Possible penalised website, with PR6

[Jack-ToolkitWebsites]

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[WilliamBay]

That would be just one thing that I would look at. There are a number of other considerations I would have first though. 1. The phrase "Web Design" has got to be one of the most competitive searches out there (guessing). So that is a biggy. 2. If you are gonna take on trying to rank for it, do you optimize for it on your site. Does it appear verbatim in your header in the first position, throughout your site, etc. You can run the on-site tool to see if you are optimized correctly. 3. What is the Anchor Text in the footer links say? Is it your company name or is it specifically "Web Design by..." 4.cBlocks will be a factor, but what are the others? If you run the Keyword Difficulty tool and look at the top 10 results what kind of link metrics are showing up? How does your MozTrust compare to theirs? If you have 55,000 links, do they have 10x that? Look at where you're deficient. It's good that you're looking at things like cblock (especially when you end up with clients on your server, it's to be expected). But what are the other factors you are missing? You can easily look at the top 300 results of each metric and see where you are with each one, and make a game plan based off of where you are weak. Hope that helps.

[DanHill]

Stop worrying about 'PageRank' - I put it in quotes because the only PR we can see is what the toolbar says and it's normally not close to the real PR.  http://www.webdesigncreare.co.uk/ ranks first on google.co.uk and has a PR of 0...

What you need is quality links from strong domains that are relevant(think technorati and the like) that are not on your server!

[Jack-ToolkitWebsites]

Thanks so much- really useful!

Will look at the tools for checking our content relevancy.

The anchor text on our clients websites is "Website design by <a>Toolkit Websites</a>" for the majority. In the process of changing this over to the "<a>Web Design</a> |  Toolkit Websites".

Our moztrust and mozrank is higher than the people in P1-3 on the web design SERP. We have a lot more backlinks than  P1 and P3, but P2 has roughly 3 times our number of backlinks.

It seems the only place we're deficient compared to P1 and P3 is that they have a lot more C blocks- we have better readings on all other metrics from our campaigns. We have 93 C-Blocks for our 55k backlinks, they have 821 c-Blocks for their 9.5k backlinks! This is why I was wondering if you'd think we have some OK rankings once we've addressed this issue...

[Jack-ToolkitWebsites]

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[WilliamBay]

Good, Don't ignore Page Authority and Domain Authority. And another metric (kinda in line with the cblock number is links from unique domains, do you have 55k links coming from 10 sites, or are there a 5,000 unique domains sending those 55k links. I think having you're anchor text be "Web Design by Toolkit Websites" would be totally fine too. It would just drive home that branding. I'm not sure how you plan to resolve the cblock issue unless you plan to start migrating sites to different servers. And even still, I'm not sure Google will really treat you any different. What I would do is start submitting to some of those design websites like Rand has mentioned in the past to start obtaining some link diversity as well as some good editorial content. Maybe a Twitter contest... See where you can get people to write about you. You could even give away a free WordPress theme with a link back to you. If you aren't hosting them, then you're getting diverse links. One other option is to narrow your keyword choice. Would you have a better chance of Web Design, UK, or something more localized? I'd be interested to hear how you go about it...

[DanHill]

Jack

That's because using the toolbar PR number is not a good metric to go by.  seoMoz provides way more accurate data.

As a starting point(please note there are more metrics to look at than just these) their domain authority is 63 vs your 39 , total number of links is around 2.5 times yours, but you'd need to look at where the links are coming from.  What I suggest you do is use the linkscape tool or the Open Site explorer and take the top 5 results for 'web design' on google.co.uk and do a full link analysis into excel spreadsheets and then sort by domain/page authority and start going through all that data and see where they are beating you.

It's not a simple quick process but it's definitely worthwhile

[Hurf]

Hi Jack, I wouldn't be so fixated on ranking for such a broad and highly competitive keyword like "web design". Unless you are in a position to offer your services (and service clients) on a national level. I would first focus on getting all the business I could on your doorstep.

One really easy way to do this is to get yourself a more specific, regionally targeted,  exact match domain and build up a separate web presence with this. i.e. rather than investing all of your energy in trying to rank for a keyword  "Web Design" and fight for visibility amongst the biggest web design companies out there, get high visibility for "Web Design [Town Name]" - which will be much less competitive (so less time spent on SEO for yourself), much more likely to convert into business and also seen as more relevant to your potential customers - seeing the name of their town/city in the domain offers some reassurance as they are generally likely to have positive associations with the place they live/work.)

Think about how you search for servies online yourself. If you are looking for a plumber for example, do you type in "plumber" into google, or "plumber [my town]"? I suspect the latter and this is certainly the case with the vast majority of people searching for a service in their area.

FYI in my experience far more people type the SERVICE before the AREA in their searches, that is - What they want,  where they are, rather than the other way around - though I would also secure the reverse if available. I suspect that this is because the Service is the most urgent/front of mind part of their query.

Incidentally, the .co.uk and .com variants of the obvious exact match domains are as yet unregistered. I have messaged you with their details (not that it would take Hercule Poirot to deduce what they may be ;o)

I would suggest you obtain these urgently (if for no other reason than to deny then to a competitor on your area)

You should know that I battled for some considerable time to rank for a very similar keyword in my area and was frustrated to discover that the exact matches in .co.uk and .com were being held hostage by a domain leasing company - who wanted silly money to hold me over a barrel, so I bought the .net and now rank #1 for my service town with that - Jog On Domain Leasers!!!

Hope that helps. Now hurry up and buy those domains before I do and lease them to you ;o)

[Jack-ToolkitWebsites]

Hi Daniel,

I was thinking the same, but really we;re aiming for page 1, rather than position 1, and we have more links than P1 and P3...

The main way I can see we are being beaten is linking C-Blocks, but at the same time link quality may be low, but we do have a MozRank and MozTrust higher, just need to get the overall effort on the quality  backlinks up to get the domain authority up I think...

AKA- in it for the long haul!

[Jack-ToolkitWebsites]

Hi.

Please see my PM back about the exact match domains

We're actually in a position to offer nationwide web design, we have a lot of client overseas and the majority of our work is outside of the county, and we don't meet our clients. Hence the want to appear for the highly competitive term "web design" - we want to be up there with the best of them!

[Jack-ToolkitWebsites]

Hi William,

There are some really good ideas there- definitely worth looking into a competition of some sort to get links... Problem is most of our audience are currently our clients who already link to us, or use our IP (hence the fundemental C Block problem).

We're looking in to the C-Block problem, as it seems the high performers on the SERP have an array of IPs for their clients sites, looking through their portfolios.

Hopefully I can find something along the lines of Open Site Explorer which can also include server IP, so that I can get some good statistics on where we're at, but I'm thinking that's doubtful!

Thanks so much for your help - this forum is an incredibly useful resource!