Competitor Ranks Highly Despite LOTS of Duplication
-
One of my Moz campaigns tracks my main competitor. I can't get over the fact that this competitor continues to rank well despite having thousands of duplication issues while I currently have less than 10. Our websites are similar both structurally and product-wise.
The two images attached include OSE comparisons for the keyword "kraft envelopes". My competitor ranks #2 for the term, while I rank #9. I don't get why! And again, looking from a top-level perspective, MOZ shows that my competitor's website is full of duplication issues and other problems while my site is healthy as a horse. All responses are greatly appreciated.
-
Oh yes Andrew. You should invest some serious time to clean the link profile so that it looks natural and organic. We have seen dramatic improvements with clean link profiles.
-
IMHO, no link audit software can give you the whole picture of your link profile but a combination of all those can. We use almost all of them while carrying out a major backlinks check especially when dealing with penguin recovery.
-
Hi Andrew,
I meant, the competitor's website is much bigger and is driving loads of organic traffic for high search volume keywords/phrases.
"I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed. "
This theory is not a correct perspective. Even with more pages, the link juice will be still within the website unless you have a ton of out-bound links pointing to external websites.
There are a lot of other ranking factors that make the competitor rank ahead of you. If you look at organic search competition for your website in SEMRush, the competitor website is number one competitor for your website and if you look at the organic search competition for your competitor website, your website stands at 9th position. Please have a look at the ranking factors list provided in my previous post. Moreover, no matter how good a website is, it cannot rank for all the keywords/phrases in the niche. When I looked further down in the organic keywords data for both of your domains, its very evident that your competitor ranks excellently well for search queries with the term, 'envelopes' in them. Infact, they are the number one site in Google for almost all the envelopes related search queries. Their domain name must be playing a bit role in this along with other ranking factors.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Thank you Moosa. I will be conducting a more thorough audit.
-
After more research, I realize my link audit consisted mainly of link removal for just my homepage. I will have to do more for all of my inner pages. Thank you!
-
Is AHREFs the best link audit software? I conducted a major link audit recently using a combination of OSE and webmaster tools but they clearly did not catch everything.
-
Thank you Devanur. We are aware of our poor URL structure and are considering a site-wide change to include separators in all URLs.
"The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index" - - why does this matter? I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed.
-
Moosa got it spot on. Just by looking at few parameters, we can't say that a website can rank high in Google. Here is something that can be handy while doing a comprehensive SEO audit. Though the list in there is not an official ranking parameters list, it can give you a fair idea about how and what things come in to play when it comes to search engine rankings. Hope it helps:
http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
One of the basic things that you need to understand is that Google uses complex mathematics (Algorithms) to rank a website against a query and there are around 200 plus signals and not all of them are widely discussed.
There could be several reasons which includes quality of content, title tags, linking domains, website structure, internal linking and the list goes on.
Keeping the Devanur’s comment in mind I can safely advise you to do audit your website again and fix the problem to make it more SEO friendly plus get links from high quality places.
Hope this helps!
-
Just another addition to the above. When I checked the backlinks using AHREFs for the jampaper page, most of the links come from Chinese domains. This might not be good if your target market is not China. You might want to look in to this.
-
Hi,
Before digging deep, the striking difference is the URL structure. Your competitor has a clean URL structure with hyphen as a word separator. Looking at your URL, it has no word separators and looks sub-optimal with too many words held together without word separators.
Coming to the duplication issues. Just because a site has duplicate content, its not bound to be penalized. The intention matters here than the duplication itself. If you look at the size of the websites. The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index and drives much more organic traffic.I looked at SEMRush data for both the sites and the competitor is a clear winner.
Moreover, the search query also matters a lot in this case and the competitor has it in the domain name. This also plays an important role. Those were my two cents and the first thing that I would do is to make the URL structure a little better.
Good luck friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Unsolved Ranking not collecting keywords
Hi, we recently migrated our blog to be on the same domain as our main website. It's been about a month. I have continued adding more keywords we'd like to track to our Ranking list on Moz. But it's been a week and the keywords are still not collecting. Is this something we need to fix on our end, or is there something going on with Moz? keyword ranking issues.png
Moz Pro | | CoveoSEO0 -
Keyword Ranking History Chart
The attached image shows the Keyword Ranking History with big downward spirals on Aug 27 and Sep 24th. Yet it's also showing up within the #10-#20 row. What is the official technical reason for why it's in both places? My boss is asking and I'm blanking. 🙂 Just that the URL was found in both spots? B69toK9
Moz Pro | | WineCellarInnovations0 -
How to rank for multiple keyword phrases
Hello everyone! My website is smartyprogrammer.com. How do you go about ranking for multiple keyword phrases? Using the Site Grade Tool, I rank really well for one keyword phrase, like "Smarty Programmer", but then rank really poorly for another phrase like "Smarty Tuner". However, if I change my titles and all my wording towards "tuner" instead of "programmer", it seems like it will make my content either be spammy sounding, or I'll starting lacking in the "programmer" department. Is it best to just create a separate page to rank for "Smarty Tuner"? Or what is the best way to go about ranking for multiple important keyword phrases? Thanks everyone for your help!
Moz Pro | | dieselprogrammers0 -
301 Redirects - But still duplicate content?
Our website domain website.com redirects to website.com/en (since it's in English). Therefore, all pages on website.com redirects to website.com/en. In my Moz analytics, it says I have duplicate content, and lists all of these pages. Didn't the 301 redirects take care of the duplicate content? Or do I still have to add canonical tags?
Moz Pro | | Taulia0 -
Duplicate Page Title - although there are differences
Hello, I get duplicate page titles errors on pages in which there are little differences. For example: C++ Online Test for Seniors C# Online Test for Seniors I assume that from some reason the ++ and the # are removed when SEOMoz crawler checks for duplicate page titles. As you may know C# and C++ means two different programming languages. Should I do something about it or is it a bug in the crawler?
Moz Pro | | ulukach0 -
Ranking - UK or Localised?
The MOZ rankings are based on a GOOGLE UK search, when in reality when someone does a search on Google, the results, by default, are localised (based on the City IP). We need to see where we rank for a local search (Leeds) and also for a UK search?
Moz Pro | | Morch0 -
Tool which shows site ranking for a given keyword
Hi all. I have a client with a specific request and wanted to ask if there is a reliable tool which allows a user to enter a given site and keyword, and it will return the site's ranking for that keyword. More specifically: Needs to work for Google, Yahoo and Bing Needs to work for various countries such as Google.ca, Google.it, etc. Needs to show at least the top ?10k rankings, not just the top 50 The last requirement is the challenge. I clearly recognize anything past the top 50 or so ranks is really off the map, but the client would like to view his current standings.
Moz Pro | | RyanKent0 -
Report: keyword difficulty verses SERPS ranking
Hi there, I've been using the PRO tools for a few months now, and find them great for revealing information for my clients, and planning our SEO approach. One report I've put together has been really helpful for a client, but I built it manually and it took ages. It lists, in a spreadsheet, keywords side-by-side with keyword difficulty, target URL, and SERPs result. Sorting by keyword difficulty or SERPS position has helped us to prioritise which pages to hit first. But it took a while to generate the report, and I'm wondering if anyone has a better approach, or if this kind of report can be generated automatically: http://www.cicada-online.com/app/images/documents/product-page-SEO-blank.pdf Thanks Mozzers!
Moz Pro | | nedwells0