More authority back links but lower MozRank than competitor
-
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:
- Larger number of followable inbound links to my siteAND
- 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!
-
The result count at the top is always the total count, regardless of how you filter. I'd look at only external links that are 301ed or followed, and that should be a much more accurate number.
-
Go under "linking domains," and keep expanding until you find one with a bunch. Right below that group it will say something like "see all links from this domain." That will bring you back to the inbound links section with a few different filters that weren't originally there.
Another option is to check your Google Webmaster Tools. If the domain has enough authority it will pop up with how many links you are getting from the one source.
-
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:
-
Based on the site:domain.com google results, we have 499 pages and the competitor has 1890 pages
-
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.
- 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: 2,033Given 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?
-
-
No, not at all - honestly, you remember more about mR than I do
We're definitely not trying to hide anything - it's just complicated. We've also sort of slowly moved away from mT/mR, because they just weren't as predictive as we'd like.
-
Very true. Also, if I came off as being a jerk in my post, I do apologize. That wasn't my intent.
-
Sorry, I should've said "I'm not sure how / how much we measure..." - it's been a while since I've dug into mR and mT, and I don't know how much an internal link structure could tip the balance. Like PageRank, it's iterative, so you'd have to crunch the numbers - it's not a simple, linear equation I could spell out here (even if knew/remembered it).
Truthfully, it's rarely worth getting hung up on, especially if PA/DA are solid and the site is ranking well. Knowing exactly why the competitor has a higher mR would rarely provide much or any advantage. It's generally better to track their strongest links and see if you're missing anything.
-
From SEOMoz: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank
"MozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both internal and external links"
If the competitor has fewer pages, or at least less pages being linked to from each page, then the "link juice" being passed between internal links can be greater. So, while you may have a lot more links going to your home page, you may be linking out to so many different pages from the home page that the link juice passed to internal pages is minimal. Thus, diluting any return you might get from those internal links.
That's assuming that the official Mozrank page isn't lying about internal links. Dr. Peter is the only one that can tell us that for sure.
-
I'm honestly not sure if we measure internal links as part of MozRank - I'd have to check into that. If one site were much larger, with a ton of indexed pages (including duplicates), it might dilute mR, but I can't say that with any confidence. It's similar to PageRank, but not exactly the same.
-
Dr. Pete:
The competitor has a lot less links, actually, but I'm super pumped for this tip!
Rogs.SEO:
How many pages does the competitors site have compared to yours?
Have you ran a screaming frog or a xenu of both sites?
Who has more internal links pushing into the page you scanned?
Are they just menu and footer links, or are some of them in the body?
Your ratio of domains to links is pretty low, do you have a bunch of site wides pointing at your site?
-
It's tough without seeing the sites, but MozRank is a bit more of a pure quantity score than DA/PA (which are built to predict ranking power). The fact that you have a lower MozRank but significantly higher PA suggest to me that the competitor is playing a numbers game. Your top links may have a higher quality, but they may just have more overall links, multiple links from some domains (site-wide maybe), etc.
I'd rather be higher on PA, buy our numbers. The picture I'm seeing here suggests your overall quality is better than your competitor's, so I don't think I'd go chasing after their link profile.
-
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 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." -
Mozrank does take into consideration both internal and external links. Perhaps he has a better structured site that utilizes internal links in a better way?
-
Hi Greg
I think MozRank and MozTrust are good indicators but not failsafe predictors of search engine ranking (which I'm guessing is your ultimate goal)In my sector (real estate) I've seen sites with seemingly low metrics (DA, number of links, social shares, MozRank, MozTrust) outrank sites with figures twice and three times better.
I'm no guru, but what I've seen suggests to me that link relevance is becoming more and more important -- ie, a site with 40 highly on-topic links (even if from low/medium authority domains) can rank far, far higher than OSE metrics would suggest.
-
Just a guess here but it could have something to do with age of domain as well as age of links.
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
-
Low Domain Authority
Hi Our Domain Authority has dropped recently from 29 > 23 - which is really low. I wondered if anyone had any ideas of why this might be? http://www.key.co.uk/en/key I'm seeing ranking/traffic improvements for SEO & I'm not currently building any bad backlinks, I did a sweep to Disavow any bad ones last Oct. I am planning to add good quality links, but is there anything else I can do to improve the authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
Hi, One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month. We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page. Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from. Thanks! ....Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Link Juice + Site Structure
Hi All, I have attached a simple website model.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Page A is the home page attracting 1000 visitors per month.
One click away is Page B with 400 visitors per month, so on and so forth. You get an idea of the flow and clicks required to get to various pages. I have purposely placed Pages E-G to be 3 clicks away as they yield very little traffic. 1] Is this the best way to distribute link juice?
2] Should I point Pages C + D back to page A to influence its Page Rank (PA) Any other useful advice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark vafnchI0 -
Site wide links Concept
Hi All, All type of site wide links are bad for Google or it depends upon other factors as well? For example if you talk about GoDaddy or any other service provider company they put their links on the footer of other websites so in this condition, Google will harm their rankings or not? Also elaborate the best practices for site wide links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
Is this splitting my authority or link juice?
Hi Using seomoz i am getting told that a 302 temporary redirect is occurring on some of my pages for instance. http://www.eco-environments.co.uk/solar-power/ Then redirects here http://www.eco-environments.co.uk/solar-power/default.phuse is this splitting my page authority because of the temporary redirect? I just want to make sure i have fully understood what's happening before i go to the company who designed and developed our site as i am convinced this is hurting my rankings. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nickhoyle10 -
Sitewide blog link and Article links
Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0