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
-
Merging 5 Sites
Hi there We have 5 separate sites which handle different regions/niches that we work in, and we are planning to merge into one so we have a logical path for 301 redirects. The sites have DA's as follows: Site 1 - DA 36
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben10001
Site 2 - DA 31
Site 3 - DA 29
Site 4 - DA 27
Site 5 - DA 20 Does anyone have any experience with how the DA would flow through to the new site? Each site currently relates to a different niche that we work with, and we are planning to keep the content structured similarly, probably like this: https://newtoplevelsite/site1/products, https://newtoplevelsite/site2/products and so on. That makes 301 redirects easy and also gives us more control in managing users and different teams in Wordpress. We would link the different niches through the top menu and links within the pages. Is there a better solution? Would it make more sense to have https://newtoplevelsite/products/site1, https://newtoplevelsite/products/site2, and so on? Thanks for the ideas0 -
Can Someone explain why this site ranks #1 and #2? I am confused.
Hi everyone, Here is my problem. This site: https://247ride.com/town-cars/ ranks for bunch of really good keywords. Such as lax car service, car service to lax etc. The keyword does not appear in Title tag, and only partially on meta description. The site's DA is 23 and PA is 22. Less than 29 links overall, and linking domains 8. Why in your opinion Google is ranking this page #1 and #2 for many competitive keywords. I know it's a hard question to ask but any input would be greatly appreciated. I am working really hard to rank for same keywords and so far i am at #11 position. Thanks in advance, Davit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19851 -
Building a product clients will integrate into their sites: What is the best way to utilize my clients' unique domain names?
I'm designing a hosted product my clients will integrate into their websites, their end users would access it via my clients' customer-facing websites. It is a product my clients pay for which provides a service to their end users, who would have to login to my product via a link provided by my clients. Most clients would choose to incorporate this link prominently on their home page and site nav.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emzeegee
All clients will be in the same vertical market, so their sites will be keyword rich and related to my site.
Many may even be .org and ,edus The way I see it, there are three main ways I could set this up within the product.
I want to know which is most beneficial, or if I'm missing anything. 1: They set up a subdomain at their domain that serves content from my domain product.theirdomain.com would render content from mydomain.com's database.
product.theirdomain.com could have footer and/or other no-follow links to mydomain.com with target keywords The risk I see here is having hundreds of sites with the same target keyword linking back to my domain.
This may be the worst option, as I'm not sure about if the nofollow will help, because I know Google considers this kind of link to be a link scheme: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en 2: They link to a subdomain on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to product.mydomain.com/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. 3: They link to a subdirectory on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to mydomain.com/product/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. In all scenarios, my marketing content would be set up around mydomain.com both as static content and a blog directory, all with SEO attractive url slugs. I'm leaning towards option 3, but would like input!0 -
The review stars for my ecommerce site in the organic search disappeared, how can I have them shown again?
We run www.prams.net, an ecommerce store for strollers and other baby products out of the Uk. We always followed schema and the stars appeared in our product snippets in the organic search, helping us a lot. A couple of weeks ago the stars stopped appearing. When I do the site:www.prams.net they appear but not in the search results anymore. We have a french site as well. www.poussette.com, their it still works. Has anybody got tips what we can do to make the stars appear again? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
Best way to start a fresh site from a penalized one
Dear all, I was dealing with a penalized domain (Penguin, Panda), hundred of spamy links (Disavoved with no success), tiny content resolved in part and so on .... I think the best way is to start a new fresh domain but we want to use some of the well written content from the old (penalized site). To do this task I will mark as NOINDEX the source (penalized) page and move this content to the new fresh domain. Question: do you think this is a non-dangerous aprouch or do you know other strategy? I'll appreciate your point of view Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Niche sites: how to optimize them?
Dear SEOmozzers, I am focusing on those keywords I find using the "Keyword Analysis" tool that are not too competitive (among 20%-30% competitiveness). I then buy domains that include those keywords. The sites are in Italian and targeting the Italian search engines, so the competition is lower than it would be in the US. Basically, I'd like to build niche sites and I'd like to ask a few questions that I hope somebody with a good experience in this field can answer: How do I optimize a niche site. Specifically, how do I go about link building? How many backlinks should I get to see some results? How long does it take for a typical niche site to start appearing in the search engines for a certain keyword, after launching an effective link building campaign? Please kindly provide any recommendations you believe to be important when building niche sites. For example, is there a company/professional you know that specializes in this field and who is trustworthy/reliable? Thank you very much for your help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
What is the best way to allow content to be used on other sites for syndication without taking the chance of duplicate content filters
Cookstr appears to be syndicating content to shape.com and mensfitness.com a) They integrate their data into partner sites with an attribution back to their site and skinned it with the partners look. b) they link the image back to their image hosted on cookstr c) The page does not have microformats or as much data as their own page does so their own page is better SEO. Is this the best strategy or is there something better they could be doing to safely allow others to use our content, we don't want to share the content if we're going to get hit for a duplicate content filter or have another site out rank us with our own data. Thanks for your help in advance! their original content page: http://www.cookstr.com/recipes/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta their syndicated content pages: http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/healthy-recipes/recipe/sauteacuteed-escarole-with-pancetta0