My OSE stats have never been better but my rankings are tanking

[Banknotes]

For some reason my traffic to [Antique Banknotes] has declined drastically over the past month even while my OSE metrics have gone up.  A typical example is this 1892 five dollar bill.  I used to rank first for this search but now I am 3rd.

Worse,  a search for ten dollar bill used to have me near the top which brought a lot of traffic. Now I am way out in the weeds.   Can anyone help me understand what is causing me to drop so much?

I know there is a new competitor who outranks me with the url [Antique money]  he is likely the cause of my fall in the ratings.  I don't know why but OSE loves his site even though I seem to beat him in most areas OSE measures.   His Page authority for instance is 45 while mine is 37 but I have higher scores in every category.   I don't understand that.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[RobertFisher]

Hey Sha,

Had to give you a thumbs up as I did not consider the issue with disavow links not influencing OSE. Great Point. Thanks,

[Banknotes]

So basically it seems that we don't have much determinism when it comes to ranking anymore.  Seems like we really lost something.  I guess I will muddle along an hope that I stumble into that special sauce that once brought me #1 rankings. 

[Zoolander]

A competitor of mine is ranking 1 step above me for a my exact match domain keyword they aren't optimized for.  They have a similar amount of linking domains with similar anchor text style proportions (i.e. between exact and partial match etc.)  Their DA is a little lower than mine and their PA is the same.

The main difference I suspect might be that I have only 3 facebook shares compared to their 47, I think that could be why, I have read that search engines are ranking social shares even a little bit higher than links.  I actually have 16 shares but according to addthis not all of them can be crawled due to factors like social sharing privacy settings.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Greg,

That is an impossible question to answer I am afraid

OSE results are an indicator of how your site stands according to the metrics that influence PageRank.

Your actual rankings may be influenced by any number of things which are known only to Google:

• Algorithmic filter effects such as Penguin, Panda, Exact Match Domain etc;

• Manual Actions (penalties) applied for any number of issues, from link spamming to cloaking or even abusing rich snippets markup. Check Slides 6 and 7 of this deck for breaches of the quality guidelines that will lead to a manual action ;

• Disavowed links (any links that you have disavowed and are disregarded by Google remain live links which inform the OSE results because Moz is not privy to the list);

If your rankings have tanked recently, I would be using OSE to see if there are any obvious issues with anchor text ratios, links originating from places that are undesirable, changes in authority of sites linking to yours etc, rather than trying to correlate the numbers with your results.

Sha

[Banknotes]

I actually can't complain that the competitor doesn't have better PA and DA numbers... he does.  But I don't know why.  In every individual metric I have a better score but he has better rankings, Moz rank and Moz trust.  I don't understand why.

Here is the OSE query that shows what I am talking about.   http://bit.ly/13iev60

If someone with experience could scan these numbers and tell me if something jumps out I would really appreciate it.

[DavidKonigsberg]

I agree things are unpredictable the point i was trying to make was you cant look at ose and say i should rank higher since i have a better score. Those days are over.

[RobertFisher]

David,

I wish I could see it as that simple, but I just don't. What I am seeing is there are situations where there are results that frankly are not relevant to the query and they are ranking with hardly any links, etc. Or, you see where a high DA site has a page that is PA of zero ranking ahead of more relevant pages, etc which have say a PA of 55, etc. A classic example in this is go look at practically any service business wherein you use a city plus a discipline: Tucson Plumber. (I have not tried that one). 50 to 60% of the time we see something like Indeed.com with 3 different urls ranking all of which have PA of less than 10. How can a major PMSA (say top twenty) with that type of search not return 10 listings for plumbers? 
When you look at queries, the relevance of showing jobs for plumbers is, well, not relevant for that search. 
What I am saying is there is no longer a way to speak with real certainty about a question like this re SEO. I think there may be a time when we have more clarity, but it is not now.  I miss those days.

When you say non anchor text manipulative, what is that?

Thanks,

Robert

[DavidKonigsberg]

Google has changed the algorithm and ose stats are no longer a great indicator as to who will rank. Now quality links that are relevant and non anchor text manipulative etc are more important.