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 How to find keywords your competitors rank for but you don't?
Hi, I'm just digging through Moz pro at the moment, and really like the true competitor feature, but would like to be able to see the keywords our competitors rank for and we don't, rather than just the overlapping ones. Is this possible at all? Thanks
Moz Pro | | pm-mbc
Paul0 -
SEOmoz not showing Google rankings accurately in Ranking Reports. How do we fix this?
We have a running campaign for a client who has rankings show for Yahoo and Bing within the SEOmoz Ranking Reports, however, Google shows no data or rankings. When we manually check from different IP's and computers and browsers, we see our client ranking very well in Google and for keywords which we have inside their campaign for SEOmoz. Can anyone provide insight into this? Have you experienced this also? Our reports would look terrible going to the client if sent from SEOmoz directly as Google shows 0 (Not in Top 50) for all keywords, so we have to get rankings from other sources or manually to show our client. Thank you in advance for your help and tips everyone!
Moz Pro | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Keyword difficulty always high
HI there, I'm new here and am just getting used to the keyword difficulty tool. I've noticed that just about every keyword phrase I type in, including ridiculous ones such as "perspex underpants" or "guy debord's shoes" all have a difficulty well over 50% and many over 60%. It makes little difference what my phrase is. Am I doing something wrong perhaps? How am I to interpret this result? It would seem to suggest that It is always very hard to rank, even for a rare and ridiculous phrase.
Moz Pro | | WeGoBang0 -
Rank tracker free one and paid one
Very easy question for most of the fellow.I have one site and I want to track more than 30 keywords for this big site. Which Free Rank Tracker do you suggest me? If I want to purchase it to create Multiple profile or track multiple sites which one is best and cheapest. SEOMOZ rank tracker is very slow for results.
Moz Pro | | csfarnsworth0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but sample pages are not related to page indicated with duplicate content
In the crawl diagnostics for my campaign, the duplicate content warnings have been increasing, but when I look at the sample pages that SEOMoz says have duplicate content, they are completely different pages from the page identified. They have different Titles, Meta Descriptions and HTML content and often are different types of pages, i.e. product page appearing as having duplicate content vs. a category page. Anyone know what could be causing this?
Moz Pro | | EBCeller0 -
What is the best method to solve duplicate page content?
The issue I am having is an overwhelmingly large number of pages on cafecartel.com show that they have duplicate page content. But when I check the errors on SEOmoz it shows that the duplicate content is from www.cafecartel.com not cafecartel.com. So first of all, does this mean that there are two sites? and is this a problem I can fix easily? (i.e. redirecting the URL and deleting the extra pages) Is this going to make all other SEO useless due to the fact that it shows that nearly every page has duplicate page content? Or am I just completely reading the data wrong?
Moz Pro | | MarkP_0 -
Duplicate Content being caused by home page?
Hello everyone, I am new to SEOmoz and SEO in general and I have a quick questions. When running a SEO Web Crawler report on my URL, I noticed in the report that my home page (also known as my index page) was listed twice. Here is what the report was showing: www.example.com/ www.example.com/index.php So are these 2 different urls? If so, is this considered duplicate content and should I block crawler access to the index.php? Thanks in advance for the help!
Moz Pro | | threebiz0 -
OSE High Domain Link Total
Why does OSE report such a high domain link total in the SERP overlay underneath each result? I'm looking at at site that I know has about 90 links domain wide and the OSE overlay in SERP reports 610
Moz Pro | | waynekolenchuk0