Can you advise why my site get outranked by sites with way less authority and so on
-
Hello SeoMoz,
As a new member I first want to thank you guys for your service, seomoz is by far the best resource and toolbox I have ever found.
I have a question, or more of a request if you could advise me on what I do wrong.
I have a website: www.letsflycheaper.com with a Domain Authority of 80, and my target keywords are keywords like: cheap business class, business class flights.
My target page is: www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php.With all my keywords I am page 2 and I have a real hard time getting on the first page, but if I look at my competitors like: www.wholesale-flights.com with a Domain Authority of 'just' 50, crappy backlinks and so on, they are all on the first page with almost all of my keywords that I want to target.
What do I do wrong? Can you maybe give me a couple tips on where I should focus on more?
Hopefully you guys can help me...
Kind Regards,
Ramon van Meer
-
It depends on how long it will be before the new content is up -if it's a couple days, might as well leave it. If it's weeks or longer, it's best to change them, though honestly making the change one way or another at this point is not necessarily going to move the site in any significant way - it's difficult to judge how much, if at all.
-
Thanks for your reply Alan, yes you have a good point, my writer is now writing new content for those pages. A page for each mayor city with introduction on that city, tips for the business travel for that specific city and handy sites for the business traveler.
Do you think, that I should take out the "Business Class" out of the anchor text until I got the new content up?
-
This is much better from the previous over-saturation perspective. Here's my next question though - all those links in the lower part that still remain - they all use "business class CityName" as anchor text.
Except none of them points to a business class specific page. So how do you confirm to Google that "these pages really are about business class services", other than by using that anchor text from that one page?
-
Alan, I changed the www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php page, could you maybe take a quick peek if this is better?
Thanks!
-
Hi Egol,
Thanks for you message, I have the same gut feeling.... To bad there isn't a way to find out which links are possible devalued....
-
Domain authority of 80? That's incredible.
Just sayin' what comes from the gut...
... I would be wondering if some of the links have been devalued by Google.
-
The other replies here have been spot on so I will only add something on the side.
You need to use link building in the most natural form possible. Instead of trying to focus your links to /business-class.php you need to spread it throughout your website with a large variation of anchortext not forgetting about long tail keywords aswell.
-
Without enough links to the target page (a mix of keyword variations and generic non-keyword specific), the target page doesn't have enough off-site "trust" as compared to other sites when compared head to head.
yet if all you have was links to internal pages, that too would look unnatural, so always have some of your new links point to the home page.
-
Have another quick question, as far as finding high quality backlinks, is it better to link it to my /business-class.php page or to my main page?
Thanks
-
Hi Alan,
Thank you so much for your advise! I will defiantly will start working on those tips....
-
Looking over this real quickly and running the 2 sites listed, yours and wholesale flights, through OpenSite Explorer, I see that yours mostly has img alt links titled "Lets fly cheaper", some of your other high PA links are titled: "Ramon Van Meer", and "Cheap International Flights", none of which are your target keyword mentioned above.
Your Wholesale Flight competitor has links titled "Discount business class tickets", your desired keyword.
You would be better off with text, not img alt links. See if you can get those changed out.
-
Ramon
There could be several other factors however here's a quick hit finding:
1. Inbound Link anchor text spread
While you've got much more content and many more links, wholesale-flights.com has a much broader variety of inbound link anchor text related to "business class" than you do, including pointing to their home page. (OpenSiteExplorer.org is great for providing insights like this).
2. Internal keyword saturation
You've got an extremely over-saturated usage of keywords in your internal linking (all those links in the bottom third of your home page for example)
By not having enough inbound link quality relative to that specific phrase, and simultaneously having too much use on internal links, you're out of balance.
3. Core architecture flaw
When I go to your Business Class page, the entire top navigation is gone. As though you've made that specific page into more of a PPC landing page than a primary site page.
On that Business Class page, you've got section level navigation specific to Business class, with the top link labeled "home". Again, this communicates that this really isn't a core part of the main site, but some sort of isolated section. This then isolates this section improperly. Then on one of those sub-pages, not only are the top navigation links gone, so are the primary site footer links.
Yes, it's good, and important to maintain that section level navigation, yet it's just as important to communicate that it's a core section of the main site.
4. Section level content.
Other than the initial business class page, none of the other pages in that section have any substantial content to speak of - they're all very weak overall.
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
-
How to build Domain Authority?
My site: https://www.fishingspots.com.au/ has started to drop Domain Authority in the past weeks, however less quality sites like http://silverstories.com.au/ are rising... I am not sure why? Is there someway I can understand why my site would suddenly start dropping authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Can you combine YouTube and on-site hosting as part of a Video SEO strategy?
My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos. We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me. As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced. From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea? 3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description. The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order: the original post on Moz a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input: Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube? Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search? Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?
Hi everyone, i´ll try to explain a situation is happening to me, i´m goint to try to explain the case (im writing the sites without links for explication purposes. Site 1: Adventurerooms Site 2: Adventureroomsmallorca Site 3: Adventureroomsmadrid (the new site) What happen is that at first there was only Adventurerooms and Adventureroomsmallorca, Adventurerooms was for Madrid and linked to the one in Mallorca too, was kind of giving the information for Madrid but in first page split with a link to Mallorca. In a new strategy we create Adventureroomsmadrid for Madrid, and leave Adventurerooms for Spain (with links to Adventureroomsmadrid and Adventureroomsmallorca. We redirect the info for Madrid in Adventurerooms to Adventureroomsmadrid with 301 redirections. We work during this 3 months in Adventureroomsmadrid making content in the blog, and improving (now Adventureroomsmadrid is Moz 15 (perhaps even more), and Adventurerooms is Moz 10. Surprising Adventurerooms is getting better in its search rankings, even when we took away content from it and even without working well. Adventureroomsmadrid is also improving but not as much as Adventurerooms (i know that is a new site, only 3 months), but Adventurerooms gets better results with no content and only DA of 10. I hope i´ve explain the case with my english so the question is: "Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?" Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webtematica0 -
Need references to a company that can transition our 1000 page website from Http to Https without breaking our SEO backlinks and site structure
Hi Ya'll I'm looking for a company or independent who can transition our website from http to https. I want to make sure they know what they're doing with a Wordpress website. More importantly, i want to make sure they don't break any seo juice from external sources while internally nothing gets broken. Anyone have any good recommendations? You can reply back or DM me. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Does getting a placement in a high DA site matter if PA remains low?
I run a very small business in Australia, and was thrilled to create content which got picked up by a DA92 site in my industry. PA is at 1 as it's only been live for 2 weeks now, and I have a couple of questions that I couldn't find online: If a huge site like the Wall Street Journal adds content all the time, the page gets buried in their history. Would the PA improve over time, or should I just expect it to remain at 1 or 1-10? Is the boost to my SERP's negligable, is there a period where I need to wait to see the effect, or is there any effect whatsoever if the PA remains low? Thanks so much in advance, I really appreciate any input. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrighterFinance
Marcus0 -
Is there a way to increase domain authority?
Dear all, when I see moz analytics for my blog irctcloginindia.co.in, it is legging behind only in terms of diomain authority when compared to my competitors. Because of which it is ranking low. Is there any short cut or fast method using which I can increase the authority for my domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irctclogin0 -
Author rank
Can anyone tellme how to know my author rank. Is better to gain authority on my author rank +dariopropdental And if it is better to gain authority as author or as page +propdental And if a do a new post on my web every day should i place every link to the post on my profile and my page. Doenst it look spammy. Should all post have a link from my profile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0