Nice Domain Authority but Not Ranking
-
Hi,
A client of mine who owns a website reached out to me. He got penalized a while ago and has long since recovered (not sure exactly, but for sure a year). His domain authority is in the upper 30s but is still not ranking for many of his keywords that he ranked on the first page.
I am not so familiar with the technical aspects of penalties and such, but is this a common scenario? Why is his domain authority great but his ranking downright awful?
Does he have a chance if he builds great links, or is something else wrong that we can't figure out?
-
Thanks for the tips but I would love to know if you have any experience with receiving a penalty and not recovering your rankings even a year later. Also, its quite confusing that the DA is not bad! Is that a symptom of a bigger issue?
-
Ranking depends on a lot of factors. Run a test with Google PageSpeed and see what it tells you, it will be actionable. All of that affects ranking to varying degrees. DA is just one of the factors and high 30s is not necessarily considered a very good or high DA from what I know, it goes up to 100.
Also, there are other factors for rankings such as personalization, demand/market changes in keywords from a few years ago to now in some markets (example: SEO ninja.... SEO Guru.... growth hacker)
And how is he checking on his ranking that he knows is bad? Rankings that moz provides? Google console? his own attempts to search for it?
One last thing, what is their backlink profile like anyway? Those may have been nerfed by Google in their value, but they still count to a degree. There is competition too, he may have found new and aggressive competition... one market like this is photo booth rental market. 3 years ago it was a new market relatively speaking, now it is saturated heavily and there are just too many hands. This will certainly impact ranks.
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
-
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
What has a better chance of ranking alongside my main site for my company name, a subdomain or new domain?
Hi Moz, Do search engines really treat subdomains as separate domains in this regard? Or are we more likely to get more real estate on the first page with a new domain? Our goal is to have our main site and this new subdomain or domain ranking in positions 1 and 2 for our company name. This is going to be a careers site/portal. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
How to migrate from an asp.net to wordpress without loosing domain authority?
I would like to migrate my current website, which is asp.net, to WordPress. However the current asp.net is sitting on hosting which is windows based and WordPress isn't very compatible. Do I need to migrate hosting to a Linux based hosting provider? But if I do can I still migrate the asp.net files from my current website so I can 301 redirect? Any help on this would be great. Regards, Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
Rankings dropped - lost 3,000 backlinks (but from same domain)
lost a lot of rankings. 2 things have happened to my site over the past 2 weeks and I am trying to establish which may be the case: My site has 30.000 links from a top news site (on main bar across all pages - not for SEO, it just happened). My site lost 3,000 links from this site last week, when they were doing some cleaning up, which means I still have 25,000+ links from them. My site - job site - has published another job board's jobs so I get paid per click. This means ratio of my job vs external jobs is 1 to 5. So basically, I added last week 5 times more jobs that is already live on external site to get paid per click. In other words, my own site's unique content went down big time. Which of the 2 is more likely to cause the massive drop in rankings since last night?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)
Hey everyone, I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm. They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain. They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content. They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain. If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
Is my other domain making me not rank?
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back. A few possibilties to why this has happened: We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools. Why I think it could be this: If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version. Here is the webpages in question: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/ http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/ Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities. Hope someone can help me out with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Multiple domains expiring that have 301 redirects to my primary domain. Am I in trouble?
I recently took on the SEO of a large website with http://example.com. My predecessor bought 40 plus domains for specific cities like Jacksonvilleexample.com, Miamiexample.com, etc. ZERO of the additional domains linked to our main website. The domains that were bought basically had our exact same website in terms of content, links etc that mirrored our main http://example.com. I added 301 redirects to help problems that may be a result of this type of structure. Some of the additional domains were indexed and some were not but all have 301's and as far as traffic is concerned I'm not worried about loosing short term traffic. My question: All the domains are set to expire in June and I don't want to continue to have them 301 redirected to my main domain (example.com). I'm not trying to avoid the additional cost of all the domains but I don't see an advantage to having them so CAN letting all these domains expire hurt me from a long term SEO position if I don't renew them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ballanrk0 -
Google Author Biography Tag-Why Should I Pay Attention To The Author Biography Tag
Hello, I've reading all about Google's Author Biography tag but I am not sure how I can use this in my business. Can anyone explain ( in plain simple English) how I can leverage this tag? Is there any implications in SEO and higher rankings? Just trying to wrap my head around this concept and why it's important...or not. Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0