Why are the Keywords Rankings Incorrect for 1 of my Competitor.

[ArtM]

I have 3 competitors that were all set up the same way. 2 of them show correct rankings for keywords but one competitor says all 51+ when I know they rank higher for most. I know because I have another campaign they are set up in and that one is working just fine.

Thanks for your help!

[pallasart]

I had the same problem. All three of our competitor websites went #51 on all keywords.  I wrote to MOZ and they said the we didn't have a www. in front of their URLs - that was odd because we've had them in the system for years.  We changed them to www. as instructed - and MOZ told us we'll loose all of the historical data.  I wonder if this was not correct - it seems like others have had this problem as well.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I don't know if this related, but Moz is having some issues right now with keyword rankings:

http://health.moz.com

Maybe that has something to do with it. Just a thought.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Arthur,

Sorry for the confusion here. The reason that pallasart mentioned is correct here.

It looks like you are tracking this competitor as a root domain, but we are only able to track your competitors based on the subdomain. Without going into the specifics of your campaign for privacy reasons, competitor.com is what you are tracking in your campaign, but www.competitor.com is what is ranking in search engines. A great way to check if the site should be tracked with or without the www is to actually go to your competitor's site. In this case, the competitor.com redirects to www.competitor.com, so that would indicate that you want to track the site with the www in front of the domain.

If you add the www subdomain in front of your competitors from your edit campaigns settings tab, you should get some pretty awesome rankings data next time your rankings are pulled. Here is some more info on campaign settings: http://moz.com/help/pro/campaign-setup

I hope this helps! Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.

Chiaryn
Help Team Sensei

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Pallasart,

It is a common issue that the competitors are being tracked on the wrong subdomain. I looked into the issue with your account to make sure that the advice was correct in your case and it does look like this was the case with your competitor. It seems like you had an account quite some time ago and then picked back up with a new campaign at the end of April. Only one of the competitors was the same between the old campaign and the new campaign, and that competitor was originally tracked with the www so this is the correct way for it to be tracked in the new campaign. I apologize if that was confusing!

I hope this helps to clear things up.

[pallasart]

Yes, that really helped.  We had a meeting at Pallasart and discussed all the points and understand why it happened and everything is on track again.  Thank you!

Bob

[ChiarynMiranda]

So glad to help, Bob!

[ArtM]

Hi Chiaryn,

Will adding the www mean the competitor's subdomain will no longer be tracked? We were told recently to set up 2 different campaigns, one with the www to track just the domain and one without to include our subdomain. In this particular campaign we would like to track the subdomains, its set up right now so that none of them have the www and our analytics and two other competitors are working fine, it's just the one competitor that's not showing keyword rankings.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Arthur,

The need to set up a competitor with or without the www in the url is completely dependent on how they have their website set up, so your other two competitors are getting rankings because they have set up their site to resolve without the www and, therefore, their site ranks without the www in the url. Again, the best way to tell which way you should enter the competitor site is to actually go to their site and see if it resolves with or without the www.

I looked into your contact history with out support team and I don't see the advice to create two different campaigns, so I don't have the background on what you were specifically told to track separately, but it looks like it was actually regarding your own site so that you could track the www and support subdomains separately. We can track the main site of a campaign by domain, subdomain, or subfolder but competitors can only be tracked by subdomain so the same advice doesn't always apply to both. The competitors' sites do need to be input independently of how the tracking for your site is set up because our tracking for them is much more limited.

In this case, you will definitely need to add the www to the url for this specific competitor in order to get accurate rankings for them. The other two competitors don't need to be changed.

Hopefully, that clears things up, but please let me know if you have any other questions about your campaign settings.