Have you been outranked by a page that is inferior in every way imaginable?
-
Has this ever happened to you?
You create an amazing piece of content to rank for a keyword phrase that you are targeting. The content is way better than your competitor's page but they are outranking you.
You have a higher domain authority.
Your page has a higher page authority.
Your page and site has higher toolbar Page Rank.
Your page has more inbound links.
Your page has higher quality links.
You have more Twitter, Facebook, and Google plus shares.
etc., etc.But still you are being unranked and you can't find a single factor where your competitor is better. What can you do?
-
I have a great example. For the past few months my client was ranking organically on page one for some high level attorney key phrases. We are a web content company working with an SEO and in efforts to stay ahead of the game we made some minor changes to some geo specific key phrases and in less then a month we almost disappeared off the map. The website I am referring to is www.wolfandpravato.com and one of the culprits with thin or no content beating us in the SERPS is www.representingtheinjured.com among others. If you have any feedback or are willing to do a test or case study I would be happy to provide more data. I hope to hear your thoughts soon. We also started doing PPC for the client. Thanks. Alex
-
Do you have an example? Maybe we can identify the problem.
-
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Read this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/postpanda-your-original-content-is-being-outranked-by-scrapers-amp-partners
From my research it appears like no one really knows what to do yet.
In my specific case, the site is a scraper site that is scraping my original images and content and outranking me for it. I'm working on compiling a massive list of infringements and then submitting a DMCA Take Down request for each infringement.
I really don't know what else to do at this point. It's very frustrating.
Also, I tweeted to Matt Cutts a while back: "How can we show you instances where recent updates have made results worse?" and he responded "tweet me with examples or do a blog post and tweet me a link to that."
So if we can show Google enough examples of how their updates have made specific SERPs worse, they will hopefully eventually dive in and figure out why and adjust their algo accordingly.
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
-
Duplicate content? - Ecommerce reviews loading the same products on every page
Hello there! I use a plugin on my ecom site that shows customer reviews - not product reviews but general shopping experience reviews. The plugin also loads links and short descriptions of products those customers bought. Having installed it site-wide, on every page there are short descriptions of the same products. Of course, as people leave new reviews the content changes (but it doesn't happen very often). So the question is: Is having links and short descriptions of the same products on every page harmful for SEO in this case? I'd be grateful for any insight into this matter.
On-Page Optimization | | thpchlk0 -
Will it upset Google if I aggregate product page reviews up into a product category page?
We have reviews on our product pages and we are considering averaging those reviews out and putting them on specific category pages in order for the average product ratings to be displayed in search results. Each averaged category review would be only for the products within it's category, and all reviews are from users of the site, no 3rd party reviews. For example, averaging the reviews from all of our boxes products pages, and listing that average review on the boxes category page. My question is, will this be doing anything wrong in the eyes of Google, and if so how so? -Derick
On-Page Optimization | | Deluxe0 -
No meta description on category page
Hi Moz is reporting no meta description on a wordpress category page like this one: http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/category/uncategorized/ Can I add a meta description to a category? Best wishes. David.
On-Page Optimization | | WallerD0 -
Duplication in landing page
This is driving me mad, I have a site that for some reason google and moz pick up the landing page as a duplicate. They see "mysite/" and "mysite/index.html" as two different pages and giving me warnings for duplication. I have no 301 included at this time and I am using foundation as the base. This is occurring both on a localhost test bed and live....... anyone got an idea how to correct.
On-Page Optimization | | AndyBirtles0 -
A Page For Every Conceivable City In The US - Seeking Community Feedback
Hi Guys! If you ask Local SEO questions here in the Moz Q&A Forum, you and I have probably had the chance to chat at some point or other. This time, I'd like to ask you question! I'd like to request feedback from the community regarding a practice I've been running into for as long as I can remember. Here's what I'm talking about: Let's say the company is a national florist company, a cell phone service company, a website design company. They have national headquarters but either very few or zero physical locations beyond this. In other words, they are virtual rather than local, apart from their national headquarters. Their approach to online marketing revolves around creating a landing page for every conceivable city or zip code in the U.S. I would guess that the thought behind this strategy is that their product is available in each of these cities, and this is their method of getting the word out. Because I work almost exclusively with local rather than virtual companies, the scenario I've described falls somewhat outside of my work experience. It does, however, relate to what I do for a living because I frequently encounter these types of pages (some with near duplicate or very thin content) ranking in the organic results for local searches, alongside the local pack results. My questions are: What do you think of this practice? Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value? Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend? I really appreciate you taking the time to read my question and consider replying!
On-Page Optimization | | MiriamEllis2 -
Third party pages
Suppose you are using a third party tool such as an affiliate program. Typically, all the files are organized under one subdirectory. In addition, you may have little or no ability to modify any of the files in terms of SEO. Would you recommend hiding the entire subdirectory with a noindex? Best,
On-Page Optimization | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Too many on-page links
I manualy counted the links on my website http://www.commensus.com which came to around 50, but SEO moz says I have over 100 and google isn't seeing them all.
On-Page Optimization | | jawl44630 -
Optimization of home page
Hi there I have an issue which, despite searching hard, I simply cannot find the right solution for. We have an index page that used to rank pretty well for a main industry keyword. However following a revamp of the site last year the kw slipped and no longer brings in decent traffic levels. The problem seems to be that the old static site had a sprinkling of variable anchor text links that brought value to the home page. Instead of the main anchor being "home" we would revert to "main keyword" and variations across the site sometimes in t he content but mainly on the nav bars. However the new CMS design structure restricts us considerably with anchor distribution and so instead we opted for the site logo on the masthead to have an ALT tag for "main keyword" but so as not to game google too much we added .."home" to the tag. Probably pointless but we figured it could do no harm. This ALT text is site wide Problem now is that we have lost the spread of internal nav bar anchors and variety etc. We have slipped in the serps for "main keyword" and I cant help thinking we are not maximising the anchors as we should. So what Im coming to is this.... How can we tell if Google is picking up the ALT tage anchor as the main anchor to rank the site at the expense of all internal text anchors. Despite retaining lots of embedded anchors - according to the Moz metrics these are not being picked up because OSE suggests the ALT tag anchor is taking precedence. The serps probably support this view as well. Should we: a) Vary the masthead ALT if there is no way of avoiding this being the most important link / anchor on the page b) Remove the ALT anchor and instead opt for content links high on the page (we do have nav bar links saying "Home" site wide as well which may overrid the embedded links?) c) Leave the ALT alone and still push for content anchors as described in b) What is the best way to handle this..? Best wishes and thanks Morch
On-Page Optimization | | Morch0