Now, even the "link:" command on Google gives me no result for their url either, so it could be OSE, but the fact that they never even ranked on the #1st page is worrysome to me. What other tools to you suggest I look at?

[zazo]

Julien-

When I do a non-personalized search on Google  for "Job etudiant Paris" I see the first two results for jobetudiant.net and the fourth result is for "studentjob.fr" which I assume is your competitor based on the metrics you provided.

I agree with Devin that OSE probably has not crawled the page and that is why the authority is coming up as 1.

Based on the strength of their root domain, keywords in URL, on-page optimization and content their ranking at number four make sense to me with a quick look.

[Devin_Anderson]

Hey Julian,

Can you link us the competitor's website? Maybe some of the pages that are ranking in place 1? Would need to have a look at them to be able to say with any kind of certainty.

Something to bear in mind though, if Open Site Explorer says their PA and DA is 1 and they have 0 linking domains, then OSE has not crawled their site yet. If you were using OSE only then they probably have far more links than you are seeing.

[jgenesto]

I moved down by 1 position only.

The competition was not "intense", but they weren't easy queries either. However, this player was never on the first page. Adn it's now #1 or #2 on pretty much any query!

[entourage212]

• How many positions have you moved down?
• How competitive has it been with your competition? Has it been "neck and neck"? Only out ranking them by 1 or 2 positions?