Can you advise why my site get outranked by sites with way less authority and so on

[DennisForte]

Hello SeoMoz,

As a new member I first want to thank you guys for your service, seomoz is by far the best resource and toolbox I have ever found.

I have a question, or more of a request if you could advise me on what I do wrong.
I have a website: www.letsflycheaper.com with a Domain Authority of 80, and my target keywords are keywords like: cheap business class, business class flights.
My target page is: www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php.

With all my keywords I am page 2 and I have a real hard time getting on the first page, but if I look at my competitors like: www.wholesale-flights.com with a Domain Authority of 'just' 50, crappy backlinks and so on, they are all on the first page with almost all of my keywords that I want to target.

What do I do wrong? Can you maybe give me a couple tips on where I should focus on more?

Hopefully you guys can help me...

Kind Regards,

Ramon van Meer

[AlanBleiweiss]

It depends on how long it will be before the new content is up -if it's a couple days, might as well leave it.  If it's weeks or longer, it's best to change them, though honestly making the change one way or another at this point is not necessarily going to move the site in any significant way - it's difficult to judge how much, if at all.

[DennisForte]

Thanks for your reply Alan, yes you have a good point, my writer is now writing new content for those pages. A page for each mayor city with introduction on that city, tips for the business travel for that specific city and handy sites for the business traveler.

Do you think, that I should take out the "Business Class" out of the anchor text until I got the new content up?

[AlanBleiweiss]

This is much better from the previous over-saturation perspective.  Here's my next question though - all those links in the lower part that still remain - they all use "business class CityName"  as anchor text.

Except none of them points to a business class specific page.  So how do you confirm to Google that "these pages really are about business class services", other than by using that anchor text from that one page?

[DennisForte]

Alan, I changed the www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php page, could you maybe take a quick peek if this is better?

Thanks!

[DennisForte]

Hi Egol,

Thanks for you message, I have the same gut feeling.... To bad there isn't a way to find out which links are possible devalued....

[EGOL]

Domain authority of 80?  That's incredible.

Just sayin' what comes from the gut...

... I would be wondering if some of the links have been devalued by Google.

[SeoStallion]

The other replies here have been spot on so I will only add something on the side.

You need to use link building in the most natural form possible. Instead of trying to focus your links to /business-class.php you need to spread it throughout your website with a large variation of anchortext not forgetting about long tail keywords aswell.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Without enough links to the target page (a mix of keyword variations and generic non-keyword specific), the target page doesn't have enough off-site "trust" as compared to other sites when compared head to head.

yet if all you have was links to internal pages, that too would look unnatural, so always have some of your new links point to the home page.

[DennisForte]

Have another quick question, as far as finding high quality backlinks, is it better to link it to my /business-class.php page or to my main page?

Thanks

[DennisForte]

Hi Alan,

Thank you so much for your advise! I will defiantly will start working on those tips....

[sferrino]

Looking over this real quickly and running the 2 sites listed, yours and wholesale flights, through OpenSite Explorer, I see that yours mostly has img alt links titled "Lets fly cheaper", some of your other high PA links are titled: "Ramon Van Meer", and "Cheap International Flights", none of which are your target keyword mentioned above.

Your Wholesale Flight competitor has links titled "Discount business class tickets", your desired keyword.

You would be better off with text, not img alt links. See if you can get those changed out.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Ramon

There could be several other factors however here's a quick hit finding:

1. Inbound Link anchor text spread

While you've got much more content and many more links, wholesale-flights.com has a much broader variety of inbound link anchor text related to "business class" than you do, including pointing to their home page. (OpenSiteExplorer.org is great for providing insights like this).

2. Internal keyword saturation

You've got an extremely over-saturated usage of keywords in your internal linking (all those links in the bottom third of your home page for example)

By not having enough inbound link quality relative to that specific phrase, and simultaneously having too much use on internal links, you're out of balance.

3. Core architecture flaw

When I go to your Business Class page, the entire top navigation is gone.  As though you've made that specific page into more of a PPC landing page than a primary site page.

On that Business Class page, you've got section level navigation specific to Business class, with the top link labeled "home". Again, this communicates that this really isn't a core part of the main site, but some sort of isolated section.  This then isolates this section improperly. Then on one of those sub-pages, not only are the top navigation links gone, so are the primary site footer links.

Yes, it's good, and important to maintain that section level navigation, yet it's just as important to communicate that it's a core section of the main site.

4.  Section level content.

Other than the initial business class page, none of the other pages in that section have any substantial content to speak of - they're all very weak overall.