My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?

[harrybingham]

I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there.

I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12.

And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes.

It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least.

So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful.

I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess.

We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk

[isntworkdull]

I'm no expert, so you can take this with a pinch of salt...

But, to my knowledge google gives a lot of weight to domains such as .ac.uk, as these are some kind of educational website and not available to just anyone etc... not saying it is right that they rank above you, just saying that might be the reason google puts them above you.

[harrybingham]

Thank you! That gives me something to focus on - and the site HAS been through a lot of evolutions in recent years, so I guess we've left a lot of debris

[Robert_G]

Harry,

it is very difficult, if not impossible, to know what Google's algo take (or do not) into consideration.

I don't know, maybe your competitors have less links but those links may carry a higher weight, value.

I see every day websites that should rank better than other but still...

But I do get your frustration.

[AlanMosley]

I did a quick crawl of your site and found a lot of crawling issues.

You have a lot of canonical issues, broken links, unnecessary redirects, these errors would be wasting your link juice for a start

Problems and counts

<colgroup><col width="348"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| The tag   does not have an ALT attribute defined. | 2,338 |
| The page contains broken hyperlinks. | 900 |
| The page was excluded by a noindex   attribute. | 591 |
| The page contains multiple canonical   formats. | 548 |
| The description is missing. | 541 |
| The page contains unnecessary redirects. | 263 |
| The page contains invalid markup. | 251 |
| The URL for the hyperlink is broken. | 230 |
| The title is too long. | 111 |
| The link text is not relevant. | 99 |
| The description is empty. | 32 |
| The

tag is missing.

| 22 |
| The description is too long. | 15 |
| The URL is linked using different casing. | 14 |
| The page contains multiple title tags. | 10 |
| The title is not relevant. | 10 |
| The description is too short. | 8 |
| The page contains multiple

tags.

| 2 |
| The title is empty. | 1 |
| The page contains too many hyperlinks. | 1 |

[harrybingham]

Sorry - maybe I should be clearer: the search term we're chasing is "Creative Writing Courses" which is the term that has the most traffic and the most associated revenue.

And yes, our web page has only 27 linking root domains, but the #5 competitor (solihull.ac.uk/creative_writing-52514.html) has 0 external links from 0 domains. Fewer internal links too.

Our domain as a whole has 700+ linking root domains versus just 300 for our competitor. So I'm still confused!

[Robert_G]

As you may know, Google's algo implies hundreds of factors. The importance of on page SEO, compared to the importance of relevant backlinks is almost neglectable.

I've seen websites without any onpage SEO ranking better just because they have a buch on relevant backlinks.

According to OpenSIteExplore, you have 2962 backlinks from only 27 root domains.

You can use the "Keyword Difficulty Report" and select Google UK.

For me, for the search term "Online Creative Writing Courses" you're on page 1, Place 2. You can also run a full report for more detailed data.

Also, you might want to check out in opensiteexplorer the anchor texts you and your competitors are using.

Best of luck!