How can a page rank for keywords that it does not have on it?
-
I have a client that is ranking in the top 10 for several keywords on their homepage. Their site has no purposeful SEO in it, there is barely any text on the homepage at all and none of the text are the keywords it is ranking for.
-
Can you describe your more detailed search in more detail? I also noticed that Moz misses a lot of backlinks
-
Look outside of the data of Moz from time to time, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools might sometimes be able to already get you so many great insights for smaller sites that Moz doesn't have (because they're not crawling the whole web, vs. search engines doing that).
-
Thank you for your responses!
They have 4 #1 rankings and 8 in the top 10. My company did not design their website, but they are interested in getting more content and would like to focus more on SEO now. I was just surprised and baffled by what they already had. Part of the reason for my confusion was that the reports I received from Moz did not show many backlinks and no anchor text. We found several when doing a deeper search on our own. After that deeper search, their SEO makes more sense.
-
Backlinks. Anchor text. Find people that will link to you using the words you want to rank for.
"Their site has no purposeful SEO in it, there is barely any text on the homepage at all and none of the text are the keywords it is ranking for."
The above statement is concerning. If they have a good budget, as their SEO and design advisor I would say what needs to be said. Text can be added in a stylized way to help improve the SEO of any site without taking away from a good design. Google likes words, not CSS and images. Without a reference, it's hard to judge what can be improved, and how you should go about suggesting it to your client. You also mentioned rankings, but what do those rankings look like? Are we talking page one, or top 3?
-
Backlinks and Anchor Text. For example if you Google "click here" you will see alot of businesses that do not have "click here" on there website or meta title, but they have a lot of websites linking to them with the anchor text "click here", as an example.
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 add geo keyword without it looking keyword stuffed
I'm updating my mobile home inspection page and I want to add geo keywords with my seed keyword Mobile Home Inspections. How do I add these so that the page do not look like it keyword stuffed? Is there a technique that you use for this? I was thinking something like internal links to the City pages of have but then the Anchor text landing page would be a cite page and not a mobile home inspection page.
On-Page Optimization | | Vallerinspects1 -
Can you canonical from one domain page to a different domain page
We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS. My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090 -
Page Rank drop from 4 to ?
Our site (ecommerce) has been around since 1998. The pagerank has gone from a 4 to a ? The Moz score is still good, but traffic is way down. Never got a warning from Google, and were never part of a BH linking scheme? I'm puzzled? There are some duplicate content issues and missing meta tags, but they were on customer login pages that we have since blocked? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | rglaubinger0 -
Can soft 404's hurt my rankings?
This post mainly pertains to soft 404's but I recently dropped a few ranks in my main keyword which I have maintained prior to this my better rank for well over 2 years. I participate in NO BLACKHAT and obtain links naturally. I want to describe a few issues that happened prior to my ranking dropping and see what you guys think. I started to receive about a week prior to my ranks dropping DNS issues with GWT. It was weird because when I would use Goole Fetch on those pages they would return just fine so I was not sure what was happening there. I use Google page speed server which did in fact decrease my load time (YEAH!!) so that was cool. About 1 week prior to my rankings dropping I enabled godaddy's Website Accelerator as well thinking that could help even more. Because of this I thought maybe this had something to do with my DNS issues with Google so I decided to turn off my website accelerator with Godaddy and just leave my Google pagespeed service on. I figure I don't need 2 of them anyways IMO. Also at the same time I started to receive a ton (31,000+) html errors with duplicate metadescriptions and titles. I discovered I had an error with my code which was displaying 2 different sets of descriptions and titles for each of these pages. I since then have fixed the issue and waiting for Google to index those pages. Here is were I think I might have been hurting from the drop in rankings. Some months ago (maybe 2) I decided to redirect my 404's to my homepage. Yes I know this is not good now and I have created a proper 404 page which returns the 404 code. I recently started getting a ton of Soft 404 errors in GWT which is what brought my attention to this issue. My question is, could my action of redirecting my users to my homepage as a 404 which obviously was returning a 200 on a page that did not exist be possibly the culprit to my ranks dropping?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich1 -
Google Indexed = 35, 445 pages, Bing Indexed = 243 pages... Why?
Dear MozSquad, Can anyone check our site and let me know if there's anything super apparent that would cause Bing to treat us like a bum on the street? I recently made some structural changes which really helped with Google, but Bing didn't even budge. It's a lot harder to keep up with all the SEO initiatives I have in mind with it being a small start-up where I'm responsible for planning the entire Internet Marketing campaign, giving constant input on UX and site design, etc on top of 900 other things, so I figured it'd be a good time to use The Moz to help a brother out. Ideas? Domain: homeandgardendesignideas.com (yeah, I know it's a little long =P)
On-Page Optimization | | zDucketz0 -
Keyword Cannibalization/stuffing on an ecommerce category page
Hi, Whats the best way to tackle e-commerce category pages? If you have, say, a category showing 30 pairs of socks, and each of the sock products in the lists has a 'view more' link, a link from the product name and a link from the thumbnail. Naturally each of those links should be the product name - sprinkled with a slight variation, a preceding 'View more on [product name]' or superseded with the shop name, so you dont end up with complete duplicate link titles, you get the idea. But you suddenly end up with 90 instances of links with title tags containing 'socks', which ultimately lead to keyword stuffing/cannibalization - especially as you then move to another category with, say, sports socks showing 40 products and therefore 120 link titles also with the word 'socks' Thought on a postcard please? Thanks Tom
On-Page Optimization | | pretige120 -
Woah, my A-grade optimized pages that were on the first page have all vanished outside the top 50 in Google... is this Panda?
Yep as mentioned, I had some pages hit the top ten pretty quickly after ensuring they were A-grade for pretty uncompetitive keywords however, today, all bar 2 have just vanished from the top 50! All were ranking in Google.co.uk and I know we were predicting the Panda update to hit soon but WOW! My client is understandably a little upset, what on earch do I tell him and what should I do about it? Cheers! jT
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0