How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
-
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011.
Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18.
An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are:
http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13
http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\
However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages.
Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority.
Our website is www.anteater.com.au
Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
-
Thanks for the info guys
-
If the links that are passing juice are media related, government related or edu type links then those can carry a ton of weight. They are worth Morty than a thousand crappy links combined.
-
Also, out of those 500 plus links they have coming in, they might have 10-20 really high quality links mixed in that are really passing juice.
-
Domain age can also be a factor. Also remember that when Panda was released an astounding 12% of sites were impacted. This either means the rest of the sites on the net are all white hat or just slipped through the cracks. Googles algorithm is by far one of the most advanced in the industry but the web is vast and it might take a while for your competitors to get caught for there tactics. I agree with EGOL, focus on your site. Social promotion and conversions. In time white hat will prevail.
-
I am not trying to be a wise guy... just saying what I would tell a friend or an employee... and the opinion that I hold for myself.
I think that you have discovered that the trust and authority numbers are not what google is using to rank websites. In fact google in the past couple of months has dramatically altered the way that they consider links.
Panda, nofollow, and google information never yet revealed make the link metric waters really muddy. There is a really good chance that lots of links have been made worthless... and others are depreciating assets.
I am betting my money elsewhere.
So, the most reliable way to advance the success of your website is to focus your efforts on increasing the appreciation of your website by your visitors.
Name the most successful sites on the web. This is what they do first and foremost leaving SEO as a five minute job for each page of content.
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
-
Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?
Our commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains about 800 URLs. Since 2012 the domain authority has dropped from 35 to about 20. Ranking and traffic dropped significantly since then. The site has about 791 URLs. Many are set to noindex. A large percentage of these pages have a Moz page authority of only "1". It is puzzling that some pages that have similar content to "1" page rank pages rank much better, in some cases "15". If we remove or consolidate the poorly ranked pages will the overall page authority and ranking of the site improve? Would taking the following steps help?: 1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages? A MOZ crawl of our site's URLs is visible at the link below. I am wondering if the structure of the site is just not optimized for ranking and what can be done to improve it. THANKS. https://www.dropbox.com/s/oqchfqveelm1q11/CRAWL www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (1).csv?dl=0 Thanks,
Alan0 -
Legal Client Wants to Change Domain Name... What's the best way to pass authority from old domain?
Hey Mozzers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations
I received a call on Friday from a 6 attorney law office who have been my client for a long time. They have an established brand/domain in their market which isn't very big, but has a lot of competition. 2 of the attorneys are leaving to start their own firm and they want to remove a letter from their name abbreviation, thus their domain name as well. So, the other partners want to change the domain to reflect this. They want to buy a EMD [city]lawyers.com for about $1,600 along with some others to protect their new brand and name. I have a good idea as to what I need to do, BUT would love to hear advice from the community for this type of drastic change. 301 redirects? New Google Analytics code or same just different profile? Webmasters verifications? Content from old site? Old domain forwarding or keep active for a little bit? Is not the time to get them an SSL? Also, what should I prepare them for in terms of website traffic expectations and Google authority drops or remains the same? I know their Moz DA/PA will drop to 1/1, but anything else to look out for? Thank you in advance!
Fellow Pro Member - Patrick1 -
How does the use of Dynamic meta tags effect SEO?
I'm evaluating a new client site which was built buy another design firm. My question is they are dynamically creating meta tags and I'm concerned that it is hurting their SEO. When I view the page source this is what I see. <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">keywordsGoHere</a>" content="" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" id="<a class="attribute-value">descriptionGoesHere</a>" content="" /> <title id="<a class="attribute-value">titleGoesHere</a>">title> To me it looks like the tags are not being added to the page, however the title is showing when you view it in a browser and if use a spider view tool, it sees the title. I'm guess it is being called from a DB. So I'm a little concerned though that the search engines are not really seeing the title and description. I'm not worried about the keywords tag. Can anyone shed some light on how this might work? Why it might not being showing the text for the description in the page code and if that will hurt SEO? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BbeS0 -
How to seo websites on another server
We have partners that want us to build and manage a co-branded white label for them. We will have unique content on the white label, however the white label will be located on our server. I was planning to put it on a subdomain and mask the URL, however was told that google will see through that and not give any credit to the white label. Our partners all have high PR and we are a new company with low PR. We want the white labels to get the credit from the partner websites. Should we do it through url masking or by changing the A Record in the other website to point to our server?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TravelerVIP0 -
How should I go about cleaning up link spam from an acquired domain?
I recently acquired a domain and the previous owners practiced some very shady link practices. The current backlink profile is flooded with link spam with foreign anchor text, amongst links from spam directories. What are some good practices to help clean up the backlink profile of this domain so it will not hurt me in the long run?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
Redirect Help - Domain Change and Website Redesign
Hi there, I've redesigned a website for a client, but we are also changing domains and I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up the redirects from their old domain to the new one. 95% of their search engine traffic originally came through brand related keywords that landed on their homepage, and most of the remaining 15% landed on 3 other pages. The new site has pages to replace these 3 main SEO pages, and I'm about to set 301 redirects from their old domain, but I can't figure out the quickest/best way to do it. Is it possible to set up a specific redirect for the 4 main pages (Home + plus the 3 others) then a "catch all" type of thing for the rest of the pages, that redirect either to the homepage, or some sort of "Check out our new Site" landing page. How do you do this, or is there a better way to set it up? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timscullin0 -
Why does Tripadvisor rank higher than my official hotel website?
We have an official hotel website under our brand hawaiihotels.com called www.RoyalLahaina.com. It is a resort in Hawaii. However, Trip Advisor comes before our official website but it doesnt do this for the other websites. Could anyone tell me why this is happening? It is ranking higher for royal lahaina resort
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TSpike10 -
Changing domain reigstrant - seo impact
Hi there if you get a domain off someone and change registrant details and hosting, to what extent does this affect the power of the site? Any opinions of interest, many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0