My OSE stats have never been better but my rankings are tanking
-
For some reason my traffic to [Antique Banknotes] has declined drastically over the past month even while my OSE metrics have gone up. A typical example is this 1892 five dollar bill. I used to rank first for this search but now I am 3rd.
Worse, a search for ten dollar bill used to have me near the top which brought a lot of traffic. Now I am way out in the weeds. Can anyone help me understand what is causing me to drop so much?
I know there is a new competitor who outranks me with the url [Antique money] he is likely the cause of my fall in the ratings. I don't know why but OSE loves his site even though I seem to beat him in most areas OSE measures. His Page authority for instance is 45 while mine is 37 but I have higher scores in every category. I don't understand that.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
-
Hey Sha,
Had to give you a thumbs up as I did not consider the issue with disavow links not influencing OSE. Great Point. Thanks,
-
So basically it seems that we don't have much determinism when it comes to ranking anymore. Seems like we really lost something. I guess I will muddle along an hope that I stumble into that special sauce that once brought me #1 rankings.
-
A competitor of mine is ranking 1 step above me for a my exact match domain keyword they aren't optimized for. They have a similar amount of linking domains with similar anchor text style proportions (i.e. between exact and partial match etc.) Their DA is a little lower than mine and their PA is the same.
The main difference I suspect might be that I have only 3 facebook shares compared to their 47, I think that could be why, I have read that search engines are ranking social shares even a little bit higher than links. I actually have 16 shares but according to addthis not all of them can be crawled due to factors like social sharing privacy settings.
-
Hi Greg,
That is an impossible question to answer I am afraid
OSE results are an indicator of how your site stands according to the metrics that influence PageRank.
Your actual rankings may be influenced by any number of things which are known only to Google:
-
Algorithmic filter effects such as Penguin, Panda, Exact Match Domain etc;
-
Manual Actions (penalties) applied for any number of issues, from link spamming to cloaking or even abusing rich snippets markup. Check Slides 6 and 7 of this deck for breaches of the quality guidelines that will lead to a manual action ;
-
Disavowed links (any links that you have disavowed and are disregarded by Google remain live links which inform the OSE results because Moz is not privy to the list);
If your rankings have tanked recently, I would be using OSE to see if there are any obvious issues with anchor text ratios, links originating from places that are undesirable, changes in authority of sites linking to yours etc, rather than trying to correlate the numbers with your results.
Sha
-
-
I actually can't complain that the competitor doesn't have better PA and DA numbers... he does. But I don't know why. In every individual metric I have a better score but he has better rankings, Moz rank and Moz trust. I don't understand why.
Here is the OSE query that shows what I am talking about. http://bit.ly/13iev60
If someone with experience could scan these numbers and tell me if something jumps out I would really appreciate it.
-
I agree things are unpredictable the point i was trying to make was you cant look at ose and say i should rank higher since i have a better score. Those days are over.
-
David,
I wish I could see it as that simple, but I just don't. What I am seeing is there are situations where there are results that frankly are not relevant to the query and they are ranking with hardly any links, etc. Or, you see where a high DA site has a page that is PA of zero ranking ahead of more relevant pages, etc which have say a PA of 55, etc. A classic example in this is go look at practically any service business wherein you use a city plus a discipline: Tucson Plumber. (I have not tried that one). 50 to 60% of the time we see something like Indeed.com with 3 different urls ranking all of which have PA of less than 10. How can a major PMSA (say top twenty) with that type of search not return 10 listings for plumbers?
When you look at queries, the relevance of showing jobs for plumbers is, well, not relevant for that search.
What I am saying is there is no longer a way to speak with real certainty about a question like this re SEO. I think there may be a time when we have more clarity, but it is not now. I miss those days.When you say non anchor text manipulative, what is that?
Thanks,
Robert
-
Google has changed the algorithm and ose stats are no longer a great indicator as to who will rank. Now quality links that are relevant and non anchor text manipulative etc are more important.
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
-
Anchor Text to Rank for a Keyword
Is it still possible to use anchor text to rank for a keyword that is not present on the landing page? Or are there any alternatives?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Not ranking
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
so our website (www.18brandz.com) has been up for 8 months now and has not been ranking yet, we are indexing, moz crawler SEO issues are regularly fixed and we are down to about 25 non major issues, i started using google lighthouse to optimize and had made changes. we post GOOD quality in house written unique content, we follow an SEO templet of guideline i wrote for titles/meta title tags, structure, site speed has been optimized and as for the moment we rank A OR B with no major issues on all speed checking sites possible (gtmetrix/google speed insights/ webspeed... etc) but nothing. and i cant figure out why we wont rank, our field of digital marketing is a tough one and very competitive , i know, yet not ranking for so long seems odd. our only know fact major disadvantage is the lack of links and no link building strategy. any suggestions? any idea?1 -
Can new domain extensions rank?
Hi Does anybody know if it's possible to get domains with extensions like .party or .world to rank? Even for high competitive keywords? Can they rank over .com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeWU0 -
Any WordPress themes better for schema
I'm putting together a holiday listing sits and as seo is key would like to add schema data. Does anyone know of any themes that are easier to do this with for a non techie - have looked at plug ins but they get a mixed review Thanks Neil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neilhenderson1 -
Local ranking (keyword) strategies
Hello SEOmozers, I've been working on improving all components of my SEO skills for the past 6 months. I have definitely had some great victories and some gray defeats. My newest challenge is local ranking for a home improvement company. My target is to rank them locally with Google within the top 7 results. I have managed to do so, but only for one keyword "windows and doors CITY". My campaign, in terms of anchor text has a wide variety of long and shortail keywords, I have not concentrated on the above keyword. My question is, how do I go about to rank this website in the local results for all other keywords "windows CITY", "window replacement CITY", etc... What I don't understand is how Google picks up which keywords to rank the website locally for, and which ones to ignore. Any information will be well received. Cheers, Nikster
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thenikster0 -
Pontoon boats rankings...stumped
Recently fallen from 2nd to 5th with Manitou Boats website for the term pontoon boats - this is our money term. I can see eBay jumping us since they're a huge brand, but Avalon and Crest aren't even close by any metrics I can find. Really would like someone else's perspective on this...Anyone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
Competitve keyword ranks on mobile but not on laptop
When i search for a very competitve keyword on a smart phone , my site ranks #6 but on laptop or desktop ranks #24. I do not have a mobile verison of my site just to clarify it. I have cleared the cache on my mobile and laptop. still the same. What is the reason for this?, I d appreciate an insight on this thanks. Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orion680 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0