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
-
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 -
Joomla Opencart Duplicate Link Issue
With a few recent catalog changes my client is having tons of duplicate content issues. The most peculiar is one that I cannot see visibly on the site pages. This page: http://www.CLIENTDOMAIN.com/catalog/lights.html shows to have several duplicate content issues with URLs such as: http://www.CLIENTDOMAIN.com/catalog/lights/Lamp-DRW.htmlhttp:/www.CLIENTDOMAIN.com - where the domain is basically added to the end of the first URL. Has anyone seen this? Any fixes, plugins or thoughts? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | KristinaWitmer
Kristina0 -
How to Learn a Lot from Moz Q&A
You can learn a lot from Moz Q&A without asking any questions. The way to do that is to watch for topics that you are uncertain about, then subscribe to that question by clicking the "Email Updates" button. Then, when people reply to that topic, you will be able to read what they have to say and will likely learn many things (and see a few entertaining arguments 🙂 Give it a try. You might subscribe to more questions than you think and learn many things that will improve your skills and expertise.
Moz Pro | | EGOL8 -
Ranking History
I realize you can click on a specific keyword and view Ranking History for approximately the most recent 12 weeks. I am wondering if you plan on offering additional options (e.g. 6 mo or 1 yr)? It would be great to show clients progress over a greater time span. I am aware of the csv download, but my clients are not interested in looking at or comprehending raw csv data. Can anyone suggest a good tutorial for transforming csv into a decent looking graph? Or, perhaps a software that is capable of doing the same - for those of us that quite simply don't have the time to crash into yet another learning curve 😉 Thanks!
Moz Pro | | SCW0 -
Tools for Monitoring Hundreds to Thousands of Keywords and Rankings
Hi All, I am in process of doing and SEO overhaul for our five global sites in: US, UK, Canada, Sweden, France I'd like to track hundreds of keywords and rankings per site - I'm talking at least 300-400 keywords each site. Each site has its own country domain with both www and www2 domains. So, I need a keyword tool that will let me track massive amounts of keywords. I know that the Moz Pro tool helps, but we only have 350 keywords on this account. I think on this. Any suggestions on something reliable that will provide good data? I'm sure I can get some budget to purchase something, but I also can't spend too too much money. I'm not looking for a massive analytics package. Right now, I'm concerned mainly with our keyword rankings Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | CSawatzky0 -
Rankings csv export doesn't show local rank
Is there a way to enable this in the settings somewhere? or is this simply not an available feature yet? Would be really great if there was an extra column in the report that shows local rank, as 93 of our top 100 keywords we track are all blended search results and a lot of the time this shows really inaccurate results because of this.
Moz Pro | | adriandg0 -
Site rank checking tool
Is there a tool where I can enter a URL and it will tell me all the terms a site ranks for? Basically I recently put up a new website and I want to know what terms I rank in the top 50 for in Google
Moz Pro | | KevinPatrick0 -
A tool for seeing all the keywords a website ranks for
As title, is there a tool out there that will allow you to see all the keywords a website ranks for in the first few pages of a particlur search engine? I would be particularly interested for keywords in the first 10 pages of Google. Thanks
Moz Pro | | blagger0