Site #2 beats site #1 in every aspect?
-
Hey guys, loving SEOMoz so far and will definitely continue my subscription after the free trial.
I have a question however, which I am really confused about.
When researching my primary keyword, I have found that the second ranked site beats the top site in every single aspect, apart from domain age, which is almost 6 years for the top one and 6 months for the second.
When I say every single aspect, I mean everything. More authority for the page and domain, more links, more anchor text links, more authoritive links, more social signals, more relevant links, better domain (although second ranked site is a .net), better MozRank, better MozTrust etc....
I have noticed though, that in the UK SERPs, those sites are switched, so #2 is actually #1.
Could it be that the US SERPs just haven't updated yet, or am I missing something completely different.
-
When you're looking at 200+ ranking factor, there's a lot we can't account for even across all of our metrics. A few possibilities:
(1) The #2 site's links are being devalued, for some reason, due to quality issues.
(2) There are geo-targeting signals out of whack or focused outside of the US market. If the site is ranking #1 on Google.co.uk and has a clear UK connection, that could lower it's value on Google.com slightly. It's not the kiss of death, but it can make a difference.
(3) The #1 (currently on Google.com) site has recent activity that we're not aware of yet (link-building, especially).
(4) As Joshua said, #1 could be targeting inbound anchor text better.
(5) As Brandon said, #1 may have an advantage on user signals.
I don't think that Google currently "sandboxes" new sites in they way they may have once. What I think we're seeing is a grace period where new sites get a chance to rank while Google evaluates their link profile. If, after a couple of months, those links look spammy, the site may drop. In most cases I've seen, though, that's not a #1 vs. #2 sort of thing.
-
Darrenspeed
I think if you take both Brandon and Joshua you will likely have your answer. Brandon went where I went when I first saw the question. Are you giving the searcher the info they are looking for in a way that makes them want to keep reading? When I read Joshua's response I had to say he, too, was correct.
There have been many times when I kept telling myself how we were beating a competitor and caused myself to miss the flaws in our site. So, Forget who is first and whether or not they are dating Larry Page, focus on getting your page to perfect or flawless. Even if the page is about Chinese Gambling Sex Herbs, put in an info graph and list the top three myths about Gambling Sex Herbs. Then make sure you have spot on Title Tags, H1-H2, alt text, great linking program, quality backlinks, etc.
As to domain age, there is the place where that will have an effect...for a very short time frame. If a new domain comes out with great content, gets lots of traffic, social, and back links, domain age will not over weigh the other factors for ranking. -
More relevant links is an interesting concept and probably where the problem lies. Which links are Google counting and what is the anchor text? and does the link profile look natural?
In my experience, not ranking for a certain keyword usually comes down to needing more links with a mixture of exact and partial match anchor text from a variety of sources. Try investing in some better web directories like BOTW, get a couple of blogs to write about you and release a PRweb press release with sufficient linking.
Internally you may also want to write a few more articles on that specific keyword and link them all through to the central page, thus funneling relevant link juice internally as well as externally.
Let me know how you go
-
Sorry that I forgot to mention this.
Both sites have A grade according to Moz.
Both sites are 1 page sites, no inner pages apart from the About and Contact obviously, however the #1 site uses adsense whilst #2 does not.
Maybe the bounce rate of these sites also play an important factor, but I would consider both of them, to be quite poor.
-
@darrenspeed, when you listed the factors where #2 dominates #1, you didn't mention anything about on-page content. Consider this scenario:
Google actually jumps the current #2 to the #1 spot, but Google also notices that well over half the people that visit the site go back to Google within 20 seconds and perform the exact same search. This would signal to Google that the page's content doesn't fully satisfy its users. So it goes back to putting the other page on top, and notices that only 25% of the visitors go back and perform another search for the same keyword. Therefore Google waves it's magic wand and says, "yea, verily I declare #1 to be better than #2."
Other than the domain age, it is the only other plausible explanation I can come up with. Compare the content of both pages and get back to us. I'll be interested to see if it is a domain age issue, content issue, or possibly something else.
-
Wow, thanks for the quick reply.
I did think about the domain, but couldn't believe that the domain age alone would make it rank stronger, because the #2 site has a tons more of everything.
Luckily I just bought a 2 year old domain to compete for this keyword, although I hear that the domain age is weakened when it exchanges hands.
Thanks again.
-
It is definately due to the young domain. The younger one has just quit the sandbox period and going upwards while the older one has yet gained trust in google's eyes so google will have it's time to collect user data to be sure that it is better from a user aspect to switch those rankings.
If a better site could beat another one in the moment of becoming better I would be very happy, I wouldn't have to wait so much to harvest the fruits of my efforts.
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
-
Site Redesign Performance
Hi, I am looking for a bit of advice if possible. In October 2018 we did a site redesign for a website that we had acquired (www.drainageonline.co.uk) but we have lost SO much organic traffic since Oct (-40/50% each month). I have amended any crawl errors including broken redirects ensuring all 301's that we put in place are working correctly, ensured 404 pages working OK, implemented canonical onto all pages along with other bits but we don't really seem to be seeing any improvements in our organic traffic. Can anyone offer any advice on the above? Thanks, Lea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAP_Digital_Marketing0 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Worth contributing articles to a Page Rank 1 site?
My intuition tells me that it is not going to help with any SEO link benefit by posting an article as a guest writer on a Page Rank site of #1. It's a rather new fashion content site. The article would be informative and not a sales pitch. The only link is to our url home page in the bio. I've been told that links from low page ranking sites don't help anymore. But maybe over time the site will achieve higher PR status, and then the link in it would help us? Any thoughts? Thanks! ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
Hello, I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places. Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site? There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Redirection to mobile site
Calling all SEO ninjas! I'm currently developing single web pages for various clients which function as abbreviated versions of their main websites. They are all related & under a single domain. When a user visits these pages on a mobile device, CSS is used to display mobile friendly versions of these pages. My clients are thrilled with these mobile versions and now want to also redirect mobile visitors from their main site (which is not mobile optimised) to these pages. My questions are: Are there any negative implications if we did this? ie. redirecting to a different domain What is the best method for redirection? eg. JavaScript Can this be achieved by adding a single line of code to their main site Can this be done in an SEO friendly way so that the redirection acts like a backlink? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martyc0 -
Migrating a site from a standalone site to a subdivision of large .gov.uk site
The scenario We’ve been asked by a client, a Non-Government Organisation who are being absorbed by a larger government ministry, for help with the SEO of their site. They will be going from a reasonably large standalone site to a small sub-directory on a high authority government site and they want some input on how best to maintain their rankings. They will be going from the Number 1 ranked site in their niche (current site domainRank 59) to being a sub directory on a domainRank 100 site). The current site will remain, but as a members only resource, behind a paywall. I’ve been checking to see the impact that it had on a related site, but that one has put a catch all 302 redirect on it’s pages so is losing the benefit of a it’s historical authority. My thoughts Robust 301 redirect set up to pass as much benefit as possible to the new pages. Focus on rewriting content to promote most effective keywords – would suggest testing of titles, meta descriptions etc but not sure how often they will be able to edit the new site. ‘We have moved’ messaging going out to webmasters of existing linking sites to try to encourage as much revision of linking as possible. Development of link-bait to try and get the new pages seen. Am I going about this the right way? Thanks in advance. Phil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smrs-digital0 -
2 Language Versions on Same URL
A site we are working on is a large gift retailer in Canada. They have a language option for French, but the page URLs are the same. If you click 'French' in the header, a cookie is set and then all pages are dynamically served the French content (and all nav/site elements of course change to French). The URLs then are exactly the same as it's the cookie that determines the language option to serve. e.g. www.site.ca/index.php?category=7&product=99.... would be the same regardless of if I'm set for English or French. Question: Does this setup have a negative impact on any SEO factors? The site has several thousand pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0