At a bit of a loss as to poor rankings
-
I have a site in the UK, with these metrics:
- 15 years old
- 500 pages in sitemap, but Majestic says 186,000 indexed URLs ?
- DA of 45, PR of 3
- 1000 links from 200 linking root domains, across from 150 IP's (from OSE)
- 33,000 links in OSE when I use the compare tool and look at the "links to this root domain" section
- 24,000 external links according to Majestic
- 350 shares, 2,000 tweets, 60 +1's
- Median PA of linking root domains (from OSE export) = 20
- no Moz on-page errors, or webmaster tools issues
The above metrics are better than 2 competitors who have only just launched, have fewer links, lower DA, etc, and are ranking for keywords like "wedding entertainment", "corporate entertainers"
Our site is www.superted.com
-
Why doesn't OSE show 33,000 links when I select "links to this root domain". Why will those links only be shown when I do a domain comparison in OSE?
-
I'm thinking our anchor text distribution is the problem. We have very few links containing the keywords want. Also maybe our sitemap is an issue as it only lists 500 of our pages? But given our domain age, DA, etc... surely anchor text / site map isn't the only issue here?
Any hints would be awesome.
-
Wowsers... nice response.
Thanks for spending the time on writing all that out
I'll re-work the site structure, taking all comments on board!
-
I think there are generally three areas of weakness for this site at the moment;
- Brand Strength - searching google.co.uk for "superted" or "super ted" and the site is no where on the SERPs, instead you get stuff about a TV show --> http://screencast.com/t/Am735xTr0 - and so if you're going to have the same brand name as another thing out there (even if you came before the TV show) the fact you are not ranking for your own brand means Google does not weigh the "brand" very strongly. The build this up you need
- lots of strong profiles on the web (Google Plus, social, etc) all clearly connecting back to your site
- recent mentions in reputable publications
- people searching for your brand name or branded terms and clicking on your site in the SERPs
- (sidenote: I just realized a while later the "brand" name might also be "the entertainment directory" and you do show one result in the SERP for that --> http://screencast.com/t/hy2wi88VFQtH but this also seems weak and unclear.
- Keyword Targeting / Architecture - I know it would be desirable to rank for "wedding entertainment" but it's really hard to even find a page solely dedicated to "wedding entertainment" that answers that specific query for the user really well. Instead, you have to dig many clicks in to even find such a page and when you do, it's "wedding bands" not wedding entertainment" --> http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands - what I would do is some really thorough keyword research and align it with architecture - this is a pretty involved process, you can't fix it overnight, but in short;
- You're first do very in depth keyword research - my intuition tells me a site of this magnitude would result in probably 10,000 keywords minimum.
- Then you'd prioritize these by many metrics - search volume, current ranking, conversion potential, competition etc
- Then here's the key - you'd look at top keywords that do not have a singular page focusing on answer this user's query better than any other page on the net
- You'd have to work through a process of aligning keyword opportunities with best site architecture - this may mean building new pages, this may mean removing pages that don't provide value for you or users.
- User Experience - When I land on the homepage it is a terrifying experience. There are so many options, and it is not clear what direction to go in.
- The "hamburger" menu option is probably not clear that it's even there to most people. When I do click on it, there options are overwhelming and clicking on an initial option just brings us to another set of options.
- Then trying the search bar, I expect to get a normal search result - like a list of "wedding bands in ___" but instead I just got a form to fill out, which is surprising and doesn't seem immediately helpful.
- When you click "play" on the video in the slider, the video starts playing but then the slider also starts moving so not only can I not seem to watch the video, I can't stop it from playing once the slider kicks in.
A common oversight I see, is that the site is organized from the site owners perspective not the shoppers perspective. In other words, your basic categories are "bands" "look alikes" etc - but a user would _start _with "I need entertainment for a wedding/party/event ..." - the user starts with the need (X event, situation etc) and would like to see options - so I would consider organizing the core structure of the site around "wedding entertainment" "party entertainment" "corporate even entertainment" etc - think of the categories of events and needs the user has and show them the listings from that perspective.
To answer your questions;
1. I believe the comparison numbers "total links" are including internal links - which there are a lot of.
2. I don't think anchor text is as much of an issue as the other things mentioned above. The sitemap is also not the biggest issue in my opinion. If I were to boil it down it would be site architecture / keyword alignment coupled with user experience.
-
No, but if I highlight a page it may give it more Google signals than the intended page you want to promote and that's just annoying And Google has confirmed it does crawl naked links (links without anchor just written on a page) even if it says they are treated as nofollow it is still a signal.
-
Is it a problem if google crawls this thread?
Thanks for your insight into this!
-
I found this page http://www.superted.com / wedding-entertainment
I put a gap between the slash in case google crawls this thread.
re: first comment, I searched for that because I did a Google site query and there seem to be a lot of similar things coming up, I cant remember what I was looking at at the time that brought that up exactly, but it does seem like there could be a potential quality issue.
-
Interesting.
Why did you search for: "Find event ideas, wedding entertainment or party ideas" ?
When I do it, I get the same result and also the google message about some results being omitted.
Maybe all those pages are considered "keyword stuffed" by Google?
You said you noticed one of them had a page. How do you mean?
There is a landing page for weddings:
http://www.superted.com/wedding-entertainment.php
But no external links to it yet.
-
one thing I did find interesting is if you search for "Find event ideas, wedding entertainment or party ideas", Google comes up with a whole bunch of pages but none of them have that content on them, It has renamed all the descriptions.
It would seem that Google does not think your descriptions are good enough for serps. This shows there could be some content issues on the site.
Have you though of creating two main categories for "wedding entertainment" and "corporate entertainers" work on creating great content for them? I noticed one of them had a page but the content was really not what you want to show on it.
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
-
Why is this site ranking so well
I just took over an SEO campaign for a company we recently did a website for. The old company created individual landing pages for each city they service, but they didn't have any original content except replacing the city name. We are in the process of creating completely unique content per page. My main issue is that there is a company with no link profile, duplicate content on every page, no social media presence, etc - but consistently ranks for city + fence company The company we are starting to work with is: http://betterdecksandfences.com/ The company that is ranking for everything is: http://www.alcovyfence.com Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | BeardoCo0 -
How on earth is this site ranking so highly?
I'm trying (& struggling) to rank for the keyword property in italy. Yet in the past 5 weeks I've seen this site -- betterpropertyitaly (dot) com -- rocket from about #30 to #2 for the keyword and am trying to figure out why. The obvious is that it's in the domain name, but that can't be the be-all-and-end-all, surely? It's a 2 yr 9 mth old site, so why the sudden spurt? I look in Open Site Explorer and the metrics look pretty weak: Domain Authority: 17 Page Authority: 29 Linking Root Domains: 9 Absolutely zero social shares. Good luck to him and all -- but I'm trying to figure out what he's doing right and I'm not. My site apart, he's beating some pretty big-hitters.
Competitive Research | | Jeepster0 -
Using Semantic Language to rank, how much stock do you put into this? (LSI)
In theory, analyzing the top results for a given phrase and comparing the common words and phrases would indicate what google considers relative language to the query. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) was and still is a buzz phrase for some SEOs. But how much stock do you give to the idea that if you can determine the common language for top rankers and then duplicate that language and density of common words that your website will then rank for that query you desire? Has anyone here tested the theory of using semantic language from the results themselves to better rank?
Competitive Research | | Thos0030 -
How to check Google Keyword rankings?
Hey, So I recently watched the DuckDuckGo commercial about Google's results bubble. My question is how can you get the actual keyword rankings of relevant key phrases without Google taking your locations and search history into account? Would it just be a case of clearing your cache & history from the beginning of time or is there an accurate tool (other than SEOmoz ofc that I can use? Best regards, Dan
Competitive Research | | Sparkstone0 -
Analysis tool that returns all possible phrases that a web site ranks for
Is there anything out there similar to the semrush.com's competitor research that can tell you a web sites total amount of appearances on Google that includes the phrases for which the domain ranks?
Competitive Research | | thebaldman30 -
How is otr ranking?
With the only content a list of links to realaudio files, how is the website, otr ranking?
Competitive Research | | newmon0 -
My site is ranked in the top 5 for my keywords, but howcome I'm low in an organic search results for my key words?
Are the other factors such as page rank, Alexa rating and mozRank used to determine where I will show up in search results, over Goggle's key word rank for my key words?
Competitive Research | | allstatetransmission0 -
8500+ seomoz errors and still rank one for high traffic keywords
I plugged a competitor into the campaign manager that is ranking #1 for many target keywords like "sprinkler parts" (18k broad, 720 exact) and "sprinklers"(550k broad, 4400 exact) and #2 for "sprinkler"(1mil broad, 8100 exact). This site has over 8500 errors on SEOmoz - I have spent a good deal of time fixing errors on all of our client websites and have gotten them down to 0 errors. I am just wondering if I have been wasting my time and if the errors that SEOmoz reports on even make a difference. How can a site rank for such high traffic keywords when it has 4k duplicate content and 4k duplicate page title errors? The site has 75 linking root domains according to opensiteexplorer. any help on this would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | Splashme-1391910