Competitor Ranks Highly Despite LOTS of Duplication
-
One of my Moz campaigns tracks my main competitor. I can't get over the fact that this competitor continues to rank well despite having thousands of duplication issues while I currently have less than 10. Our websites are similar both structurally and product-wise.
The two images attached include OSE comparisons for the keyword "kraft envelopes". My competitor ranks #2 for the term, while I rank #9. I don't get why! And again, looking from a top-level perspective, MOZ shows that my competitor's website is full of duplication issues and other problems while my site is healthy as a horse. All responses are greatly appreciated.
-
Oh yes Andrew. You should invest some serious time to clean the link profile so that it looks natural and organic. We have seen dramatic improvements with clean link profiles.
-
IMHO, no link audit software can give you the whole picture of your link profile but a combination of all those can. We use almost all of them while carrying out a major backlinks check especially when dealing with penguin recovery.
-
Hi Andrew,
I meant, the competitor's website is much bigger and is driving loads of organic traffic for high search volume keywords/phrases.
"I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed. "
This theory is not a correct perspective. Even with more pages, the link juice will be still within the website unless you have a ton of out-bound links pointing to external websites.
There are a lot of other ranking factors that make the competitor rank ahead of you. If you look at organic search competition for your website in SEMRush, the competitor website is number one competitor for your website and if you look at the organic search competition for your competitor website, your website stands at 9th position. Please have a look at the ranking factors list provided in my previous post. Moreover, no matter how good a website is, it cannot rank for all the keywords/phrases in the niche. When I looked further down in the organic keywords data for both of your domains, its very evident that your competitor ranks excellently well for search queries with the term, 'envelopes' in them. Infact, they are the number one site in Google for almost all the envelopes related search queries. Their domain name must be playing a bit role in this along with other ranking factors.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thank you Moosa. I will be conducting a more thorough audit.
-
After more research, I realize my link audit consisted mainly of link removal for just my homepage. I will have to do more for all of my inner pages. Thank you!
-
Is AHREFs the best link audit software? I conducted a major link audit recently using a combination of OSE and webmaster tools but they clearly did not catch everything.
-
Thank you Devanur. We are aware of our poor URL structure and are considering a site-wide change to include separators in all URLs.
"The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index" - - why does this matter? I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed.
-
Moosa got it spot on. Just by looking at few parameters, we can't say that a website can rank high in Google. Here is something that can be handy while doing a comprehensive SEO audit. Though the list in there is not an official ranking parameters list, it can give you a fair idea about how and what things come in to play when it comes to search engine rankings. Hope it helps:
http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
One of the basic things that you need to understand is that Google uses complex mathematics (Algorithms) to rank a website against a query and there are around 200 plus signals and not all of them are widely discussed.
There could be several reasons which includes quality of content, title tags, linking domains, website structure, internal linking and the list goes on.
Keeping the Devanur’s comment in mind I can safely advise you to do audit your website again and fix the problem to make it more SEO friendly plus get links from high quality places.
Hope this helps!
-
Just another addition to the above. When I checked the backlinks using AHREFs for the jampaper page, most of the links come from Chinese domains. This might not be good if your target market is not China. You might want to look in to this.
-
Hi,
Before digging deep, the striking difference is the URL structure. Your competitor has a clean URL structure with hyphen as a word separator. Looking at your URL, it has no word separators and looks sub-optimal with too many words held together without word separators.
Coming to the duplication issues. Just because a site has duplicate content, its not bound to be penalized. The intention matters here than the duplication itself. If you look at the size of the websites. The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index and drives much more organic traffic.I looked at SEMRush data for both the sites and the competitor is a clear winner.
Moreover, the search query also matters a lot in this case and the competitor has it in the domain name. This also plays an important role. Those were my two cents and the first thing that I would do is to make the URL structure a little better.
Good luck friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Keyword rankings and main company tagline not matching
I have a question about keywords rankings and on page keywords. I don't rank very well for the keyword "Nutcracker". But, my tag line is "Your one stop Nutcracker and Ballet Gifts source". One of my most important keywords is "Nutcrackers" (see the s 😉 ) and I hot hit really hard in my rankings with the google algorithm update. Almost a 30 position difference from one day to the next. Am I shooting myself in the foot by having Nutcracker being in the forefront, even though my chances of ranking for that are very low as there is high competition with more actual "The Nutcracker" related content. I do have the word "nutcrackers" on my home page...but all of a sudden I feel like i'm wasting space, or I should have made the tagline "Your one stop Nutcrackers and Ballet Gifts source". It just doesn't sound as good. I just recently dove headfirst into SEO and moz, so I consider myself a noob, but I learn quite quickly. Thank you for your help! Esmee/Owner www.nutcrackerballetgifts.com 12-inch-nutcrackers-n1211-a.jpg
Moz Pro | | NutcrackerBalletGifts0 -
Duplicate Pages
Hello, we have an issue which I'm hoping someone can help with. Our Moz system is saying that this page http://www.indigolittle.com/fees/ Is a duplicate page. We use this page purely for mobiles and we have added code to say This has been on for over a month now however Moz is still picking the page us as a High Priority Issue.
Moz Pro | | popcreativeltd0 -
Duplicate Content
Crawl Diagnostics is returning duplicate content/title tags for every product image on listing pages of my classified site because each image is on a separate url. So this page, for example, http://marketplace.myclassicgarage.com/cars/all/Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/ has, among other things, the same title tag as all this page, http://marketplace.myclassicgarage.com/cars/all/Chevrolet-Bel-Air/24481/media/151968 which is one of many different images that are all child pages in the folder /media In this particular case there are over 140 pages with the same title tag because there are over 140 images for this particular car. That is just one listing and there are over 1,000 listings (vehicles) and that number will grow. Is this really a problem? With limited resources, what real positive effect will making all these images have unique title tags really have from a SERP perspective? Keep in mind this being user generated content, there is no way to descriptively update the title tags to something like <title>Bel Air Passenger Side Profile</title>. That is not feasible.
Moz Pro | | MyClassicGarage0 -
Canonical URLs and Duplicate Page Content
My website (doctor directory) is getting a lot of duplicate page content & duplicate page title warnings from SEOmoz. The pages that are getting the warnings are doctors profiles which can be accessed at three different URLs. Problem is this should be handled by the canonical tag on the pages. So example below, all three open the same page: https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/ https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/gkv https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/pkv Here's our canonical tag (on line 34): rel="canonical" href="http://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh" /> So why is SEO moz crawling the page? We are getting hundreds of errors from this - and yet Google doesn't have any of the duplicate URLs indexed...
Moz Pro | | thomashillard0 -
Ranking Tracker not correct?
Over the last 6 weeks I've been linkbuilding for one of my customers. The search term is: bed and breakfast portugal. It is not easy but we are making progress. The goal is the number 1 page (top 10 results) in Google.nl I've been keeping score with Rank Tracker and also created a campaign. Last week we were still ranked 11 (for some time already) according to Rank Tracker but tuesday we made a jump to number 7. Whoehoe you would say but opening up Chrome and Firefox browser I am still seeing www.bedandbreakfast-casaceedina.com on the 2nd page? Maybe somebody can give me an explanation? I've de-personalized my search and also Rank tracker show s the command they are using: http://www.google.nl/search?q=bed+and+breakfast+portugal&pws=0 However also using that I'm not seeing my client back at position 7. How can the Rank tracker information be so wrong, I was hoping not off course 🙂 Your help is appreciated very much.
Moz Pro | | newtraffic0 -
Pro Dashboard Rankings Report not accurate for the UK?
We rank in the top 5 consistently for our keywords on www.google.co.uk However, the ranking report (set to Google UK) shows that we don't appear in the top 50. When looking in more detail at the keyword in question, it shows the top ranking sites to be all US sites with .com domains that don't rank at all on google.co.uk. Can anyone shed some light on this or tell me if there is any way of getting accurate ranking reports via SEOmoz tools for UK sites, so I don't have to do it manually? Thanks in advance
Moz Pro | | heatherrobinson0 -
Is there a problem with Weekly Ranking report this week?
I just received my weekly ranking report. 2 Up, 0 down, 8 the same this week. However, last week my page was #2 for "innovation conference" and this week you report "not in top 50." My first thought was penalty, but when I searched and removed personalization, we were still #2 for that search query. So, something must be wrong with the report - either we're 1 down or "not in the top 50 is wrong."
Moz Pro | | KNect3650 -
Home and index.html isted as duplicate page
Hello, www.mountain-solutions.net and www.mountain-solutions.net/index.html are listed under an error for having a duplicate page. They are in fact the same page. I'm wondering how I can remedy this. Thanks
Moz Pro | | benfirth0