Page not ranking despite indicators showing should easily be mid-1st page?

[PulsedMedia]

I have many years old website selling a service. The main keyword is 47% competitive, and we used to be #1 page 2, occasionally page 1 couple years back.

Domain authority is double of any of the competitors on 1st page, followed root domain links is many times that of 1st page competitors, infact against some of them almost 10 times as much, MozRank and MozTrust higher too. Infact, every metric is higher than competition. Only metric which isn't as good is Followed vs NoFollowed links metric, 95% of our links are NoFollowed, but we are still #1 in external followed links.

Yet we are stuck on 4th page, and on some localizations we are not even in Top 50.

This has happened slowly over time, not a overnight thing. Page we are trying to rank for gets grade A for optimizations, yet we have less significant pages ranking higher for that keyword. Further, newer pages tend to rank better than old ones. The whole site actually ranks quite low and we are not even getting search traffic for long tail keywords.
No problems reported on GWT, Analytics etc.

Is this a google penalization or something of the sort? How can i troubleshoot this and get past this?

[evolvingSEO]

"...slowly going downwards over the year"

This sounds like possibly user metric related, which are important ranking factors no tool is able to give us. It's possible, users have showed preference to other pages ranking for that query over time. Metrics could be;

• click through rate from SERPs
• bouncing back to SERPs ("pogo-sticking")
• time on page
• repeat visits to the page
• direct visits the page
• completed actions on that page
• ...etc

Essentially, users might be telling Google they don't like the page based upon their behavior. Some suggestions;

• Watch Rand's video about how to improve Pogo Sticking
• Check out these articles on improving CTR in the SERPs (most the top ranked resources there are good)
• Set up goal tracking to get a conversion rate
• Try Justin Cutroni's scroll tracking to see how users are interacting with the content
• Try a heatmap program like http://www.crazyegg.com/

Without being able to see your page, it's tough to give custom recommendations, but I would also recommend making sure you have the best design of any site in your niche for your audience.

[PulsedMedia]

It's been slowly going downwards over the year - the page itself is more than 2 years old, only with minor modifications during this time, basic texts have remained the same.

No changes correlate to major algorithm shifts as far as i can see.

Could google penalize that hard for the content age? This is a business frontpage - so there really is not that much to update on that particular page.

Our link portfolio hasn't seen major changes in years - infact, it seems to be pretty much the same. I went through the first 300 or so as reported from GWT on random check, didn't see anything seriously spammy, many of which are high quality organic links. HOWEVER, moz tools says we have ~8600 inbound links, and GWT says total links 854,161

Something seriously wierd is going on for the keyword since #2 position is held by a site with 1 external link inbound as per moz tools, only thing they have pretty much is 99 google +1s.

Downloaded more sample links and still cannot see anything seriously spammy. There are some scrapes and people copy pasting offers or announcements, but not much. There's also some semi-spammy sites which list best offers etc.

GWT tells no manual actions.

[BCutrer]

Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.

I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.