Internal Links Data on OSE and poor ranking despite excellent metrics
-
Hi folks,
I use OSE a lot for comparing where we stand against our competitors and I'm always surprised to see most of our competitors have loads more internal links than we do. For example, comparing 'www.kensyard.co.uk' with 'www.sterlingbuild.co.uk', we are better on every Root Domain Metric except for the Total Links metric and this is down to a much smaller number of internal links.
They are ranking better than us in Google so I'm wondering if there is something wrong with the way our site is coded / structured that means Google and OSE are not picking up our internal link network properly? We have over nine times as many external root domains linking to our site than theirs, which is surely a far more valuable metric than internal links right? Or is there an issue with our internal link structure that is confusing Google and causing us to rank lower?
Many thanks for any advice, Luke
-
Hi Luke,
It really depends quite a lot on which exact keywords/phrases you are talking about. From a quick look at the two sites in open site explorer it is true that you have more linking domains than the other site. But...
If you look at the homepage metrics, they are ahead of you in the moztrust and mozrank metrics. This 'might' be partly due to a better internal linking strategy on their part.
The external links from both sites look a bit unnatural in that they have a number of non branded exact match links which are obviously pretty much there to try to influence rankings. Yours however are going the 'buliding materials' route and theirs are going the 'windows' route. They also have a lot less exact match and a lot less in percentage terms than your site which could be a factor if google is (likely) discounting a good chunk of those links. Again though, it really depends what keywords you are talking about.
Hope that helps.... a bit!
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
-
How important are Internal Equity-Passing Links in rankings?
Hi,I ran opensite explorer of a customer site: www.enviosadomicilio.com and compared it with the most ranked competence sites. In almost all the factor enviosadomicilio.com has the best scores, except in Internal Equity-Passing Links. The competence has aprox 20K Equity links and another 2K meanwhile enviosadomicilio.com only have 296. Do you think that factor could be the reason that enviosadomicilio.com are in ranking 15th while the competence in 1st and 3rd?. How could we get Internal-Passing Links?, we don´t have a lot of products or categories in the site. Thanks a lot.
Moz Pro | | ramirez_salvador0 -
Crawl results on keyword rankings differ from actual search rankings
For the second week in a row, the weekly keyword rankings in my MOZ account show "not in top 50" for most keywords. However, when I check some of my rankings I still broadly have the rankings that I used to have. It seems that the MOZ crawl is experiencing some difficulties. Does anyone have suggestions how to find out what's going on? If I can't rely on the crawl outcomes, then the tool is not very useful anymore!
Moz Pro | | matteis0 -
SEOmoz Not Picking Up Links
I'm finding that SEOmoz often doesn't pick up on many of the links my client's websites are attaining. The links do appear in search engine and often have a high domain authority (often PR links, which I why I follow up to see if they've been picked up). I do tend to see many of the links appear in webmaster tools, so it's a little frustrating that they don't appear, even after months of pages being live. Thoughts?
Moz Pro | | SebastianDyer0 -
Data Update for RogerBot
Hi, I noticed that rogerbot still give me 404 for http://www.salustore.com/capelli/nanogen-acquamatch.html refferal form http://www.salustore.com/protocollo-nanogen even I made changes since a couple of week. Same error with one "Title Element Too Short" on our site. Any suggestion on how to refresh it? Best Regards n.
Moz Pro | | nicolobottazzi0 -
Is anyone having problems with rank tracker
Hi for some reason i am finding semoz site very slow and when i have tried to use rank tracker it is not working. is anyone else finding this
Moz Pro | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Rank Checker Tool
How many keywords/domains can I track using this tool on the Pro membership? Looking at the tool itself, it looks like 100 but in the 'help' section it states up to 300?
Moz Pro | | dentaldesign0 -
Why would Open Site Explorer say some internal links are images when in the source code they're text?
Hi, All! I was looking at OSE for one of my client's site's pages, and I saw that all internal links were said to be images. I was pretty sure their menu was CSS, and all the links were text. So I did "fetch as Googlebot" and looked in the resultant code of one of the homepage to see the main navigation bar. The navigation link for one of those pages looked like this: `onmouseover="doMenu2on(this);">[](http://www.mysite.com/solution_sub.asp?ID=8)` [``` <code>![](images/arrow6.gif)Anchor Text Here</code> ```](http://www.mysite.com/solution_sub.asp?ID=8) ``` The nav link for a page that does show internal anchor text in OSE looks like this: onmouseover="doMenu2on(this);">[](http://www.mysite.com/solution.asp?ID=5) [```
Moz Pro | | debi_zyx
<code>Anchor Text Here</code> So there is an image in the link (it's the little arrow before the text to indicate a sub-category), but the anchor text comes right after it. Is Linkscape (and therefore potentially Google) seeing them as two different links to the same page and only counting the first? But it's all wrapped within the same <a></a>tags. Any ideas on if this is a bug in Linkscape, or a real issue, and what should be done? Thanks! Aviva``0