Then why my site is not ranking

[Somanathan]

My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Jane, thanks for stopping by and giving your inputs. You are right, no SEO tool is a one shop stop for carrying out an SEO audit. We use a myriad of tools to analyze the link profile, on-page elements with lot of manual scrutiny, Google penalty checks from GA and GWMT account perspective. The major tools that we use include but not limited to, Moz, MajesticSEO, ahrefs, SEMrush, Brightedge and Maven. Though there are many areas and features that these tools superimpose on each other, a consolidated audit data from these tools gives us a holistic picture of the issue at hand with lot of manual checks that go in to the process.

Recently, we saw a situation where page loading time was an issue with all the other stuff being superior to the competition. We use a set of tools we use for page loading performance test looking at Site speed data from GA. Sometimes, the historical indexing data can also have an impact on present ranking especially when the same website operated in a different niche (or even probably operated in an illegal niche) and now serving different content with no change in ownership (Whois data). In cases this these, we look at way back machine data and try to analyze things.The list of audit checkpoints goes on and on... :))

We try to leave no stone unturned when it comes to doing an SEO audit and as you know SEO forensics is a very time consuming tiresome process especially when we have a client with better SEO parameters over the competition and crying foul about Google.

Its a daily battle and the best thing about SEO is, we love it and Google is both our strength and weakness ; ))

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[JaneCopland]

Hi Devanur,

Just one more thing to add (and I am definitely not trying to insinuate anything here!) but one thing to keep in mind with third-party tools like Moz, etc. is that they have access to all the publicly available data about your site and your competitors' sites, such as how many links they have and from where, but they do not have access to Google's filters or "spam" / quality measures. As such, Google may be devaluing some links that other services are discounting. Moz and other providers work very hard to ensure that they count / discount links in the same way as Google probably does. And for the most part, they get this right. However, when all of your metrics across different tools show that you should be ranking better, and you are not, it is a good idea to manually analyse your links and content in comparison to your competitors' and see if you can spot any issues that are not showing up in automated analyses (e.g., do you have a very high number of links from one particular type of site, whereas your competitors do not, etc.).

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi, just in case, login to your Google analytics account and please visit this URL:

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Give read-only access to the application and check if this website has been hit by any of the Google updates like Panda or Penguin. Look from October 2012 till date. I see an issue between December 2012 to February 2013. Let us know what do you see and we shall take it from there.

By the way, no on-page SEO tool on this planet is comprehensive. A true SEO audit can be done by only a good SEO expert. Of course making use of best tools of the trade like Moz etc.,

Best regards,

Devanur

[KeriMorgret]

DA and PA are Moz measures of a site, and try to approximate how a search engine might view the site. They're not perfect, and you need to look at a variety of other things, such as:

What type of content do you have? What type of content do they have?

What type of links do you each have?

Can your site be easily crawled?

[Somanathan]

I know I should not come to a conclusion only by moz's DA & PA. Like I mentioned below, both QuickSprout and Woorank are also placing my site on top of my competitors. I am confused.

I appreciate your time and reply.

[Somanathan]

I have checked with Moz's on page grader and it provides "A". What Should I do then.

[Somanathan]

Hi Devanur Rafi,

Thank you for your example and i appreciate your time.

Compare with our competitors, we are doing extremely good in content part. We have been adding content, writing blog posts with infographics, sharing them in social media, creating videos etc..,

Even I did check with Moz's on page grader which gives A. Not only moz, i have compared my site with competitors using tools like Quicksprout and woorank. My site gets good score than competitors.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Somanathan,

Suppose:

Website = Car

Content  = Engine

DA/PA   = Turbocharger/Nitro booster

You need to have content that is unique, highly relevant, targeted, updated and useful to the visitors. With this in place, your website will get the boost from DA/PA and thereby can rank well in the search engines. You should do a thorough keyword research and analysis, come up with highly searched terms for your niche, add pages targeting each of these with highly relevant content targeting the main keyword/phrase. If you can let us know the website in question, we will be able to suggest you better. Good Luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[mandr612]

Are you using the keywords that you are trying to rank for in the search engine?  If so then have you keyword optimized your website for the keywords you want to rank for?

[GPainter]

DA & PA are not a garuntee of rankings, have you looked into other metrics like Content (which can include keywords), social metrics, links in the likes ot Hrefs & Majestic SEO.