Page Ranking Incorrect According to Moz

[Mission-Quest]

Hello,

A while ago I published an article on our blog (HERE) and ensured that it meets all Moz's criteria for a good ranking. Moz scores my article at 96%, which is great. However, Google does not show my link anywhere, even that the target keyword has a difficulty score of 5% only.

Any idea why this page is not doing good on Google?

The article URL is: https://missionquest.org/how-to-choose-a-missionary-service-agency/ The target keyword is: Missionary Service Agency.

Thank you for your help.

Mission Quest

[Chris.Menke]

Mission,

I know, if only there was an interwebs where Moz was in control of the search engine, we could just run our lives based on domain authority : )

But...  Moz gives you an approximation of how well your on-page is optimized but there are a gazillion factors that go into google's algorithm, such as, maybe if your site has another page that ranks for the same or very similar target keyword, for example,  of which you have a couple.  Some people call that keyword cannibalization.  Maybe go after a different keyword?

[Nozzle]

I manually searched in Google for "missionary service agency" and found that you are ranking in positions #1 and #2. The pages that rank though, are https://missionquest.org/missionary-service-agency and https://missionquest.org/what-is-a-missionary-service-agency/ respectively.

The reason why the specific page you mentioned is not ranking is because Google finds these other pages more relevant for this phrase. If you want that page to rank first over the other two, you're going to need to de-optimize the other pages a bit. Also try linking to your new article from the two ranking pages using the phrase, "missionary service agency" as the anchor text.

[Mission-Quest]

Thank you, Boyd, for your response. This is indeed very helpful. Does Google have a limit on how many pages he would display for a certain page per domain? Also, when I search "How to choose a missionary service agency" this page does not show up either. Is it possible that, for some reason, Google blacklisted this page?

[Nozzle]

Google typically only shows one page per domain for each query but sometimes will show two or more for keywords with less competition.

The page has not been blacklisted. If you search "site:https://missionquest.org/how-to-choose-a-missionary-service-agency/", you can see that Google has that page indexed because they list it in the results. You can also click on the little drop down arrow and see that Google last crawled that page on May 15th, 2020.

Also, I see that you added an internal link to https://missionquest.org/how-to-choose-a-missionary-service-agency/ from https://missionquest.org/what-is-a-missionary-service-agency/. I suspect when Google re-crawls that page and sees the addition of the internal link, that  https://missionquest.org/how-to-choose-a-missionary-service-agency/  will start ranking for "how to choose a missionary service agency". Google last recrawled that page on June 8th so it may take a week before Google re-crawls that page.

[Mission-Quest]

Dear Boyd,
Thank you for your response.

Yes, I did add the hyperlink per your recommendation. Your answers are very helpful! Thank you.