Why Would My Page Have a Higher PA and DA, Links & On-Page Grade & Still Not Rank?
-
The Search Term is "Alcohol Ink" and our client has a better page authority, domain authority, links to the page, and on-page grade than those in the SERP for spaces 5-10 and we're not even ranked in the top 51+ according to Moz's tracker.
The only difference I can see is that our URL doesn't use the exact text like some of the 5-10 do. However, regardless of this, our on-page grade is significantly higher than the rest of them.
The one thing I found was that there were two links to the page (that we never asked for) that had a spam score in the low 20's and another in the low 30's.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to maybe get around this?
Certainly, a content campaign and linking campaign around this could also help but I'm kind of scratching my head. The client is reputable, with a solid domain age and well recognized in the space so it's not like it's a noob trying to get in out of nowhere.
-
You are more than welcome.
I know I really enjoy answering questions on here and I suspect that EffectDigital does as well.
Please do let us know how you get on either directly or by replying to this post, that is one thing that is lacking when we respond to questions on any forum. People don't always let us know the results of our answers.
I wish you all the best working with what sounds to be a good client and hope to see more of you on the forums.
Steve
-
Thank you both for your additional information.
I was aware of most of the content that you've published here. However, you've taken my understanding and painted a very helpful "big picture" that takes a step back to understand all the factors at play.
It's been very helpful to me as it reminds me that there likely isn't a "magic fix" but that through continual work on the body of the business/website, and through continual differentiation and creation of great content, over the long-term we should be well positioned to compete even further.
Part of this question comes from a deep dive into trying to understand what's taken place for the client overall as there wasn't a lot of SEO work done at all over the history of the business and they've still managed to be very successful.
This company was a pioneer in their space, they're such wonderful people and such a wonderful company that they were able to grow significantly. Now, as competitors have crept in because of their success, and have deployed strong SEO strategies, they're starting to see their first shift from the major growth scale.
We have the closest thing to a "magic fix" that you can have which is moving their blog from the separate URL that it's presently on with its millions of links, to be attached to its main eCommerce site. There is some apprehension on their part with making this move too quickly (which is understandable). And so I'm really trying to paint an overall picture as you've just helped paint so that they can understand, what we can do from here (without moving the blog) and what that looks like.
Your answers have been so tremendously helpful to guiding the millions of thoughts in my head to something that's actionable and a great way to explain it and I just wanted to thank you both very much for your answers because I know you're also busy people, with a lot to do.
Thanks so much!
-
Not a problem! I always like these kinds of Qs and responses as they cover a bit of the history of SEO
-
Thanks EffectDigital,
Again your answer takes it to a new level though and provides great insights.
-
Steve's answer is really great. Basically in SEO we have to cater to Google's PageRank algorithm. We used to be able to see a very watered down, simplified version of PageRank using the Google toolbar for Firefox (before Chrome became big) and using various Chrome extensions thereafter
Google figured out that people were misusing this data and shut off the API which supplied the (very, very simplified version of) PageRank (a number for 0-10 for each URL on the web). PageRank still exists and Google still use it in their ranking algorithms, but no one except Googlers (and even then, only certain ones) can see it. Arguably no one could ever really see it, as TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) was really simplified and watered down, it was never a full view on a page's 'actual' PageRank
Suddenly, marketers had no way to evaluate the SEO authority of each web page they were looking at. Many stepped in to fill this hole (Ahrefs supply a URL and domain rating metric, Majestic SEO supply Citation Flow and Trust Flow metrics, Moz of course were first with PA and DA)
These metrics are our industry's attempt to fill a hole left by Google's removal of bad data from the public eye. Moz attempt to use various signals and metrics (link counts, search traffic estimates for URLs) to re-build TBPR as PA and DA
... but Google don't use PA and DA. Google use PR (PageRank). PA and DA are 'shadow metrics', they indicate and mimic but they are indicators only and cannot (read: absolutely must not) be taken at face value
For example, although link counts affected Google's old TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) metric, other things did too. If a site was blocked from Google, if a site had a penalty or algorithmic devaluations. Those things could lower or nullify the TBPR rating of a website. Since Google and Moz are not 'connected' in data terms, Moz's metrics miss many of the 'true' authority nullifying circumstances which could occur - thus you can end up with high PA / DA and still no traffic
Things that can affect you:
- Algorithmic devaluations, where the sites linking to your site are penalised and thus they no longer pass SEO authority to you - making your results go down as well. Not a penalty, just Darwinism in action I am afraid
- An actual penalty on your site
- Poor keyword targeting where your keywords aren't properly used in your content and / or Meta data, stuff like that. Sounds like this one is a real concern for you, as you may have SEO authority but NO relevance!
- Technical issues like an architecture which Google can't (or doesn't want to spend the time to) index, e.g: over-reliance on generated content through JavaScript (which Google can crawl, but it takes them much longer - so if you're a nobody don't expect them to care much or take that time)
- Technical indexation issues like blocking your own site with Meta no-index directives or robots.txt crawl blocks
- Legal challenges to your business or content in the form of DMCA requests, people filing reports directly with Google to have content removed from your site - there are many other types of legal challenge that can affect SEO
- Content duplication, internal or external
- Spam reports and disavow logs against your website
... there are many other factors, a big one is that your site may lack a value-proposition for end users. If other sites doing what you do, existed before you - and they're cheaper, have better reviews or tout unique features like free shipping (click fit and collect services for clothing, etc etc) then your offering itself may just not be competitive (and no matter how good your SEO is the site was doomed from the business end). Google expects sites to 'add value' to the web
The best thing to do is concentrate on your value proposition and making your site genuinely popular online. It's not easy. Building a successful site is as hard as building a successful business, it's just the digital reflection of what you are and what you do
-
Hi,
The first thing to remember, Google rankings do not use MOZ DA or PA to decide where a website should be ranked in the results.
The best way to use DA and PA are as an arbitrary measurement that allows you to compare against other sites, so you can see how you are doing against your competitors.
Now without knowing the URLs involved, I cannot check the websites to give any real insights. However, there is any number of reasons why the other sites may be ranking higher than your clients.
They may have better content for the keyword. They may have more backlinks pointing to the domain, they may be answering questions regarding that keyword in more detail.
Without actually being able to compare the sites it is hard to say.
I would analyse the sites that are higher than yours, check the backlink profiles, compare the number of pages and compare the quality of the content then you should have a plan to move forward and improve your rankings.
I hope this helps,
Steve
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
-
Non-optimised pages ranking higher than optimised homepage
I'm a developer working with a dating site and we're having what appear to be unusual ranking behaviour for the keyword "Ukraine Brides". When searching for "Ukraine Brides" we typically have the top 3 results in Google, however the homepage is almost never ranked #1. Other non-optimised pages appear ahead of it. I believe this is having a negative affect on our conversion rate, so wish to see this resolved. For instance, if you search here in NZ, the results are typically: Login page (/account/login) Search page (/search) Home page (/) Similar situation when searching in the US, but typically the top result is the search page. Is this unusual? We've spent quite a bit of time optimising the homepage, it has more external links, more internal links, better content that targets the keyword, more traffic, etc. Even so, the login and search pages appear higher. A side note, the average CTR for "Ukraine Brides" is significantly lower than "Ukraine Brides Agency" (20% vs 80% respectively), so I don't think that it's purely a 'brand keyword'. A few thoughts were: The search page is not accessible from the homepage unless you are logged in. Maybe this is causing some sort of linking/seo/ranking issue? Re: the login page being higher, perhaps many existing users visit the login page directly from this keyword in order to login straight away so Google pushes this to the top. I think this is less likely because most existing users will be logged in automatically (via cookies "remember me") and the homepage has a login form in anycase The site supports multiple languages. Maybe this is causing some canonical issues? There was an additional suggestion that we should noindex the login and search pages in order to resolve this ranking issue, but were nervous that we'd lose a large amount of organic clicks if we did this. Google must be doing this for a reason, so we wanted to resolve that underlying reason before dropping the noindex hammer. The fear is of course that we've done something wrong with our homepage which is causing it to perform poorly and thus these other pages rank higher. The hope would be that if we fixed that, that our rank for other keywords would improve also. It would be great if we could get some more eyes on this to hopefully confirm we're not doing anything silly, and are just generally after a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrew_uba0 -
How come a page can rank in top 10 for medium difficult keyword, with poor link profile.
Hi Moz Community, The keyword that http://customsigncenter.com/ is ranking for is "custom sign", the keyword difficulty is 38 (according to Moz Keyword Explorer). Here are the link metrics for the page and domain: Page authority: 27 Domain authority: 18 Facebook shares: 50 Linking RDs to the page: 7 Linking RDs to the Root Domain: 8 From the SERP, a lot of its competitors have better link profile than this guy. How come the page http://customsigncenter.com/ can rank 6th for the keyword "custom sign". Are there any important "hidden factors" behind the scene? Thank you for any help and support. Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii1 -
Why does my ecommerce category page have such low PA?
I'm a bit of a newbie to the game and I've learnt a lot over the past couple of days with a Moz subscription. I'm starting to put together a strategy to improve our SEO performance and get our site ranking higher for some specific terms. We have a low domain authority at 25. The page I am concerned about is one of our main product categories, link here. About a year and half a go we changed our domain name and did a 301 redirect on all our category, products and content pages. Would this have affected anything? These redirects are still in place. I also notice OSE shows now inbound links. I'm almost certain there are a few around though. Most recently we've been investing in unique descriptions for all products in this category at around 60 words per product, this excludes the product features in a tabular format. I appreciate this isn't many words. I have also read a lot about faceted navigation and this category suffers from a very flat product structure were facet navigation is used heavily by the user to find a product that matches their requirements. Does anybody have any ideas about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
New pages not ranking
I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better. The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages. Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
How hard would it be to take a well-linked site, completely change the subject matter & still retain link authority?
So, this would be taking a domain with a domain authority of 50 (200 root domains, 3500 total links) and, for fictitious example, going from a subject matter like "Online Deals" to "The History Of Dentistry"... just totally unrelated new subject for the old/re-purposed domain. The old content goes away entirely. The domain name itself is a super vague .com name and has no exact match to anything either way. I'm wondering, if the DNS changed to different servers, it went from 1000 pages to a blog, ownership/contacts stayed the same, the missing pages were 301'd to the homepage, how would that fare in Google for the new homepage focus and over what time frame? Assume the new terms are a reasonable match to the old domain authority and compete U.S.-wide... not local or international. Bonus points for answers from folks who have actually done this. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Two links from one page with different Anchor text
Example Business Name - UberPuter UberPuter targets the keywords "Computer Repairs" right from their home page. UberPuter has the option to place links on 150 of their customers pages that are happy with the service. Would it be best to place two anchor text links one with the brand name and one with the keyword anchor text in "computer repairs" pointing both at the home page or should UberPuter only place one link back to the home page for the Keyword Anchor text? To the best of my knowledge G only counts the first link on a page as a "Vote" so my thought is to only include the single link with the keyword anchor text. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0