How can a site rank higher when you beat them by A LOT on virtually every SEOMOZ factor?
-
Any insight into what's driving these results would be appreciated.
Another site ranks #6 and we rank #22 on a keyword that scores 67% for "Keyword Difficulty", but we score significantly higher than them on almost every ranking factor including having nearly 10 times more backlinks along with higher PA and DA scores,etc. Here is a comparison from the Keyword Difficulty Tool report.
Question: What could be going on?
Factor and ranking comparison (us v. them) with our higher rankings are listed first.
PA: 61 v. 39,
mozRank 5,85 v. 4,54,
mozTrust 6.00 v. 5.49,
mT/mR = 1.0 v. 1.2,
total links = 4,198 v. 90,
internal links = 4198 v 90,
external links = 275 v. 57,
followed links = 4171 v 85,
no follow links = 27 v 5,
linking root domains = 46 v 30
on-page grade = A v B
broad keyword usage in title: yes v yes
broad keyword usage in document: yes v yes
keyword used in url = no v no
keyword used in domain = partial v no
KW exact match - no v no
exact anchor text links = 2373 v 13
%links w/ exact anchor text = 56% v 14%
linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 7 v 8
% linking root domains w/ exact anchor text = 15% v 26%
partial anchor text links = 0 v 0
Domain Authority = 54 v 27
Domain mozRank = 5.4 v 3.2
Domain mozTrust = 5.8 v 3.7
DmT/DmR = 1.1 v 1.2
External links to domain 9261 v 63
Linking root domains to this domain = 355 v 33
linking c- blocks domains to domain = 267 v 30
tweets = 4 v 3
FB shares = 13 v 11
Google Plus one shares = 1 v 0
-
That's the problem! Although some do surprisingly!
Google's wise to this though and so if it sees that you have a good number of quality links, it won't penalise you for it. Otherwise a competitor could just build spammy links on your behalf and ruin your ranking!
-
Shelly, that is very helpful. Id pretty much thought that was it. Though I somehow doubt the owners of these rubbish sites are going to take the time to remove the links.
-
You should probably start a new Thread for this Tina - you'll get more responses.
The only way to remove bad links really is to contact the site owners where the bad links reside and ask them to remove them! There's no quick fix unfortunately.
You can use opensiteexplorer to seek out the links which are bad, then you'll need to go through them one by one, seek out the contact details for the site admin (using WHOis if necessary) and then ask for the link to be taken down.
If you have spammy links, you should also concentrate on creating QUALITY links at the same time. Google will usually ignore most spammy links as long as you have a reasonable number of good links in your profile as well.
Hope that helps.
-
Im sorry to ask what is probably a not too bright question - but how exactly do you get spammy links removed? For example, how did you get the Forex links taken down Andrew?
-
Look at where your links are coming from and try and get rid of any links that may come from spammy websites.
These could be websites that have many outbound links which bear no relation to each other or Sites which have no relation in subject matter to your website.
I recently checked my link profile and found loads of links from Forex trading sites, which all appeared to be really spammy! Cleaned up and saw my SERPs rise back into top 10!
-
Thx. watched it, makes good sense.
-
Here's a good video on it: http://acumenstudio.com/articles/2011/09/exact-match-vs-partial-match-in-seo-today/
You will want to start diversifying your anchor text. Start contacting some of the webmasters that you have links from, and ask them to change the anchor text.
-
I have considered this, but I suspect something else is playing a much bigger role.
Here's why --- a couple months ago we were not optimized for "exact match" and we were still below them. We've only been building exact match in the last couple months.
Also, if a site beats another on so many factors, is it really possible that just one factor like "exact match" links being over 20% could put you below them?
Seems like something else is in play here. No?
-
anything specific you have in mind to "clean up" the link profile?
-
2 years v 9 years; theirs is older, but ours is over 2 years old
-
In my experience it sounds like your link profile could be letting you down. Use OSE to analyse your links and try and clean it up.
-
Here's what Blueglass said about too many exact match links:
"Penalties, as opposed to rewards, are being reaped for too many exact match links."
In this article: http://www.blueglass.com/blog/link-building-in-a-pandas-world/
It used to be all about getting exact match links, but things have definitely changed. For starters, guess how easy it is to see if you are having a major hand in your link building? Super easy if you keep forcing exact match text.
I would suggest:
Making your link profile look more natural
Making sure most of your exact links come from the higher quadrant of your link profile (but still under 20% saturation)
Continue growing
-
Age of a domain registered seems to be a factor. I have been working on a newer site and our new site is ranking higher than our competitors in all seomoz factor but not over taking the older sites. All I can say is keep up the good work and one day you will catch up.
-
What is the age of both domains?
-
%links w/ exact anchor text = 56% v 14%
I've heard that 20%, depending on the vertical, is about the maximum threshold for exact match links. Perhaps you are over-optimized?
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
-
Ahrefs Much Higher Than Competitors But Competitors Doing Significantly More Traffic?
Hey guys, I'm baffled by checking my Ahrefs ratings lately. It looks like our rating just went up considerably... from over 1 million to now around 500k. One of my main competitors, however, has a much lower Ahrefs rank (over 3 million) but he does a considerable more amount of traffic than we do... how is this? My domain rating is higher than his by a lot. Very curious how this works.
Competitive Research | | jfishe19880 -
I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website is doing on google ranking
Hello, I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website (flyhy.co) is doing on google ranking and I have no clue why even though I have been doing my homework regarding SEO. Just a bit of background, I have created a new website about 6 months ago for the paragliding community, the primary goal is to provide a platform for people to publish their ads (osclass), but also to provide some interesting reviews and tools to help paragliders chose their wing. We have been putting a lot of effort to provide a nice user experience and tio build the tools mentioned above. Our main channel to connect with the community is Facebook, and we have been quite active there. I have looked at many SEO articles and I made sure the website provides a good UX, the URLs are SEO friendly, good meta data, etc. Also have been using the google search console and analytics to monitor all of this. But here is the thing, all these does not seem to change anything in our ranking for important keywords such as "paraglider for sale", "paragliding equipment", etc. We seem to only rank (looking at Google’s keyword tool) for very specific wing model names that people have mentioned in their ads. I have ran out of ideas on how to improve our SEO !!!!!! I know the website is only 6 months old, but by now we should get some results. As an example, I will mention one our main website competitors: www.paraglidingequipment.org. OK the URL is pretty obvious and this website ranks in page #1 for "paragliding equipment" (but also for "paraglider for sale" and other paragliding related key phrases). OK there is the URL (paraglidingequipment.org), but I thought nowadays google bots are smarter than just that. The website is 1 year old (so not really much older than us, and was ranking high anyway even 6 months ago). The website looks like it was clearly made by one person and then quickly just left it running, so no content has been added (except for people putting their ads), there is almost no activity on the Facebook account. I have run some test such as "pagespeed insights" and we both rank the same. On "seositecheckup.com", we are clearly better with more 10 points. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what is going on? Have I missed a very important aspect of SEO? Is our website somehow compromising the robots crawling (although I can see about 80 pages have been already indexed in google search console)? I know content is king, but in paraglidingequipment.org the only content I see are ads, and we have ads and other interesting (ie reviews and tools) for paragliders. To conclude, I am basically completely clueless of what to do to rank at least on the first couple of pages of google for the key phrases above. I need help. Hichem. PS: in Moz bar our score is non existing (PA=1,DA=10), on paraglidingequipment.org (PA=23,DA=15). So it looks that essentially we are not apparent on the web! PSS: We have also tried to build some backlinks on few important paragliding community websites.
Competitive Research | | hichemboudali0 -
How can I tell if a competitor has a KML Geositemap or not?
Is there someone to tell if a competitor has a KML Geositemap or not? Would it be in the source code on their homepage? or can I just put their url in a "Open Site Explorer" type product to find out? Thanks, Ruben
Competitive Research | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Can an https: impact (not provided) keywords in Google Analytics? Meaning if I make my site https: will it provide any more keywords. If not how can I get this data?
I have a site that I'd love to have more keyword data on. Can making my site an https: site give me more keyword data than leaving my site an http: site? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Can anyone suggest a AHREF's alternative?
Hello Everyone,
Competitive Research | | Juratovic
Now that AHref's has killed their keyword analysis I am on the search for a substitute.I just can't see paying $80 per month for their link analysis only even-though I do find their link index to be much much much more updated then any other company even SeoMoz (sorry Rand and company). Does anyone have any suggestions? SemRush is the only one I have seen to come close. Thank you! Pete0 -
Competitor's Ranking's Reports are Showing Blank Values for Rankings
When selecting competitors to see how they rank for specific terms in the ranking's report page here, it loads the page normally, but without any actual rankings. Where values should be, it lists all values as our competition not ranking whatsoever (for all competitors). I'm not sure if there is something we're doing wrong, or perhaps we just need to wait for a refresh, but if anybody could help out, that would be wonderful!
Competitive Research | | ACLens0 -
Good tools to compare site speed on different sites?
Google tells me that my site is slower than 81% of the internet.Now this is a very large news website, so I would like to compare this against other very large news websites. Are there any tools that will be able to tell me the speed of a list of websites? I am looking for something a little more detailed than 'this site loaded in 1 second'. Also, do any of you fellow SEOs know of any good tools to analyse what is causing your site to slow down? Kind regards
Competitive Research | | MirandaP0 -
How many Page Rank 8 sites are there?
Anyone have any estimate of how many Page Rank 8 sites are out there? Best, Steve
Competitive Research | | Aggie0