More authority back links but lower MozRank than competitor
-
Hi All,
I have a basic understanding of SEO and the various factors that contribute to higher search rankings. This question is specifically related to MozRank, which I understand to be defined as:
Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.
In my case, I am wondering if somebody could explain to me why I have a lower MozRank score than my competitor when I have both:
- Larger number of followable inbound links to my siteAND
- Of my larger number of followable inbound links, the page authority (and domain authority) of these links are greater than the page/domain authority of the lower number of links to my competitor's site.
I have attached 3 images to help explain my points.
Comparison Image: My site is on the left.
Competitor Inbound: Shows a snippet of the volume of inbound links and quality of inbound links of my competitor's site (filtered by highest page authority).
My Inbound: Shows a snippet volume of inbound links and quality of inbound links to my site (filtered by highest page authority).Any feedback or help is much appreciated!
-
The result count at the top is always the total count, regardless of how you filter. I'd look at only external links that are 301ed or followed, and that should be a much more accurate number.
-
Go under "linking domains," and keep expanding until you find one with a bunch. Right below that group it will say something like "see all links from this domain." That will bring you back to the inbound links section with a few different filters that weren't originally there.
Another option is to check your Google Webmaster Tools. If the domain has enough authority it will pop up with how many links you are getting from the one source.
-
Hi Dr. Peter,
Thanks for chiming in on the question.
I'm still fairly confused as to why the competitor has a higher MozRank score as we have a higher number of links and a higher number of quality links (please view the image in the original post titled 'Comparison').
I'm not using the tool to try to chase down their links, I'm basically trying to figure out why we are not ranking above the competitor in search, which lead me to diagnose our MozRank score and why we were not getting a higher score than the competitor. At this point, I'm just curious as nobody seems to be able to figure out what the reasons may be!
If you have any other thoughts, would love to hear them!
Cheers.
-
Hi Cody,
Thanks for taking the time to get involved here - it's getting more and more interesting as I investigate the different results.
Regarding your questions:
-
Based on the site:domain.com google results, we have 499 pages and the competitor has 1890 pages
-
We've used the SEOMoz Site Crawler
3&4) We have 216 internal links to this page and they are mostly just from menu and footer links. I am waiting for the results of the crawl test on the competitor.
- This was interesting to check out:
When you view our page comparison (image included in the original question at the top of this thread), you see that we have a total of 2,249 total links (216 internal links and 2,033 external links).
Let's just focus on the External Links:
External Followed Links: 259 links coming from 46 Followed Linking Root Domains
Total External Links: 2,033Given your comment about a low ration to domains to links, I wanted to see where all these external links were coming from. I headed into Open Site to run a check by using the following criteria:
Show [all] links from [only external] pages to [this page]
The results said we had 2,033 links but when I went through the results they only showed 5 pages of 50 results per page (max 250 results), and when I download the CSV the file only produced 216 links external inbound links!
Am I missing something here?
-
-
No, not at all - honestly, you remember more about mR than I do
We're definitely not trying to hide anything - it's just complicated. We've also sort of slowly moved away from mT/mR, because they just weren't as predictive as we'd like.
-
Very true. Also, if I came off as being a jerk in my post, I do apologize. That wasn't my intent.
-
Sorry, I should've said "I'm not sure how / how much we measure..." - it's been a while since I've dug into mR and mT, and I don't know how much an internal link structure could tip the balance. Like PageRank, it's iterative, so you'd have to crunch the numbers - it's not a simple, linear equation I could spell out here (even if knew/remembered it).
Truthfully, it's rarely worth getting hung up on, especially if PA/DA are solid and the site is ranking well. Knowing exactly why the competitor has a higher mR would rarely provide much or any advantage. It's generally better to track their strongest links and see if you're missing anything.
-
From SEOMoz: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank
"MozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both internal and external links"
If the competitor has fewer pages, or at least less pages being linked to from each page, then the "link juice" being passed between internal links can be greater. So, while you may have a lot more links going to your home page, you may be linking out to so many different pages from the home page that the link juice passed to internal pages is minimal. Thus, diluting any return you might get from those internal links.
That's assuming that the official Mozrank page isn't lying about internal links. Dr. Peter is the only one that can tell us that for sure.
-
I'm honestly not sure if we measure internal links as part of MozRank - I'd have to check into that. If one site were much larger, with a ton of indexed pages (including duplicates), it might dilute mR, but I can't say that with any confidence. It's similar to PageRank, but not exactly the same.
-
Dr. Pete:
The competitor has a lot less links, actually, but I'm super pumped for this tip!
Rogs.SEO:
How many pages does the competitors site have compared to yours?
Have you ran a screaming frog or a xenu of both sites?
Who has more internal links pushing into the page you scanned?
Are they just menu and footer links, or are some of them in the body?
Your ratio of domains to links is pretty low, do you have a bunch of site wides pointing at your site?
-
It's tough without seeing the sites, but MozRank is a bit more of a pure quantity score than DA/PA (which are built to predict ranking power). The fact that you have a lower MozRank but significantly higher PA suggest to me that the competitor is playing a numbers game. Your top links may have a higher quality, but they may just have more overall links, multiple links from some domains (site-wide maybe), etc.
I'd rather be higher on PA, buy our numbers. The picture I'm seeing here suggests your overall quality is better than your competitor's, so I don't think I'd go chasing after their link profile.
-
Hi Jeepster,
Thanks for the response. I can see how the link relevance might make a difference to the search results - this makes complete sense.
Putting search results aside, I'm more just confused as to why the competitor has a higher MozRank score as I have superior backlinks, which you can see from the images attached when I first posted the question. Do you have any idea why? Is there something about MozRank that I am missing from their definition of MozRank:
"MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank."
Flag1 <a title="I like this.">
</a>0 <a title="I disagree.">
</a>Reply
-
Thanks for the feedback so far guys, but I'm not sure that the answer to the question has been nailed down.
I'm not asking why the competitor is showing up higher on the search results. I'm just trying to figure out why the competitor has a higher MozRank, when it appears (from the MozRank description page) that MozRank is focused on the link building aspect of a page: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank
"MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank." -
Mozrank does take into consideration both internal and external links. Perhaps he has a better structured site that utilizes internal links in a better way?
-
Hi Greg
I think MozRank and MozTrust are good indicators but not failsafe predictors of search engine ranking (which I'm guessing is your ultimate goal)In my sector (real estate) I've seen sites with seemingly low metrics (DA, number of links, social shares, MozRank, MozTrust) outrank sites with figures twice and three times better.
I'm no guru, but what I've seen suggests to me that link relevance is becoming more and more important -- ie, a site with 40 highly on-topic links (even if from low/medium authority domains) can rank far, far higher than OSE metrics would suggest.
-
Just a guess here but it could have something to do with age of domain as well as age of links.
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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Have a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages as a client and they are currently not getting much organic traffic to their level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: https://www.domain.com.au/category/s...-category-type These pages have been on-page optimised, category content added, yet hardly any traffic. However the site level 1, level 2 pages do quite well. So this suggests this might be an internal linking issue? The site is definitely not penalized and as enough authority for these level 3 pages to rank. Any ideas would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Links not removed
Hello, I want some help regarding Bad links, I have Uploaded Disavow links, webmaster tools before 4-5 months But still, They are showing in Back links to my Site & Not disavow, can any one Help For this ? why they still appears in backlinks to my site, Why not removed Still ? Thanx in Advance, Falguni
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sanjayth0 -
Block Level Link Juice
I need a better understanding of how links in different parts of the page pass juice. Much has been written about how footer links pass less juice than other parts of the page. The question I have is that if a page has a hypothetical 1000 points of Link Juice and can pass on +/-800 points via links, and I have 1 and only 1 link in the footer to another page, does it pass the full 800 points? Or... since footers only pass a small fraction of link juice, it passes lets say 80 points, and the other 720 points stays locked up on the page. This question is a hypothetical - I'm just trying to understand relationships. I don't know if I've explained the question too well, but if someone could answer i it, or point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Unnatural Links Removal - are GWMT links enough?
Hi, When working on unnatural links penalty, is removing and disavowing links shown on the GWMT enough or should the list be broaden to include OSE and Majestic etc.? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Why are my competitors ranking higher?
I know there could be numerous reasons here why they may be ranking higher but I hope I can get some answers from the details that I provide below I am looking at one particular page so its www.mydomain.com/urlhere.html I have page rank 5 on this url I have had the domain for 7 years I have videos on this page (my competitors do too) I have 65 linking root domains 14,000 inbound links to this page. I have 6 keyword phrases in my title tag My main competitor has a lot more pages and has been around longer, but has lower page rank and lower inbound links to that page. They also have less words in the title tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phoenixcg0 -
Site Wide Link Situation
Hi- We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RezStream80 -
What is your onsite linking strategy?
So there are a few different routes to take when you're SEOing your site. My quest is to determine which is the best way to approach this. Let's use a real life example of a product. It's project management software, online collaboration software, employee scheduling tool, business process streamlining tool, client management tool and task/to do manager. It works for virtually any industry. I've created my keyword document and it's HUGE. I've created my wireframe with related keyphrases in buckets. Each one of the example keyphrases listed above have slight variations then a whole list of long tails. I have a few options as I see it: Create site sections within the main site that focus on each (This can make the site look slightly sloppy and categories would have to be masked so it doesn't appear spammy) Create a page in the blog relevant to each keyphrase and link all subsequent blog posts within that keyphrase family directly to that blog post (This seems like my best option) and have cta's or conversion mechanisms on this page Link all keyphrases to the home page (Seems like a terrible idea) Not sure if I answered my own question here, but I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cmdsonline0 -
Dark Matter Links
From 2007 - 2004 I worked for Sprint in several positions with my last one being a Corporate Account Manager for fortune 1000 customers. In 2004 I left Sprint after the Nextel merger and created an eCommerce site called thesprintstore.net as a Sprint Nextel preferred partner. I used my inner working knowledge of Sprint to my wonderful advantage and began making 3x my original salary. My desire for more business turned to greed and I began leaking information that consumers loved i.e. phone release dates, price points, warehouse stock levels and tricks of the trade. This garnered me thousands of links from big sites (had no idea at the time) and eventually my site was issued a Cease and Desist order from Sprint's Corporate Headquarters. I recently realized one evening that I had a GEM of a domain with powerful backlinks that I could redirect to my current site TECHeGO.com [staff removed hyperlink]. (Some of the back links are from Engaget, Engaget Mobile, Rimmarkable and even one from Sprint.) The redirection has been in place for months now and I have confirmed that all that sweet Link Nectar is flowing through! I have found it interesting, however, that my back link and referral domain count have never increased leading me to believe that in doing a 301 Redirect existing links become what can only be described as 'Dark Matter Links' i.e. the links are there, simply invisible. Dark Matter Definition: dark matter is matter that is inferred to exist from gravitational effects on visible matter and background radiation, but is undetectable by emitted or scatteredelectromagnetic radiation. Dark Matter Links: dark matter links are visible links that have passed through a 301 redirect which are now inferred to exist but are no longer visible by crawlers? Is there a better definition that could be applied to the term 'Dark Matter Links'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TECHeGO1