Google seems to prefer ranking pages with 0-10 links than pages with 50+ links?

[Samwise89]

Okay, what is the deal with Google these days?

I had a page in the top 3 and it's slowly fallen to the top of page 2. During this fall, I invested a couple thousand in guest post links to see it not budge at all. The only thing I can think is maybe my anchor texts got diluted too much, so I got a couple exact match anchors to it and will see what happens. But that'll still keep me at around 2% for exact match.

But I looked at the top 10 and not only do most of the pages have no links or only really crappy ones (less than 10), most of the domains have half the links mine has. These aren't sites doing PBNs as far as I can tell, mainly because I've seen them in my niche forever. They just got the good hand during this update.

Has anyone else seen this?

I actually killed the flow of links to this page and I want to see what happens in the next 90 days. Maybe my page will shoot to the top. But these guest post links came over the course of 5-6 months, plenty enough time to see some positive movement. It was a very slow drip. It feels like Google doesn't want to rank your page while it's actively getting links. I've seen them rise up well after a campaign ends though.

It's driving me nuts. I feel like I should have spread that $2,000 over 10 posts and I'd have been much better off.

Is anyone else seeing situations where you should be ranking at the top, no questions asked, but are on page 2, even with perfect balanced on-page?

 

[becool]

Has anyone else seen this?

I have seen this off and on in a niche I'm working in. Have you considered domain age? In my niche, for instance, many of the competing sites have been around for over a decade . I think domain age may be at play (at least with respect to my niche, where I've experienced the same issue you've articulated above).

Frankly, my response has been more links and my rankings seem to have progressed, although I'm currently experiencing what appears to be a bounce/dance. Nevertheless, on the whole, my rankings have improved with my ramped up link acquisition strategy.

 

[Calamari]

Have you tried making improvements to the quality of the page to improve user metrics and serp ctr?

I'd stop muddying the waters by messing with the flow of your "link juice" and focus on the user.

 

[Encrypted]

I had a page in the top 3 and it's slowly fallen to the top of page 2

Has this happened to only you or is there any other site(s) that was at the top for that keyword (like you) and has also dropped?

If it happened to only you then this may be an on-page issue. Compare your content with the top results , identify where you're lacking and see how you can improve.

 

[RomesFall]

I do a lot of testing and I'm also working with a rather substantial amount of data because of that and just generally through tracking & analysis.

Generally, the biggest sites out there aren't ranking the way you're describing. This used to work well, and there are some outliers. But I hear stories like yours every day.

Links won't fix those kind of problems. You need to improve the content... Analyze the sites in your SERP. All of them... This will give you the best clues, reverse engineer.

 

[stackcash]

... mainly because I've seen them in my niche forever.

Sounds like you're fighting age and authority. Two things that are very hard to overcome.

I'm seeing this a lot with my main site. The majority of the money keywords are KD0 - KD5, but I'm having a hard time overcoming older, more authoritative sites that are DA50+ compared to my DA30.

If this is just a single page you're working on, I would make sure your on-page SEO is set one more time and then let it sit for up to 4 months.

Here are things you can do to make sure your on-page is mint:

• Make sure your content is about 25% longer than the average length of the top 3 spots
• Your exact target keyword should be in the title tag, h1 tag
• Variations of your target keyword should be in the h2 tag
• Your general article format should be scannable with subsections and sub-subsections (if necessary).
• Include an unordered list... preferably around something you can grab a featured snippet for. Try looking at the top 5 ranking pages organic keyword profiles and see which other keywords those pages are ranking for have featured snippets. Then figure how to get them.
• Include at least one image that uses the main kw as the file name and alt tag. If you use more than one image, use keyword variations for the them while "describing" the image as best as possible.
• Embed a hyper-relevant YouTube video on the page if available... preferably one with your keyword in the title.
• Make sure your main kw is in the body content of the article 1 to 3x. Get the average KW density of the top 5 pages and make sure you never exceed that. Less is more when it comes to KW density.
• Take a look at Google's Auto-Suggest for the keyword and make sure all the bold words are somewhere in your content. Don't just stuff the words into the content. Instead, make sure your content is talking about those words in some fashion.
• Optimize all your images with a tool like Kraken.io (thanks @Ryuzaki )
• Run a search for the kw on AnswerThePublic and use any common questions you find in a FAQ section on the page.
• Look for the kw on Quora and try and find any questions that aren't being answered in your content. Add those to your FAQ, or give them a dedicated subsection if you need to elaborate.
• Use bold and italics to draw attention to important points throughout your content. Don't just use them on keywords. Use them to improve UX and time on site / bounce rate.
• Run a bulk TF*IDF on the top 10 ranking pages with a tool like Ranks.NL to find the common terms among them. Look for "grouped" terms and not single words so you actually get common phrases. Use like the top 20% of the most used phrases in your content. Again, speak to them, don't just stuff them in.
• Run a TF*IDF on your own page and make sure that there aren't *any* words on the page that are used more than 3%. If there are, edit the content to reduce that density below 3%.
• Use a meta description for the page that tells the reader to do something such as "Read this review to learn..." or "Discover 3 new ways to..."
• If you have added a significant amount of new content to the page as a result of all this, then "update" the publish date to the current date.

Assuming you already have enough links to rank top 3, you should optimize the onpage as listed above and then let the page sit and marinate for 4 months. The max I've ever seen a ranking settle in has been 120 days. Go build something else in the meantime while you're waiting.

Bonus Tactics:

Of course, there's some sitewide stuff you can be doing as well that will help.

• Do a speed optimization
• Optimize the size of all images on your site
• Create 5 to 10 pages of supporting content around the topic or subtopic of the page you're trying to rank. Interlink from these pages back to the target page using the target page's main keyword or keyword variation as the anchor.
• Search Google for "target keyword" site:yourdomain.com. Any pages that come up for that search beyond your target page are "relevant" to your target page. Create internal links from them to your target page.
• Run a heatmap on the page to see how your traffic is behaving. Perhaps the design and layout of the page/site are not as intuitive as your visitors are expecting.
• Compare bounce rate and time-on-site before & after the ranking change. If they have worsened, perhaps the newly ranking pages have a better user experience.
• If you're sure UX is on point, try to send targetted traffic to the page outside of organic.... paid ads, forums, traffic leaks, etc. If your bounce/dwell is good and there's a ton of traffic that proves that, you should get an indirect ranking benefit as a result.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Almost every time I've seen this happen, when as you said you have the on-page taken care of correctly, is exactly what you said regarding anchor texts.

Typically you'll rank highly with fewer links because you have your anchor text dialed in good. Then an update bumps you back a bit so you start sending more links at the page, types where you don't control the anchor text. And for some odd reason, even though you're now absolutely destroying everyone else in terms of links, you keep losing more ranks.

In my experience that's because your anchor text ratios become more diluted, not only it terms of exact match but "word spread" in general. If you were to take 1-word phrases and lay them all out, the words in your exact match phrase probably don't appear as much as you think, despite them being highly prevalent in a 2-word or 3-word spread.

You've done exactly what I'd recommend: adding a couple exact match anchors and see how it reacts. You said you've done it and you're waiting. Let us know how that goes. I bet that helps pretty soon.

 

[stackcash]

Almost every time I've seen this happen, when as you said you have the on-page taken care of correctly, is exactly what you said regarding anchor texts.

Typically you'll rank highly with fewer links because you have your anchor text dialed in good. Then an update bumps you back a bit so you start sending more links at the page, types where you don't control the anchor text. And for some odd reason, even though you're now absolutely destroying everyone else in terms of links, you keep losing more ranks.

In my experience that's because your anchor text ratios become more diluted, not only it terms of exact match but "word spread" in general. If you were to take 1-word phrases and lay them all out, the words in your exact match phrase probably don't appear as much as you think, despite them being highly prevalent in a 2-word or 3-word spread.

You've done exactly what I'd recommend: adding a couple exact match anchors and see how it reacts. You said you've done it and you're waiting. Let us know how that goes. I bet that helps pretty soon.

Well... now you gotta tell the class how to get preferred anchors the "white hat" way.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I haven't read everything everyone has said in full, especially the on page stuff which of course is super important, but I just wanted to stick to one point - the number of links from outside sites that one page has is not the only thing you should be looking at as it's not the factor that determines the Page Rank of that page.

Yeah sure Google doesn't publicly share PR data anymore but it's baked into the algorithm - they went as far as to recently confirm that things like 'domain authority' don't exist at Google they use Page Rank style data still.

Now of course you're saying - but sites with higher DA or DR do correlate with ranking higher. And links to a page is a correlating factor in studies etc etc.

True because both are independent ways of increasing the Page Rank of pages on your site. If you site has thousands of links all over the place and is interlinked a bunch, then a page, one page removed from the homepage, often has a PR either equal to or maybe one point lower than the homepage because of the power of internal links to that page being X% less than the homepage but still substantial due to the power of those individual pages etc.

We used to be able to see this easily all the time as we clicked through a site with the toolbar turned on.

So some of the pages you see with not many links beating you are on sites which have a higher Page Rank for pages throughout the site, not just that page, and the difference in links you have to the page vs them isn't sufficient to overtake that advantage by itself (assuming all other things are equal).

Just because there isn't a PR toolbar anymore doesn't mean we can just forget how Google works. DA, DR etc are just made up numbers by tool providers that reflect the 'overall authority' of a site and give a clue how high a well linked to (internally and externally) page on that site might have its Page Rank but that's all it is - a clue. It's not suddenly how Google works or whatever.

 

[Samwise89]

@Ryuzaki, we were right. I got two links with exact match anchor texts and popped back to the middle to bottom of page 1. Maybe a couple more will seal the deal. I'm hesitant to go too hard with it but YOLO. This page has tons of links, it should be fine.