Ranking better with worse figures
-
Six months ago a competitor e-commerce site appeared in the top 10. Now six months later he is at #2. (for the main keyword in my sector in Dutch language, competition +4 million)
My site is 4 years old and since three years ranks at #1 or 2. I'm now at #3, behind the competitors site.
My competitor has a HomePage PA of 36 with 2295 links from 26 domains, root domain DA 23 with 175000 links from 30 domains.
My site has a HomePage PA of 49 with 6975 links froms 238 domains, root domain DA 40 with 310023 links from 269 domains.
I have more specific landing pages, better and more content, code W3C checked ....
Can somebody explain why a younger site with worse figures gets a better position in Google ranking?
-
Thanks Marek for the usefull words. Yes I still use meta-keywords as there is also Bing and Yahoo. But of course you are right about differing the description tags. I will change them asap.
Actually all this is about the Dutch version where I have "only" +4.000.000 competition for the keyword Lighting in Dutch. I don't even want to try to compete in English with that word. But then I compete with the Brand names and get my English speaking customers anyway.
Thanks again !
-
Sometimes it is been hard to understand but never give up
you still using meta-keywords ... they can only help the competition not google position.
meta - description tags are all the same for different pages.
If yes it can be a main reason. You have to diversify descriptions and they have to be consistent with title and page content.
e.g. for <title></span></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span><span> </span>Buy LED lighting at the best price.</span></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span></title>
in description use: name="Description" content="LED lighting is the latest craze. ..... an so on about LED up to 140 characters">
Marek
-
H-tags, titles,speed, and much more, I am very aware of the importance and using. What worries me more than being dropped on #3 is that a site, appearing from nowhere, in 6 months can get to the top. This site is in all ways inferior to mine, I mean inferior in terms of what google thinks is important. Their content is fresher of course and they have less nearly dupicate content. But it seems to me that history has no weight anymore. It seems that once you are ther for three years, you are damn dificult to be caught. Seems I am wrong.
For my understanding, analysing the results for years, sooner or later the mechanism, the algorithm behind (from Google) must become clear. Thousands of people are on top and after making an inventory of everything possible that can be important, I don't discover new things anymore. It seems that they have some secret arguments left as, as you told yourself, in many cases the logic based on what is known is far far away.
And no, their domain is as bad as mine I started my site without knowing that a keyword in a domain name is important.
What I see is that in the top 10 there are 9 .be domains and only mine is a .com. Maybe Googles starts to give importance at local domains.
And no again, I don't have many G+1, but they don't neither. I have many pages on Facebook, a page on LinkedIn, a blog with my Google identity, an author link on my site pointing to this identity .... I'm getting out of arguments !
-
Maybe, I never got attention for PA and DA. Only after starting to use SEOmoz that I became aware. But my links are good, are many, my content and keywords optimal, my code good, my speed fast. I have some nearly duplicate content as I have 27000 products on my site and the difference between product A and B can be very small giving nearly identical product pages. But this was as such since the beginning. Maybe Google has more attention for this now than some years ago.
-
Thanks for your answer. No, I am quiet sure that my platform is the best what I can get in my country. I was aware that a platform can be important for ranking as speed is important for google.
-
I have many examples of such a situation. In my work I won with Nikon Academy (akademianikona.pl) - site supported by Nikon with huge number of links and better statistics.
Refresh you content.
I agree with EGOL and Gordon. What I want to add ... think that internal consistency of the site is very important. Good content structure (H -tags, content with keywords) - title - description - url should be the first elements of the subjects of your mind.
Also very important is competitors tracking. What do they have that you do not have? Maybe they follow some (local ... global) trends? Social impact is another area to check - do you have many G+1, FB shares, votes etc...
Check technical issues like page load speed and other
And last but not least - what is their domain name - is it better that yours?
some other ideas to improvement (simple report) link
Good luck Rik
-
Just a hypothesis here, it could be based on the platform you are using. Some ecommerce platforms rank better in google, an example of this is that the ecommerce platform "magento" is seo friendlier than other ecommerce platforms. That could be a reason that it is ranking better with "worse" statistics.
Another hypothesis is that their onsite is better with less errors and less duplicate content and therefore being penalized less.
Hope that Helps
-
I can only echo EGOL.
Keep working at quality content, relevant links etc. if your efforts continue, there is every chance you will be back on top.
-
Can somebody explain why a younger site with worse figures gets a better position in Google ranking?
Maybe because the figures that you are looking at are different from what google is using to rank the pages. I think that the figures that you are looking at are good for tracking your progress over time but they obviously are not what google is using.
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
-
What if your content is way better than competitors?
Do you have any suggestions if you are being outranked by competitors even though your page has way better content and better links?
Competitive Research | | Charlessipe0 -
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
Competitive Research | | Martin_S0 -
SEOMoz bar shows competitors ranking higher in SERPS with less Moztrust and Mozrank?
We are targeting the term "wholesale fireworks" we are currently on page two and just completed some on page optimization. I noticed using the Mozbar that the SERP results on the first page show a site with near zero page rank, Moztrust, domain trust, etc.. It is steadily number two in SERPS. Our site is just as strong or stronger on these ratings as anyone on the first page. How is it possible that we are still hanging out on page 2?
Competitive Research | | devonkrusich0 -
8500+ seomoz errors and still rank one for high traffic keywords
I plugged a competitor into the campaign manager that is ranking #1 for many target keywords like "sprinkler parts" (18k broad, 720 exact) and "sprinklers"(550k broad, 4400 exact) and #2 for "sprinkler"(1mil broad, 8100 exact). This site has over 8500 errors on SEOmoz - I have spent a good deal of time fixing errors on all of our client websites and have gotten them down to 0 errors. I am just wondering if I have been wasting my time and if the errors that SEOmoz reports on even make a difference. How can a site rank for such high traffic keywords when it has 4k duplicate content and 4k duplicate page title errors? The site has 75 linking root domains according to opensiteexplorer. any help on this would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | Splashme-1391910 -
Why do you think this site can't reach a better ranking?
Hello, My name is Pablo Lagos. We have a hosting company in Chile since 2006. All the time we have been ranked in the first page for the keyword "hosting" in google.cl. Some years ago, we used to be on the first 3 results. Since the last year our site went down to 7 and higher places no matter we do. When I run the link analysis, we have the highest punctuation in all items. I would really appreciate your comments. The site is in spanish: www.ilihost.cl Thanks.
Competitive Research | | pabloandres0 -
I'v been trying to rank for this word for a long time
Hi, I have this one page designed to rank for a spesific word i google (sweden). The page has a flawless moz grade A on-page. While my competator ranks for their subdomain, also grade A. I rank 6 he ranks 2 in google. Would I be doing a misstake if i 301 directed it to mu subdomain. In visitor perspective it would be a better landig page aswell. I dont want to lose my rank though. Best practice, anyone?
Competitive Research | | SuperlativB1 -
Competitor with over 100,000 links to duplicate copy ranks well, anyone know why?
One of our competitors has over 100,000 links on Yahoo site explorer, most of them are from pages on their site with duplicate content and they don't seem to have a focus on gaining backlinks, but the site still ranks really well. Can anyone think of a reason why this duplicate content hasn't been penalised by Google?
Competitive Research | | RobertHill0 -
Keyword Ranks reported by SEOMOZ don't match actual searches
SEO Moz reported that various keywords I was tracking were not in the top 50 results on Yahoo or Bing, yet when I did a Yahoo or Bing search for those keywords (from multiple computers and not logged into any Yahoo or MSN/Bing account) I found the keywords easily. What's the scoop?
Competitive Research | | Cybernautic0