Does social media presence + inbound links outweigh bad SEO?
-
Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us for keywords that we're targeting. The SEO errors are duplicate content, titles, and 404 errors. We've successfully nailed down much of our SEO issues to a bare minimum, although not eliminated them completely, so we're at a loss as to why we aren't gaining much ground.
From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence. Can it be inferred from this that an active social media presence and large inbound link count outweigh bad SEO practices? What else should we be looking for to help pinpoint why we're not gaining rank with the keywords we're targeting?
-
If you were hit by Panda... Google was telling you that your content was not up to their expectations.
**Now we're bouncing between the top 10 and the top 30. **
That probably means that you have not recoved from Panda. I would be working just about 100% on content. If you improve the content then you might get more links and more social shares. People like to great sites, people share great sites.
-
So the take-away that we should be looking at is worrying less about perfecting our technical SEO and focusing more on just creating a healthy and attractive user experience?
-
We were hit pretty hard by Panda in 2012 and have been struggling to regain lost ground since then. Previous to that point, we were ranking in the top 5 for all relevant keywords. Now we're bouncing between the top 10 and the top 30.
Regarding the duplicate content, they're (the competitor's) created by parameters and dynamic content as is natural for ecommerce stores, but not canonicalized. Our links come from relevant sources, but it's a matter of around 150 links for us and depending on the competitor, 1,500 to 19,000 links. From what I've seen, many of their links appear relevant as well but I haven't had the time to comb through all of them.
What would you define as over-targeting or hyper-targeted? Is that the same as keyword stuffing? If so, we do have issues with that given as an niche ecommerce store many of our products share at least one keyword that we're targeting.
-
Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us...
Some tools report SEO "errors" that don't mean anything. Sometimes I think that just report a big load of errors for an "apparent value" effect.
From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence.
This makes perfect sense. Bet your money on it. People love them and their site so much that they are linking to them, socializing with them, etc. If you don't have this then I would be looking at what you are doing to make visitors happy.
I think that making your visitors really happy is worth thousands of some of the SEO "errors" that are reported. It's great that you cleaned up your errors. Now you can work on pleasing your visitors.
-
There are numerous factors that could be doing this. Have they been around longer? Do they have any .Gov or .Edu backlinks? Are the tons of links that they have all from relevant sources? Do they have a better array of linking domains than your site does? Do they appear to be driving a lot of referral traffic from social media to their site? Are all those duplicate content pages you see actually created by parameters but canonicalized to the proper pages? Has your site ever been impacted by an algorithmic or manual penalty? Do your links come from relevant sources? Are you over-targeting your pages to keywords at the detriment of user experience? Is the anchor text of your backlinks all hyper-targeted or is the distribution more natural? And 404s aren't necessarily a bad thing if they're relevant 404s.
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
-
Do-follow links from social media
I am experimenting with some blogs and online communities for backlinks. The Moz bar shows this link as do-follow, but it has the internal redirecting link. My brain is frozen and I can't remember what it's called to look up how it affects SEO. Can anyone enlighten me?
Link Building | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Linking Between Sites
Hi everyone, Hope you are all doing well. If a company owns several different websites that are supposed to be different brands but are part of the same niche/sector is it OK to link between them? Or would this be seen as violation? Thanks
Link Building | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Is there a software to help me check whether the sites that i give link to, also place my link on their site (reciprocal link)?
When i exchange links with others, i usually put their link on my site hoping that they'll do the same. Since it's impossible to check all sites whose link i have placed on my page to see if they have put a link back to me, i was wondering whether there is a kind of software to help me do that!
Link Building | | isidora0 -
Link Directories - Good or bad?
I've just done a search on open site explorer for a competitors site that has is ranked number one. Most of their highest authority backlinks are from link directories. I just read an article on here saying to stay away from directories that state things like 'seo friendly directory'. Many of my competitors links are from these kind of sites! Will it harm me to get links from such sites? It seems to be working for my competitors.... confused.com!
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Total Links vs Ext. Followed Links
Hi I'm fairly new to SEO and SEOMOZ. I've created a campaign for my own site and I've added 3 competitor sites. There are 1,385 total links to my site and a massive 49,450 links to one of my competitor's site. However under "Ext. Followed Links", there are 1,045 to my site and only 911 to the same competitor site. Am I correct that it is the "Ext. Followed Links" which are more important from an SEO point of view as the other links have the "no follow" attribute set? Or have I got this wrong? Thanks James
Link Building | | avecsys0 -
Do no follow links have any seo value at all?
I saw some test results of no follow links from some years back and it seemed to indicate that Google still counts the anchor text in no follow links provided the page is already indexed and has do follow links pointing to it. The test results seemed to indicate that Google does count the links and uses the anchor text to cause the page to rank higher in the serps for those key words. any truth to this? If i don't expect any traffic whatsoever from a no follow link should i not build it? Take care, Ron
Link Building | | Ron101 -
Free link on a Paid Link Blog
Hi there, I have been doing some outreaching, and managed to have a blog post accepted on a authority blog. They included links to my website, and I was very pleased with the placement. However, having browsed through the site, I was worried to see that they openly admit they allow 'reviews' of websites, with backlinks included, for $50 per review. I am worried I might be penalised without actually doing anything wrong. I did not pay for my link, but the link has been placed on a site which openly admits they accept payment for links. Should I be worried? Should I ask them to take it down? To date I have been told countless times by bloggers I am outreaching that if I pay $10, $50, $100 etc I can write a blog post. I have never accepted because of the risk of penalization. Now, unwittingly, I am linked to from a paid link site with a blog post that would look like I have paid for it because of the placement and style of back link. What do you think? Thanks,
Link Building | | giveacar0 -
Can too many high PR links can hurt SEO
I recently accuired about 10 PR 4- 5 for my website after getting mostly PR 1-2 for the past 6 months. After a couple of day my rankings not only didn't go up, but actually went down really drasticly for many keyphrases that i used to rank at the top 3. Should i keep building those high PR links in the same fast pace, should i slow down? Or maybe i should even those out with some low PR link?
Link Building | | atohad0