Blog page outranks static page for KW -- why?

[540SEO]

Blog page ranks 10 in Google, while the static page is on page 7. What makes it more interesting is that the blog page scores an "F" with the Term Target tool while the static page scores an "A".

Static page has more inbound links and a mR/mT of 3.89/ 4.54 vs. 3.71/ 4.14 for the blog page.

Any ideas on how to approach this one?

[kennyrowe]

Have you considered age factor? When is the last time Google crawled your static page? When is that last time the static page was updated compared to the blog post?

[540SEO]

Static page crawled 7/15, blog page crawled 8/1. It's a client, so not sure when the last time the static page was modified. Looks like the blog page was created around June.

[eTundra]

What's the URLs of these pages?  There are way too many factors that play into rankings to give you good advice without seeing the pages themselves.

[540SEO]

Just PM'd you there URL's. Thx for taking a look. I'm happy to send anyone else the URL's that wants to investigate. Thank you!

[eTundra]

Do these pages have a 302 redirect on them? I tried to test the content of the pages through the LDA Topics Tool and I got an error saying that both of these pages are 302 redirected. If so that could be an issue...

Also, how are you gauging the rankings you refer to? Because I'm not getting the same rankings for these pages that you are.

[540SEO]

I ran a crawl test and there's no 302 -- the site does appear to be down right now though. I used Rank Tracker for the rankings. Did you get wildly different rankings?

[Svetoslav]

It got me wondering. Can you PM me the URL? I have two ideas why that might be.

1. You have a lot of recent tweets/other social signals to your blog post.
2. You webpage/site is not properly associated with the market.

Cheers,

Svet

[eTundra]

I did get different rankings.  Rank tracker is showing me the static page ranking at #12 for your keyword and the blog page not in the top 50.

A manual test of Google search results with location set to Boulder, CO (not very accurate but at least I have no search history for that keyword) showed the same thing.  Just from looking at these pages those rankings seem more in line with where they should be...

[540SEO]

Just PM'd you, thanks. They don't have much social activity in general. The static page scores well for the target KW using the Term Target tool, the blog page does not -- although both pages have authoritative and market-appropriate content.

[540SEO]

Weird. I signed out of Google, appended &pws=0 and I still get the blog page ranking #12, static page #61. The weird thing is the client is seeing the same dynamic. Weird.

Just to be double sure we are on the same page, blog is the one ending with "mid-year-update/".

[Svetoslav]

Ok, so this might sound strange. You have a few facebook shares and tweets on the blogs post. There is also one external link, unlike the webpage. Could that be such a factor now? I understand 100-200 tweets can do miracles, but I wasn't thinking a few could go that far.

[540SEO]

FYI -- checked with a source in another city, and he also saw the blog result outranking the static page. It's an odd one. If anyone has any ideas, let's hear them!

[eTundra]

Weird... well sorry to send you on a wild goose chase!

I like Svetoslav's theory - do you think it's possible?

[540SEO]

No worries. If the blog page had gone viral I think that could be an explanation, but this isn't close to approaching that.

[Svetoslav]

I'm still puzzled about what caused the page to rank better. One thing you probably thought of is to try and link from your blog page to your static one and see how this goes. Also you might consider the rel=author option when linking to your static page. At 3AM, I'm mostly writing down what pops up in my head. If your static pages goes up, then you at least will be sure that the blog page is performing better and not your static page being pushed down due to some external or internal issues.