2 sites with low DA and PA and unoptimised <title>outranking everyone for competitive search term - How ?</title>
-
Im doing some keyword research for a new client, Ive found 2 anomalies for competitive search terms where sites with unoptimised <title>tags, poor backlinks and other stats, (compared to the other sites listed in the SERP) are out ranking everyone and claiming the #1 spot</p> <p> The 2 search terms are :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Interior designers London</a>- #1 new-id.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=new-id.co.uk&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=interior+designer+london">Interior designer London</a>- #1 nstudio.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnstudio.com%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> </ul> <p> (interestingly they hardly rank at all for any modification of those search terms)</p> <p> The only thing i could think of is that they both had some really good links using that exact anchor text, but ive been checking OSE for the past month both in the backlinks and the just discovered but couldnt see anything like that.</p> <p>I conducted the SERP checking from a laptop with a broadband connection based in London, although im not very local to either of these locations im about an 8th of the cities distance away from one of those location and about half a cities distance away from the other. So i dont think its a local skew thats causing the SERP rankings.</p> <p>For both sites i can see they had old domains which now redirect to the them :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">New-id.co.uk = </span><span data-mce-mark="1"><a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnewidinteriors.com&no_redirects=1&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - PA1, DA1</span></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">Nstudio.co.uk = intarya.com - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=www.intarya.com&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - Da 32, PA43</span></p> </li> </ul> <p> Although the intarya domain was quite strong with good backlinks (but nothing above par comapred to the other sites the nstudio.co.uk site is now outranking, the anchor text was mostly natural with only some keyword anchor text from PA1 pages. </p> <p>The <a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> didnt seem to have a backlink profile, both PA1 and DA1.</p> <p> Ive taken screenshots of the SERP pages below, but feel free to dig further</p> <p>Any idea what's going on here ?</p> <a download="HWkjmDf.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/HWkjmDf.png" target="_blank">HWkjmDf.png</a> <a download="A70jXse.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/A70jXse.png" target="_blank">A70jXse.png</a></title>
-
Thanks Ikkie,
Agreed that could have a big effect in principal, but do you think that is the deciding factor in those examples ? Im sure Nstudio.co.uk is getting a boost from its previous domain (but in the case of the new-id.co.uk 's previous domain it had no strength PA1, DA1)
Both of the sites previous domains are no stronger than anything else in current SERP and yet they are outranking everyone ? Ive attached their old domains stats below and updated the question to include them for reference
-
New-id.co.uk = newidinteriors.com - OSE info - PA1, DA1
-
Nstudio.co.uk = intarya.com - OSE info - Da 32, PA43
-
-
Ikke is right, there is quite some benefit from having an older domain name that has quality backlinks pointing to it. Also, don't underestimate the power of social media. Based on what I see, there's a good chance that the site is benefiting from social shares and being active on the social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc..
-
In my opinion, their old domains are giving them good boost to capture this rank. I have acheived this previously for our clients many time.
We have site with Google penalty on it. We changed the domain and off course disallow almost all toxic link. Our new site, started getting rank top postions with many keywords within a week or so.
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
-
I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website is doing on google ranking
Hello, I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website (flyhy.co) is doing on google ranking and I have no clue why even though I have been doing my homework regarding SEO. Just a bit of background, I have created a new website about 6 months ago for the paragliding community, the primary goal is to provide a platform for people to publish their ads (osclass), but also to provide some interesting reviews and tools to help paragliders chose their wing. We have been putting a lot of effort to provide a nice user experience and tio build the tools mentioned above. Our main channel to connect with the community is Facebook, and we have been quite active there. I have looked at many SEO articles and I made sure the website provides a good UX, the URLs are SEO friendly, good meta data, etc. Also have been using the google search console and analytics to monitor all of this. But here is the thing, all these does not seem to change anything in our ranking for important keywords such as "paraglider for sale", "paragliding equipment", etc. We seem to only rank (looking at Google’s keyword tool) for very specific wing model names that people have mentioned in their ads. I have ran out of ideas on how to improve our SEO !!!!!! I know the website is only 6 months old, but by now we should get some results. As an example, I will mention one our main website competitors: www.paraglidingequipment.org. OK the URL is pretty obvious and this website ranks in page #1 for "paragliding equipment" (but also for "paraglider for sale" and other paragliding related key phrases). OK there is the URL (paraglidingequipment.org), but I thought nowadays google bots are smarter than just that. The website is 1 year old (so not really much older than us, and was ranking high anyway even 6 months ago). The website looks like it was clearly made by one person and then quickly just left it running, so no content has been added (except for people putting their ads), there is almost no activity on the Facebook account. I have run some test such as "pagespeed insights" and we both rank the same. On "seositecheckup.com", we are clearly better with more 10 points. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what is going on? Have I missed a very important aspect of SEO? Is our website somehow compromising the robots crawling (although I can see about 80 pages have been already indexed in google search console)? I know content is king, but in paraglidingequipment.org the only content I see are ads, and we have ads and other interesting (ie reviews and tools) for paragliders. To conclude, I am basically completely clueless of what to do to rank at least on the first couple of pages of google for the key phrases above. I need help. Hichem. PS: in Moz bar our score is non existing (PA=1,DA=10), on paraglidingequipment.org (PA=23,DA=15). So it looks that essentially we are not apparent on the web! PSS: We have also tried to build some backlinks on few important paragliding community websites.
Competitive Research | | hichemboudali0 -
Why our competitor has bigger DA?
I just compare our website www.simpletranslation.com with one of our competitor www.straker.com.au and their DA is much better than ours even we have more external backlinks. Can somebody explain me why? We worked really hard on new content on our blog and did few guest posts and instead of see some results on increasing of our DA our DA went down in last 2 months and I have no idea why.
Competitive Research | | Lukas-ST0 -
Difference between Searches and Impressions
I've been using the Bing Ad Intelligence tool (which is great!), but I'm confused about one of the metrics and even the Microsoft customer support guy wasn't too clear. I search on "wills and trusts" and I get results that say there are 2,347 searches, and 7,228 impressions. How can there be more (ad) impressions than there were searches? If it was 5 searches and 1 impression, I'd assume that meant an ad didn't appear for all the searches. Makes sense. But 1 search and 2 impressions ... how does that happen? Appreciate any help, probably a dumb question but has me puzzled. Also, I hope non-Moz tool questions are appropriate. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | flyntime_tx0 -
Rankings w/ 301 redirect.. is this normal?
For http://www. I am ranking for particular KW's/phrases However, when I search just http:// - I am unranked. The http:// 301's to the http://www. Is this normal? Thank you
Competitive Research | | lawfirm0 -
Ranking and Domain/Page Authority
I'm not seeing a very good correlation between ranking and domain/page authority. Am I missing something here? ie., 2nd raning at 1/0. Also seeing competitor as "12" domain authority in "competitive domain analysis", but shows much higher here for same competitor? <colgroup><col width="94"> <col width="171"> <col width="108"></colgroup>
Competitive Research | | delphia
| Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority |
| 70 | 40 | 83 |
| 1 | 0 | 41 |
| 51 | 3 | 97 |
| 34 | 5 | 36 |
| 41 | 3 | 52 |
| 23 | 1 | 59 |
| 59 | 49 | 100 |
| 48 | 2 | 100 |
| 52 | 6 | 77 |
| 27 | 2 | 14 |
| 1 | 0 | 57 |
| 15 | 1 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 24 | 1 | 57 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 21 | 1 | 36 |1 -
Open Site Explorer is not showing dmT. Where do I go to get this metric.
Just trying to understand the video I watched on Link Building w/ Open Site Explorer. I'm not seeing the dmT metric in the live version. Has it been replaced by something else. Or is there someplace else I need to look for it?
Competitive Research | | AhmadS0 -
My average visit duration is UP by 110% from 2 minutes to 4 minutes... and my visits (rankings) are down by 6 %.... I would have thought to see more positive ranking affects from that..
Latttteee last night I asked this question Just like the question says, I would have thought that Google would reward a site with more traffic that clearly has a growing level of user engagement. I can't imagine that there are other sites in my niche that are having a longer rate of user engagement... Well, since I can't guarentee that, let's not debate what we don't know.. But shouldn't SOME benefits be seen for a 110% increase? I mean shit, if I could replicate those results with sales, I would really be able to afford higher rankings... Maybe that's how they feel? If I get longer duration, I should get more sales, which means I should be able to afford to pay a professional more to get me to rank higher....? A nice guy Marcus Miller(http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/78416) answered by saying Hey Tyler Google analytics data is not used in anyway in the search ranking algorithm. It's a great thing that your user engagement is up, but it will not benefit you with a better rank on the back of that. That said, if people are enjoying your site more, it should be easier to generate more links and sharing to get more traffic and hopefully boost your standing in search. This is worth a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg... Hope this helps. Marcus I was still a little unsure though, so I said Solid answer man, I really appriciate the youtube link too, gotta love when an answer is chizzled in stone. I was thinking though.. Google does track data for bouncing back to search for similar queries, and some types of time on site, etc, right? Do you, or does anyone else know the specifics about the data that Google tracks, in relation to how a user interacts with your site?
Competitive Research | | TylerAbernethy0 -
How do I go about removing low authority, crappy, backlinks?
How do I go about getting rubbish backlinks on a clients websites removed? The links were created by a previous companies link building campaign, and I believe this (along with a few other things) could be the reason for their poor SERP's as they are an established website. Can I alert Google and get them to discredit the links, or do I manually have to try to make contact with the owners/webmasters of the websites to get the links removed? All help appreciated! Thanks
Competitive Research | | JustinWalmsley0