Determining why an established competitor's rankings have bombed - What's the best way to go about it?
-
I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages.
I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too.
**What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? **
I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No?
Thanks guys
-
Then you can exclude 3, 4, 5 and 8.
I think penalties (like malware and hacks) would not relate to only a keyword/term but rather to the entire site.
So you're down to:
-
Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm
-
Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity
-
Canonicalization Problems
-
Broken links
-
**robots.txt Issues
** -
Duplicate Content
Perhaps you could exclude more of the remaining 6 reasons by using the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. I think it easily could be used to compare present and older use of rel=canonical (3) and robots.txt changes (5).
Reason 4 can be excluded by using Xenu's link sleuth.
-
-
Thanks mate,
They dropped substantially for most of their terms except for one or two which only dropped buy one or two positions. Does that narrow down the possibilities?
-
It's probably a link purge on their part, and if you were able to see some of their linking activities and were able to identify them, that's probably a good indicator of what they did wrong, and what you should do to avoid it.
-
Hi TCE
On February 24, 2011 Google released a major update to its ranking methods popularly referred to as "Farmer" or "Panda" since the purpose was to target so-called "content farms" which are large sites filled with low-quality content. The update also targets sites that have an excessive ratio of advertising to content and sites that have a high level of duplicate or 'scraped' content. This is one of the rare circumstances in which a Google ranking factor works on a site-wide level, as opposed to an individual web page.
You could read this article by Vanessa Fox: Google Traffic Dropped With Farmer/Panda Update. It suggests ways to analyze why your rankings dropped and how to restore them. I guess this also could be used for competitors
The ten most common reasons for a site dropping rank in SERP:
-
Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm
-
Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity
-
Cinderella Story or "Honeymoon" Effect
-
**Malware or Hacking
** -
Google penalty, including:
- Hidden Text
- Text Link Ads
- Thin Content
- Multiple Domain Names
- Domain Farms
- Linking to penalized, or so-called "bad neighborhood" sites
- Excessive Link Exchanges
-
Canonicalization Problems
-
Broken links
-
Server Problems
-
**robots.txt Issues
** -
Duplicate Content
I know these are not direct answers to your question. But my guess is that the Farmer/Panda update caused it or an error in their server at the time of indexing...
But it is almost impossible to identify, without tracking all their moves over time and at the time when the rankdrop happend ...
-
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
-
(Need helps here!) Can homepage and other internal pages (services) rank high together on Google?
Hi Moz community, Recently I am working on our website's SEO. Our company is a marketing agency. We provide general marketing services and also web design. Here is the content of our homepage and internal pages (specific services). Homepage (marketing agency) Internal page #1 (XXX marketing service) Internal page #2 (YYY marketing service) Internal page #3 (web design) I suggest to my supervisor that we could make some improvement and optimize different keywords for these 4 pages, respectively (homepage, internal page #1 #2 #3). However, my supervisor holds a different point of view that homepage and internal page#3 cannot rank both high for their own keywords because web design is not as related to marketing. So I did some research and look for some top-ranking marketing agency guys who also offer web design. I found their internal pages about web design service rank pretty bad for their own web-design-related keywords. Here are my thoughts and guess (please correct me if I am wrong): Google takes everything into account and deems web design to be kind of irrelevant content to the website, so the internal page for web design will not rank high. The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development. My question is: In above case, can homepage and other internal pages (our services) all rank high together for their own keywords? I know what I wrote is kind of confusing...But I really need help here and want to solve this problem badly. Really appreciate any help!! Thank you in advance! Best, Raymond
Competitive Research | | Raymondlee0 -
Moz Rank /Moz Trust Tips and Tricks
I've been working on the following website (www.pleasantparkkennels.com) for about 2 years now for SEO and been able to place the site for many keywords. At times some competitors seem to come into the mix and 'just get lucky' in their rankings regardless of all the work I've done ... it seems they've implemented no SEO strategies whatsoever and yet them sometimes rank better. Upon comparing link metrics with these competitors, I seem to be doing well in most criteria but Moz Rank and Moz Trust always seems to be a category I fall short in.
Competitive Research | | MainstreamMktg
Does anyone have any resources / tips and tricks / checklists that I might be able review to assess my website for to see how I make it better. I'm running out of ideas 🙂 Thank you!0 -
Open Site Explorer is not showing dmT. Where do I go to get this metric.
Just trying to understand the video I watched on Link Building w/ Open Site Explorer. I'm not seeing the dmT metric in the live version. Has it been replaced by something else. Or is there someplace else I need to look for it?
Competitive Research | | AhmadS0 -
Why does my site get sandboxed but this one doesn't?
I'm currently working on an entire website redesign and restructuring. My current website is extremely spammy. I really worked on it before I knew much about SEO. Now that I have a better foundation I have been remaking my site to get rid of duplicate content and to have a much better UX. With this said, I still depend on the current site to bring in my income while I'm working on getting my new site up. Google seems to constantly kick me out for about a month at a time and then let me back in. The few other times I thought it was because the new site I have been working on is on a different domain and was exactly the same for a while (I don't want google to find this new domain it's just for testing purposes). So I removed the new domain from google and in a couple weeks my main site was back in. Problem is yesterday google hit me again. I'm out of google for all my search terms. Before I was ranking on the first page for just about every "keyword + city" phrase I was trying to rank for. I can find plenty of reasons why google would give me problems with my current site. For example I have TONS of duplicate pages with just the keyword/city changed. Pretty spammy. I did buy about 5 links a year ago or so but they are pretty nothing sites. My question is if google's going to ban me why don't they just do it? They keep taking me out and putting me back in. No messages in webmaster tools. My domain is below: http://yourmusiclessons.com Also when I just started out I got the idea of "keyword + city" from a competitor that ranks for EVERYTHING which is also found below: http://www.musikalessons.com All of the links I bought were the same links the above site bought. I tried buying a link from classical.net which has a high page rank and links to musikalessons.com on each page of their site. As soon as google found the links, I was kicked out. I had them remove it. My question is musika has basically the same "spammyness" as me just on a much larger scale and yet they never seem to be kicked out of google and still rank high. I've thought about reporting musika, but I'm afraid Google will ban me as well because my site is just as bad. Again I'm working all day on fixing my site and doing a 180, it's just taking a long time and I can't launch quite yet. I live off the income from my current site though, so it's very disheartening when this happens. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | BrianJenkins0 -
Twitter as a website's #2 ranked linked page?
A site I'm researching on open-site explorer has a #2 link with page authority of 52 and Domain authority of 97, and that link is the site's twitter page. No other sites I've researched have had their twitter page show up in it's link rankings like this, can someone explain?
Competitive Research | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Why does website rank? PA-39 DA-24
This website is pretty nice, well done. The few links they do have are nice and clean, from his brothers website, very much white hat. However, it appears that they aren't doing much of anything from an SEO standpoint. This site, is PA31 DA21 is also doing unusually well. In both cases, these guy are outranking the best know, most famous, and most trusted company in the industry who is PA84 DA81. This is a HUGE company that wins the most awards and gets tons of media coverage both in print and on televisiton shows. I'm also noticing that the websites that are ranking well in my niche (every keyword) all have the name of their company at the beginning of the title tag, those with the name of the company at the end of the title tag are consistantly a few ranks lower. This seems to be consistant across all search terms. My niche is highly competitive for a very low amount of traffic. Adwords is crazy expensive for some of these keywords! That said, one valid sale generates a significant amount of money. Would love to hear your thoughts. I'm thinking the first company is being treated so well becase G considers them to be virgins, the purist of white?
Competitive Research | | dmac0 -
Can't Grasp Why Pages rank Higher?
The first result "Bankruptcy on IRS" is the search term. Why does the first url rank higher in google. The second one, the IRS.gov page beats them in PA, DA root domains links. The title meta has bankruptcy near the front. unclefed does have the IRS keyword in the title, but an I missing something here? What are the other factors, that are most obvious. Sure one can have bad links, and other negative criteria, but these are pretty decent sites that probably don't engage in much in seo, let alone bad SEO. Sure link text and mix of links can help, but am I missing something here? Actually what I think I really need IS A CHECKLIST OF WHAT TO CHECK IN WHAT ORDER WHEN COMPARING WHY ONE PAGE RANKS BETTER THAN ANOTHER. Appreciate all discussions. Thanks in advance. http://www.unclefed.com/AuthorsRow/Daily/Fwdcsea.html http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=98701,00.html
Competitive Research | | joemas990 -
Ranking keyword VCA
We want to rank higher on the keyword VCA. Our direct competitor VCAnederland ranks one place higher and we want that place. If we look at some statics from the Open site explorer, we score better. PA: VCAdirect = 53 VS competitor = 46 DA: VCAdirect = 43 VS competitor = 39 Total links = VCAdirect = 8415 VS competitor = 3051 External followed links = VCAdirect = 8178 VS competitor = 1059 Linking root domains = VCAdirect = 146 VS competitor = 105 SEOmoz competitive Domain Analysis (gives other numbers) DA: VCAdirect = 44 VS competitor = 40 DMozrank: VCAdirect = 4.30 VS competitor = 4.50 DMozTrust: VCAdirect = 4.00 VS competitor = 4.18 when I analyze the site with the SEOmoz tool. We see this figures: VCAdirect: PA: 53 / MozR: 5.89 / MozT: 5.89 / Tot links 8415 VCAnederland: PA: 46 / MozR: 6.95 / MozT: 6.16 / Tot links 3051 On the on page Report card we score both an A. Where should we focus on to win the position?
Competitive Research | | PlusPort0