RD and PA high but still not ranking

[SocialB]

We picked up a client who before ourselves was just using link building as their SEO strategy.

They came to us for on page SEO and overall guidance.  We have done some targeted link building and did some work with their link building company to remove some links, however after doing some further diggings Im wondering if we still have some bad links?

My reasoning for this is:-

• all the SEO work we have done on the pages are getting A reports in Moz (which is our back up check)

• the RD and PA for many of the pages we have focused on are higher RDs and PA's than the pages that rank on the first page

Any suggestions?

[dotfly]

how many time has passed since you`ve completed your work?

[AdamWormann]

I'd love to see the URL and some of the keywords, but I completely understand if you can't do that.  Some immediate thoughts I have are:

• Site structure - are there structural issues in the site that are causing this?  Are we talking home page compared to a page 3 layers deep?  Is it apples to apples?
• Anchor text - you don't want to be unnatural, but anchor text is still a big factor and not measured in DA/PA
• Depth of Content - Do you have one page of content on the desired keywords vs. a significant amount of content regarding the topic?

Those are probably the first three things I'd check.

[SocialB]

thanks Adam

We came on board to do the on page SEO (as they hadn't done any) they had just been link building.

We suggested they stop the link building as it was all going to the home page.  The anchor text link building was all going to the home page pretty much and some of the links were low quality.

We've got them to stop all this dodgy link building and even undo some of it.  But because they haven't seen instant results with us (even though we have shown them the problems they have had) we are in focus now.

I believe the structure of the website to be ok but would appreciate a outsider to check (can send you a link via linkedin if you are happy to take a quick look).

I've pulled reports on each keyword and page again this afternoon and can see we now need to do some quality link building for the client which we will now suggest having pulled them out of the penguin/panda updates (thanks to their previous SEO company).