Are backlinks the reason for my site's much lower SERP ranking, despite similar content?

[erin_soc]

Hi all,

I'm trying to determine why my site (surfaceoptics.com) ranks so much lower than my competitor's sites. I do not believe the site / page content explains this differential in ranking, and I've done on-site / on-page SEO work without much or any improvement. In fact I believe my site is very similar in quality to competitor sites that rank much higher for my target keyword of: hyperspectral imaging.

This leads me to believe there is a technical problem with the site that I'm not seeing, or that the answer lies in our backlink profile. The problem is that I've compared our site with 4 of our competitors in the Open Site Explorer and I'm not seeing a strong trend when it comes to backlinks either. Some competitors have more links / better backlink profiles but then other sites have no external links to their pages and lower PA and DA and still outrank us by 30+ positions.

How should I go about determining if the problem is backlinks or some technical issue with the site?

[erin_soc]

Thanks for both of your responses!

@IrvCo_Interactive I do have a Webmaster Tools and I do not have any warnings. But I do see 70 errors under Search Appearance > Structured Data, all regarding Missing: author and/or Missing: updated. I will look into what that's about.

I am working to fix the weird subdomains coming up in Google for our site. We never used these domains and someone suggested to me that this might be a result of a wildcard A record in my DNS. This other Moz article mentioned to use .htaccess to 301 these, so that might be the fix I use: http://moz.com/blog/find-your-sites-biggest-technical-flaws-in-60-minutes

I am not quite sure what I need to do to make sure my site's internal structure is solid, I just set it up in ways that seemed intuitive from a user perspective. I'm sure there are articles out there on this subject though.

@Moosa Hemani Indeed that site http://www.hvhtek.com/associates/surfopt/surfopt.html does use a few paragraphs from our site. What tool did you use to identify that this duplication was out there? I have done almost no work on link building and neither has anyone else, so in a sense what we have now is our natural link profile. But our site has been around for a long time so we may have gathered some bad links anyway.

[MoosaHemani]

There are literally tons of factors that are involved when Google ranks a site so this can be anything other than just links and quality of content. There are other factors like on-page optimization, site architecture, how you have been discussed on other websites, social media and much more…

I give a quick look to your website and here are the following things I witnessed in a one go!

• Duplication of Content

I believe there are two different websites were you are using the similar content, I just checked one page and Google says the content that is available on the website is more or less similar to the content available on this URL: http://www.hvhtek.com/associates/surfopt/surfopt.html

I believe this page also represents your company but technically they are two different domains containing duplicate content.

The idea is to have a unique and quality content on the website and this can help you improve your organic visibility.

• Links

In my honest opinion, links are playing their part too!

Open Site explorer said you are getting 182 links from the 10 root domains, probably you should increase the links from the root domains and if you are using tactics like blog commenting or forum posting to get links then consider avoiding it as this will hurt your rankings instead of building it.

Many of the links are no follow (probably coming from blog comments). It is important to have links from diversified areas and not all should be no followed or do followed.

Keeping the link profile as natural as possible is a way to go and outrank your competitors from the desired key phrases.

These are the quick analysis, I believe digging the website in detail might help you caught more areas where your attention is needed. There can be multiple factors that are playing their part and as a whole you are not been able to rank above your competitors and win organic traffic!

Hope this helps!

[IrvCo_Interactive]

There are hundreds of ranking factors, so essentially what you are asking is the entire process of SEO.

Do you have Google Webmaster Tools for your site? That might be a good starting point. It's not just the quantity of links but the quality as Google sees it. Open Site Explorer is a great tool but you should check to see if Google has any warnings or alerts in your account.

I also like to look at how Google indexes a site. You get interesting results when you type in site:surfaceoptics.com into Google. Is the order of the pages what you would expect? Are high value pages coming up above low value pages? If not maybe your own internal linking on the site needs to be rethought. Do the email servers need to be indexable by Google? (pop, smtp, mail, mx, etc.) That seems a little wonky to me. I don't see that too often. You should maybe block those with a robots.txt file or something?