SERP and SEO Moz ranking
-
Until a couple of months ago the predicted SEO Moz ranking for a specific keyword was fairly close to what I actually experienced with my website. However, since then the correlation has not been good. For example, according to SEO Moz I am ranked #1 for a specific keyword with google.ca and google.com yet my site actually shows up consistently at #3 for that keyword. Has anyone else noticed this divergence?
-
Great suggestion EGOL!
There are generally two reasons folks see different rankings than what is reported in SEOmoz
1. Personalization and localization. SEOmoz takes great pain to remove the influence of both localization and personalization from it's rankings, but these all to easily slip into our browsers and Google's default settings when checking rankings. Make sure you check your rankings with personalization turned off (or in some sort of incognito mode) and set your location to the country wide setting (United States)
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search
2. Universal Results - This has to do with the way rank is counted when influenced by things like sitelinks, video results, image results, blended local rankings and so on. The list of variables is long, but a full explanation can be found here:
https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20933146-universal-rankings
-
Seems for me that it also counts the Google Places locations numerically. It can make your rank look bad but it is also the reality of what people see before they find you. The stand alone Rank Checker tool always seems to give the right SERP over the one given in the weekly search. Yes, there is always a variable in rank but that seems to be the case with every tool out there. Again the research tool Rank Checker is always spot on for me.
-
Several people each week visit Q&A to ask why their Google rankings do not match the SEOmoz data.
These two website ratings are based upon different variables.
I would like to see SEOmoz have an obvious link on the results page of their tool that clicks to an explanation of what their results really mean and why they don't match Google's rankings. Would save lots of people lots of concerns and be a great way to educate on the value of their data.
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
-
How to get gold star reviews on SERP's
Hello I have always wanted to know: How to get gold star reviews on Google in search results! Please look at the screenshot to see what I am talking about. Please can someone share with me the knowledge required to make this happen - it would be perfect for my e-commerce website! GLkOK
Algorithm Updates | | xdunningx1 -
Our Journey back to Good Rankings.
17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss. The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase: hair loss. Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases. I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could: Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart. Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for. For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along. Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down. Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic. Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long. Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation. The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place. Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero. By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design. We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either. Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016: Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress. (80 pages) - proper 301's. News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's. Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages). 301's. Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's. Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%. Almost zero. Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs. All of these 410'd. Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed. All 410'd. Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc). All 301'd to new Article URL. Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content. It was a lot of work! After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us. I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to. Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us. He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda. He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday. Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site Cleaned up Google Search Console fully Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there. Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised. Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts. Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media. Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless: "Hi! Need help!?" **Despite this, nothing has helped. Nothing has budged. Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January. Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it. It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up. I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience. Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years. That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers. It hasn't worked. As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss. Its simply not there. At all. And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible. But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post. But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | HLTalk0 -
How soon before author rank becomes a major ranking factor?
Hi, I wanted to pose a question How soon do guys think itll be before author rank becomes a one of Googles major ranking factors? From what I can see the way they have designed it signals that it is only matter of time, before they start using it as a major ranking factor... And I have a question on Author ranks impact on the ability to sell a blog/site in the future. Surely if the blog is tied to an author(s) and the ranking of the site in the search engine is somewhat based on this authors author rank who is a part of the site/blog, then it becomes harder to sell the property if the author is not going to be a part of the property after the sale?. I look forward to your responses on this,
Algorithm Updates | | sanj50501 -
The Impact of Attribute REV in SEO
Hi, I'm looking for information about rev="" attribute in SEO. What do this attribute communicate to search robots? Does it Impacts in the positioning of pages / keywords? Does anyone have information that could help me?
Algorithm Updates | | webg0 -
Ranking drop Feb 2013?
I'm trying to get to the bottom of why Directholidays.co.uk suffered a drop in rankings for the term "cheap holidays" in February 2013. Im looking at this recently and as an outsider so I haven't got access to Webmaster tools and I haven't been tracking rankings/link profiling. They moved from 2nd to 10th temporarily and then recovered at 7th the new 10th! I've looked at keywords improved/declined on, keywords lost/gained, traffic, traffic price but im failing to see exactly what I can use to show whether Panda #24 (officially 22nd of January) had a significant effect. Can anyone shed any light on this? It would be massively appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | eolithicproductions0 -
Why some results in SERP have a www. and some don't
Hello all, If this is posted twice, I didn't mean for it to be - but it looks like last time I tried to post this question it didn't post. This is my question: How come some results on Google's SERP page are shown with a "www" and some are not? Does this effect SEO at all? I am including a screen shot so you can see what I mean. The Geary Interactive result has a "www" in front of while ingenexdigital doesn't. R6GLL.png
Algorithm Updates | | digitalops0 -
How To Rank High In Google Places?
Hello SEOmoz, This question has been hounding me for a long time and I've never seen a single reliable information from the web that answers it. Anyway here's my question; Supposing that there are three Google places for three different websites having the same categories and almost same keywords and same district/city/IP how does Google rank one high from the other? Or simply put if you own one of those websites and you would want to rank higher over your competitors in Google places Search results how does one do it? A number of theories were brought up by some of my colleagues: 1. The age of the listing 2. The number of links pointing to the listing (supposing that one can build links to ones listing) 3. The name/url of the listing, tags, description, etc. 4. The address of the listing. 5. Authority of the domain (linked website) You see some listings have either no description, and only one category and yet they rank number one for a specific term/keyword whereas others have complete categories, descriptions etc. If you could please give me a definite answer I will surely appreciate it. Thank you very much and more power!
Algorithm Updates | | LeeAnn300 -
Localised Hosting is Good for SEO - But How Local?
Hi SEOmoz community, A UK based client will soon be opening an office in the USA. We have advised them to create a new website specifically aimed at the US market, primarily because the way you talk to your potential customers is slightly different than here in the UK. However, this has also raised the question of hosting. Of course we'll be advising them to host their new US site in the States, however does it matter where? For example, if their office is in NYC, would it matter if their hosting was based in Dallas? I.e. does Google rank sites hosted in a US city / state higher for localised searches? Interested to hear your thoughts - thanks for your time! Mark
Algorithm Updates | | RiceMedia0