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Hi Justin,

That makes sense - the duplicate content issue is one I'm assessing on the site at the moment as a result of our use of an SSL cert. We have our homepage under a SSL (https://) and other content on the site is on a regular http://. As a result, I think we may be suffering from some duplicate content in relation to this - when you click on a tier 2 page link from our homepage there is a 302 redirect that brings you from https://domain.com/page2 to http://domain.com/page2.

All stuff that I thought would have been address during development, but the SEO beast needs a lot more attention than initially thought!

Thanks for the help though, and the SEOMoz community have been really great in answering a number of questions so far. Lots of great info.

Cheers.

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:

1. Based on the site:domain.com google results, we have 499 pages and the competitor has 1890 pages

2. 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.

5. 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: 2,033

Given 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?

Hi Mike,

We used the SEOMoz crawl test tool that provided the results.

The below stats are for the http://domain.com and the https://domain.com (we have a 302 from the http:// to the https://. Results are exactly the same.

<colgroup><col span="4" width="65"></colgroup>
| Internal Links | Linking Root Domains | External Links | Page Authority |
| 216 | 58 | 259 | 45 |
| 216 | 58 | 259 | 45 |

Hi Mike,

Thought you might find this interesting:

I was checking my crawl stats and it appears that the http://domain.com and the https://domain.com pages have returned the exact same backlink and page authority results. As mentioned, we currently have a 302 redirect in place here so I'm not sure how the https has managed to stack up the same page authority and backlinks as the http. Any idea?

Hi Mike,

That makes perfect sense. One last question that I'd really appreciate your knowledge on:

We go ahead and set up a 301 redirect from http://domain.com to our https://domain.com homepage.
On the homepage, we have a number of links to other pages on the site that are publicly visible. For these links on the homepage, would you advise that we set up a 301 redirect from https://domain.com/second-page to http://domain.com/second-page or is there any problem with keeping the tier 2 pages as https://domain.com/second-page.

Thanks again Mike - much appreciated.

Hi Mike,

Thanks a lot for the response there. Just two quick follow ups:

1. Would we be losing any juice or search ranking already established with http://doman.com if we now set up a 301 redirect to https://domain.com (given that the site has been operating for over a year in its current form)?

2. Is there any negative side to setting up a homepage 301 redirect to an SSL homepage (https://domain.com)?

Thanks again for your help.

Hi All,

My site, http://domain.com, currently has a 302 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com.

The reason we have an SSL cert is because we have a registration and log in form on the homepage (as well as log in options in the top bar of every page on the site - email/password).

My question is:

When taking SEO best practices into account, would we be better having a 301 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com as most of our inbound links are directed to http://domain.com.

Thanks for any help!

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 Kevin.

We currently do show up on Page 1 search results for both of these pages, but we haven't been able to get above 6th position for either (we normally get the pages listed on 7th & 8th position), which is why I'm looking into the issue.

Without any knowledge, it struck me that we might be hurting ourselves (or rather, hurting the ranking of one of the pages) by having both pages tagged with the same Title tags and keywords.

I know there are a huge number of factors involved and I'm trying to evaluate why we are not increasing in rankings (especially as I can see that we have far superior backlink juice than our competitors).

Cheers.

Thanks Justin - good points.

We do plan on segmenting the keywords for these pages in order to show up for more terms in search. It isn't segmented at the moment and I'm trying to figure out if the duplication could actually be negatively affecting our results in search.

Regarding the training slash in the URL: could you explain a little bit more about what to look out for here. Some more info from our side: when we show up in search, our domain is listed in google as http://domain.com/. However, when you arrive at our site, the url is https://domain.com

Cheers

Hi guys,

I'm trying to figure out if one my problems with search rankings might be a result of 2 of my main pages (home page and tier 2 page linked to main menu) have the same title and description tags.

Let's say my keyword is 'building paper airplanes'. The url for my homepage is http://domain.com and the Title Tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain".

My tier 2 page url is http://domain.com/building-paper-airplanes and the Title tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain".

The home page is more of an introduction page before the user gets into the instructions on the tier 2 page.

Can anybody advise if this might be having a negative affect on my search results for the search term 'building paper airplanes'?

Thanks.

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."

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:

1. Larger number of followable inbound links to my siteAND
2. 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!

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