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Doh! I guess I googled the wrong terms! Thanks for the link...

It does help a ton! What tool did you use for this analysis? I'll try to use the same techniques and then optimize each page accordingly!

Thanks

Hello,

We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french)

We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city>

Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city.

For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying.

Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search?

Thanks

Gamma,

I believe you tested woith Google.com and not Google.fr, because, with the latter, they are indeed #1.

I'll wait for a complete OSE crawl (is there a way I can trigger that?).

Now, we have a higher root domain seomoz rank and trust, we have keywords in the url, we have an A on the "on page" optimizations. And we've been #1 for years on this query... there must be something else which brought them to #1 in such a short time!

The competittor is studentjob.fr.

The pages for which they are ranking well are "landing" pages: like this one http://www.studentjob.fr/info/jobetudiant_paris

They provide a lot of useless information about Paris in an approximate french, which is what worries me. I assumed Google (fr) would be able to detect this kind of things quite easily.

Now, even the "link:" command on Google gives me no result for their url either, so it could be OSE, but the fact that they never even ranked on the #1st page is worrysome to me. What other tools to you suggest I look at?

I moved down by 1 position only.

The competition was not "intense", but they weren't easy queries either. However, this player was never on the first page. Adn it's now #1 or #2 on pretty much any query!

I am not sure this is the right place to ask that question, but I would really love to have a few explanation of why, all of a sudden, one of our competitors is starting to out rank us on very competitive terms/queries.

Up until a few weeks ago, we were #1 on a lot of queries "job etudiant <city>". (job etudiant = job student in french).  These keywords are considered competitive by SEOMoz (54% according to the ranking tool).</city>

Very recently, a competing website started to systematically rank #1on each of these terms. What's really disturbing is that I don't see any obvious reason this competitor would rank above us (at least per SEOMoz's standards).

For example, on "Job etudiant Paris", their page authority is 1 (ours is 43), the have 0 domain linkin root domains (vs. 6 for us), their domain authority is 46 (55 for us) and 144 domains linking to their domain (805 for us).

I do not think we've been penalized in any way as our relative positions (compared to other websites) are unchanged. But I feel that this website is doing something obvious that we're missing. Can anyone tell us?

I have performed a complete audit in the "ranking analysis" tool, and I'm happy to share more details if anyone wants them.

Hello,

We have a fairly large site. Due to an attack it was taken down for about 10 hours.

We have finally been able to resolve the security issues, restore the code and put everything back online.

Now, we are a little bit worried about what GoogleBot will think of us. We have been working hard during the past months to get a better SEO. Should we be worried?

So how do you suggest we optimize on keywords? Make sure we optimize all versions? That probably means creating more pages as, for example, we probably can't optimize a given page's title for both the singular and plural forms.

Thanks for taking care of this!