Why does my infographic rank better on other websites than my own?

[mattgiovanisci]

I recently created an infographic that was quite popular in my niche and a lot of people linked to it and embedded it on their own sites.

Now, if you search the term I was trying to rank for, everybody who linked to me ranks higher than the page that everyone is linking to and it's the page where the original graphic was posted.

According to SEOmoz, I have the highest Domain and Page Authority than everyone else in front of me.

How the hell is this possible?

If you want to see for yourself, just type in "hot tub yoga" into Google and I'm on the second page, http://www.swimuniversity.com/blog/hot-tub-yoga-infographic

I would love some help on this and I thank you all in advance.

[SoftzSolutions]

This is really weird. What I feel is that you should not have targeted the exact match keyword - "Hot Tub Yoga". You should be using long tail keyword in the embedded code. I fear for that reason, you website might be ranking low in this keyword.

[mattgiovanisci]

Well, I am ranking in Yahoo and Bing. It's only with Google. I feel like I'm being penalized for something.

I have another example too.

There is another website that ranks for "mustard pool algae" and that site only has two sentences and then a link to my article about mustard pool algae. This has been happening a lot and I'm creating really awesome and useful content that shouldn't be buried.

Any suggestions? Could there be a problem with my mod rewrites?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Matthew,

Sorry to hear about the lower rankings. This situation totally sucks, I know.

Unfortunately, this situation is more and more common with infographics. By all rights, you should rank higher for this term. A couple reasons why this might be happening:

1. Over-optimized anchor Text: As the other commenter pointed out, most of your incoming links are the phrase "hot tub yoga". We see this in Open Site Explorer as well - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.swimuniversity.com%2Fblog%2Fhot-tub-yoga-infographic

In the past year, especially since the Penguin updates, we've seen Google target this type of anchor text. When you get the same, repeating exact match anchor text for a phrase, it often triggers a filter which prevents you from ranking. Many SEOs now advise to use generic or branded anchor text as your link, such as www.example.com, which most likely won't be penalized.

Other SEOs advocate rotating your anchor text. Mike King recently wrote a post about this. http://blog.iacquire.com/2013/01/03/using-embed-code-randomize-your-links-anchor-text/

My personal preference goes a step further: don't use an embed code or specify an anchor text. Let folks know they can repost your infographic - even give them the file to do so - then simply ask for attribution. This way your anchor text is randomized, and likely carries more value.

2. The page may be over-optimized in other ways. I see this often when the title tag, URL, headline and anchor text all match up, Google sees this as over-optimization and will knock you down in rankings.

It's too late to change the URL (unless you want to do a rediret) But you can back off on the title.

3. Aside from the infographic, there's very little text on the page. And, of course, the words on the infographic are all an image. Adding a couple hundred words of unique text at the top, then adding an HTML text only version at the bottom could help this page to rank.

There's still a chance to turn this page around. New links (not optimized) may reverse a Penguin-like penalty, and you can add more content and alter the meta data of the page (not too much!)

Hope this helps. Best of luck!

[mattgiovanisci]

You are dead on with this and now I feel like a idiot

I want to point out that below the infographic on my page is a whole bunch of text that I wrote to go along with it.

I also did something really stupid a few weeks ago: I updated all my links on Ezine Articles. So, to Google, it looks like my website got a bunch of links all at once - very unnatural and I'm kicking myself for doing that. I just deleted all my article from there because they were shitty and I don't want my name on them anymore. The content I create is far superior now than it was 4 years ago.

I am working on cleaning up my link profile for 2013 and i will take your advice about the infographics. They get me a lot of links, but way to fast and all with the same anchor text. I like the idea of just asking people to give me credit if they want to use my infographic.

Thanks for the help!