Outranked by link farm

[JarnoNijzing]

Hello Mozzers,

I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms.

I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them.

Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it.

Looking forward for your thoughts on this.

regards

Jarno

[N1ghteyes]

Hi Jarno,

A couple of things to look at, did your site structure change when you switched to responsive? How has the responsiveness been done? (Poor implementation might cause you problems if google can no longer follow links correctly).

Are you testing while logged into a google account? Or logged out in an incognito window in Chrome? (The later will give you a much cleaner result as google adjust search results per user based on viewing habits). Or do you see these changes in Moz specifically?

Something to remember, mobile responsiveness has absolutally no known effect on desktop searches, only those carried out on mobile devices and so won't be a ranking factor for a large number of your keyword searches.

I would look at what going responsive changed though. If you like, PM me a link to the website (or link it here) and I’ll take a look to see if i can spot anything with the implementation.

[JarnoNijzing]

Toby,

thank you for your quick respons. To answer your questions:

• Site structure stated the same -> no changes were made
• The resposiveness was done by recreating the code of the website that was build in Tables and recreated with div's. I've tested the code off course and found no problems with it. It was completely HTML5 validated.
• No not logged in to Google account
• Incognito window of chrome is still untested -> will try that shortly -> thank you for the pointer
• Changes in Google and in Moz.com crawltest
• I know mobile friendliness has to do with mobile searches but since that rest of the site did not change I did not expect any change on desktop (been no. 1 since 5 or 6 years for most of the terms). I would sooner expect a increase do to the cleaner code then a decrease in rankings
• I testen in Google itself on my ipad and iphone and noticed the results there too. All of the competitors are not mobile friendly yet.

Hope this clears up some.

I will PM you a link to the site for your point of view on it.

regards

Jarno

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Jarno

I was going through the metrics for this site in OSE and Majestic, and it appears that this site is actually quite relevant for camping / recreation / outdoor backlinks in Majestic. It's seems it's doing a great job of associating itself with those themes.

It also has a quite high Page Authority. I am assuming this is why this subdomain is ranking rather high. That being said, Moz is reporting some pretty spammy backlinks pointed at them.

That being said, how long have they been out ranking you? Have you done a competitive analysis on them?

Keep in mind, this could be a fluctuation in the SERPs as there was an update on May 3rd. I would wait it out and see what happens.

Hope this helps! Good luck!