Competitor Ranks Highly Despite LOTS of Duplication

[jampaper]

One of my Moz campaigns tracks my main competitor. I can't get over the fact that this competitor continues to rank well despite having thousands of duplication issues while I currently have less than 10. Our websites are similar both structurally and product-wise.

The two images attached include OSE comparisons for the keyword "kraft envelopes". My competitor ranks #2 for the term, while I rank #9. I don't get why! And again, looking from a top-level perspective, MOZ shows that my competitor's website is full of duplication issues and other problems while my site is healthy as a horse. All responses are greatly appreciated.

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[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

Before digging deep, the striking difference is the URL structure. Your competitor has a clean URL structure with hyphen as a word separator. Looking at your URL, it has no word separators and looks sub-optimal with too many words held together without word separators.

Coming to the duplication issues. Just because a site has duplicate content, its not bound to be penalized. The intention matters here than the duplication itself. If you look at the size of the websites. The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index and drives much more organic traffic.I looked at SEMRush data for both the sites and the competitor is a clear winner.

Moreover, the search query also matters a lot in this case and the competitor has it in the domain name. This also plays an important role. Those were my two cents and the first thing that I would do is to make the URL structure a little better.

Good luck friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[Devanur-Rafi]

Just another addition to the above. When I checked the backlinks using AHREFs for the jampaper page, most of the links come from Chinese domains. This might not be good if your target market is not China. You might want to look in to this.

[MoosaHemani]

One of the basic things that you need to understand is that Google uses complex mathematics (Algorithms) to rank a website against a query and there are around 200 plus signals and not all of them are widely discussed.

There could be several reasons which includes quality of content, title tags, linking domains, website structure, internal linking and the list goes on.

Keeping the Devanur’s comment in mind I can safely advise you to do audit your website again and fix the problem to make it more SEO friendly plus get links from high quality places.

Hope this helps!

[Devanur-Rafi]

Moosa got it spot on. Just by looking at few parameters, we can't say that a website can rank high in Google. Here is something that can be handy while doing a comprehensive SEO audit. Though the list in there is not an official ranking parameters list, it can give you a fair idea about how and what things come in to play when it comes to search engine rankings. Hope it helps:

http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[jampaper]

Thank you Devanur. We are aware of our poor URL structure and are considering a site-wide change to include separators in all URLs.

"The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index" - - why does this matter? I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed.

[jampaper]

Is AHREFs the best link audit software? I conducted a major link audit recently using a combination of OSE and webmaster tools but they clearly did not catch everything.

[jampaper]

After more research, I realize my link audit consisted mainly of link removal for just my homepage. I will have to do more for all of my inner pages. Thank you!

[jampaper]

Thank you Moosa. I will be conducting a more thorough audit.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Andrew,

I meant, the competitor's website is much bigger and is driving loads of organic traffic for high search volume keywords/phrases.

"I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed. "

This theory is not a correct perspective. Even with more pages, the link juice will be still within the website unless you have a ton of out-bound links pointing to external websites.

There are  a lot of other ranking factors that make the competitor rank ahead of you. If you look at organic search competition for your website in SEMRush, the competitor website is number one competitor for your website and if you look at the organic search competition for your competitor website, your website stands at 9th position. Please have a look at the ranking factors list provided in my previous post. Moreover, no matter how good a website is, it cannot rank for all the keywords/phrases in the niche. When I looked further down in the organic keywords data for both of your domains, its very evident that your competitor ranks excellently well for search queries with the term, 'envelopes' in them. Infact, they are the number one site in Google for almost all the envelopes related search queries. Their domain name must be playing a bit role in this along with other ranking factors.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[Devanur-Rafi]

IMHO, no link audit software can give you the whole picture of your link profile but a combination of all those can. We use almost all of them while carrying out a major backlinks check especially when dealing with penguin recovery.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Oh yes Andrew. You should invest some serious time to clean the link profile so that it looks natural and organic. We have seen dramatic improvements with clean link profiles.