Impossible Google ranking with white hat techniques

Hello friends,

I'm trying to rank my page for a specific keyword(s). I'm using only white hat techniques. No BlackHat Tricks.



1. My domain name is 10 years old.
2. I never had google penalties. During all the years I'm providing the same service.
3. I have only quality manually created backlinks from websites in the same niche.
4. The page passes the "google chrome lighthouse" SEO test with a result 90/100.
5. The link structure is perfect.
6. The page which I'm trying to rank is cornerstone page with many internal links and without external links from it to any other webpages.
7. I have well-structured xml sitemap. No errors inside Google Webmaster console.
8. The content of the page is unique - 2214 words without keyword stuffing.
9. The page has https://schema.org "ld+json" structured data. Google tets show that "Page is eligible for rich results".
10. All tests with 3rd party tools like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, Yoast, etc show perfect results. Results much better than competitors. Unfortunately, I can not rank in Google Top-10 results.

In the same time pages on google, top-10 for this keyword(s) are nothing special compared to my pages - newer domains, smaller amount of content, slower servers, keyword stuffing, smaller amount of links, etc.

See attached screenshots.

My Page vs Competitor's page:




Keyword difficulty:



Referring domains to my page:



My page is eligible for Google rich results:



Do you have any ideas on how that possible?

Definitely have something wrong.

Are you looking at referring domains to the page or to the site? In general it is more revealing to look at the site level. But RD in itself means nothing.

From what I see your competitor has much more traffic, so why? Does he have more pages? More referrring domains overall? Of course he must have more than 6 referring domains? And also how about hidden referring domains? Referring domains does not mean much as I can get 66 RD for $7 at fiverr.

One would need to look under the hood to better see what is going on.

We can't judge without deeper analysis, but I am facing exactly same situation. The downside I was 1st for the keywords and dominating the niche then started to go down at the beginning of this year.

Now, I am 7 and my top competitors looks like the metrics you shared, they rank with more than one page and even twitter beat me! And I have spent thousands of $$ on my bl's and they are from top we sites with authority +70 and even +80 who have top 100 country rank!!

safeSEOboost said:

Are you looking at referring domains to the page or to the site? In general it is more revealing to look at the site level. But RD in itself means nothing.

From what I see your competitor has much more traffic, so why? Does he have more pages? More referrring domains overall? Of course he must have more than 6 referring domains? And also how about hidden referring domains? Referring domains does not mean much as I can get 66 RD for $7 at fiverr.

One would need to look under the hood to better see what is going on.

Click to expand...

Exciting point of view. The organic traffic is something which I suspected too. This competitor currently is on 3rd position inside SERP according to Ahrefs statistics. Based on Chitika statistics the web pages on 3rd position inside SERP receive 11.4% of traffic. The whole amount of organic searched for "keyword" are 2300 per month globally. 10% (~600 clicks) goes to the paid search results and ~1700 clicks are separated between the top 10 Google results. Based on these facts I can conclude that ~200 visitors (1700*11.4%) of the competitor come from search engines. The other ~90 visitors come from different sources. My opinion based on the statistics of visitors of my page is that most of these 90 visitors are direct page visits from existing clients or traffic from affiliates, etc. No matter from where come these 90 visitors. It's clearly visible that most of the traffic comes from Google Search.

It seems I'm into the enchanted circle. Because Google protects existing pages inside Top-10. These pages receive a lot of traffic from google. On the other hand, it seems that one of the most important ranking factors is organic traffic to the page. In case my theory is right to rank a page in the top 10, it needs more organic traffic than the existing page in the same position.

In that case, the interesting question is "how google measure the organic traffic". What kind of traffic to the page will be considered organic?

KHer0 said:

We can't judge without deeper analysis, but I am facing exactly same situation. The downside I was 1st for the keywords and dominating the niche then started to go down at the beginning of this year.

Now, I am 7 and my top competitors looks like the metrics you shared, they rank with more than one page and even twitter beat me! And I have spent thousands of $$ on my bl's and they are from top we sites with authority +70 and even +80 who have top 100 country rank!!
!

Click to expand...

The same story with me. The same thing happened to me. The competitors with badly designed pages, bad quality of texts, small amounts of low-quality links start to beat me. When I saw the problem I started measures to prevent it - renewed the content, collected additional quality links, improved server speed, etc. So far almost a year of work, thousands of dollars spent and zero results.

Just buy some niche edits or premium pbns and you’ll out rank him after all you have done now do these and suddenly your traffic shall shoot up.

Mr Positive said:

Just buy some niche edits or premium pbns and you’ll out rank him after all you have done now do these and suddenly your traffic shall shoot up.

Click to expand...

OP is asking about white hat methods here.

Why is it that every time I see someone ask for help - half the answers are “buy some PBNs”...

OP, your situation is not uncommon - here are a few thing I want to point out. Ahrefs keyword difficulty metric is whack and on smaller volume keywords (<10K) you should take it with a spoonful of salt. You’re looking at the competitor’s page referring links and domains, but his domain authority is far ahead of yours as it seems. Investigate his anchors as well, in certain niches and for certain keywords more aggressive profiles can pay off very well.

It’s not the quantity of links that matters, but the quality, and his profile has more power behind it from “quality” (st least mechanical) links on average hence the DA gap.

Now DA isn’t a breadmaker metric. One thing that google does is it matches your user experience statistics against the averages in each bucket within P1. You will occasionally see your site move up for a while on P1 and then drop down and then dance around for a bit, this happens because google is measuring your user stats against their recorded averages. The unfortunate part is that this system is a little wonky at times and you may need to approach it a few times before getting it right.

Also, make sure you’re not overoptimized. I’ve had sites that had twice the DA, better content, more citations and everything in place but stuck on Page 2 - why you ask? Well in the end it was a combination of being a “black sheep” (too different from the top 3) and having weird topical context from the links built (run majestic on the top 3 and see how you stack up topic wise).

nightflower said:

OP, your situation is not uncommon - here are a few things I want to point out. Ahrefs keyword difficulty metric is whack and on smaller volume keywords (<10K) you should take it with a spoonful of salt. You’re looking at the competitor’s page referring links and domains, but his domain authority is far ahead of yours as it seems. Investigate his anchors as well, in certain niches and for certain keywords more aggressive profiles can pay off very well.

Click to expand...

What's mean "more aggressive profiles"?

Currently, I have anchors with 42 phases.

- 7-8 anchor phases with 8-9 links per phase. These are the anchors with the desired keyword and its variations. They are created after manual negotiations with website owners in the same niche.

- 34-35 anchor phases with 1-2 link(s) per phase. These are organic created links from forums, social networks, review sites, etc. The anchor texts are something like "Here", "Click here", "Buy Keyword", "Try this vendor" etc.

The competitor has only 4 phrases which are:



Is that aggressive profile?

nightflower said:

It’s not the quantity of links that matters, but the quality, and his profile has more power behind it from “quality” (st least mechanical) links on average hence the DA gap.

Click to expand...

Yes, I know that, but I have more “quality” links than competitors.

Here are my page backlinks:



34 Referring Domains with Topical Trust Flow between 4 and 50. Most of the domains are with TF 24-25. All domains are from the same niche "Computers / Internet / *"

Here you are the competitor's page backlinks:



Nothing extraordinary or powerful.

nightflower said:

Now DA isn’t a breadmaker metric. One thing that google does is it matches your user experience statistics against the averages in each bucket within P1. You will occasionally see your site move up for a while on P1 and then drop down and then dance around for a bit, this happens because google is measuring your user stats against their recorded averages. The unfortunate part is that this system is a little wonky at times and you may need to approach it a few times before getting it right.

Click to expand...

interesting! Does it mean that at the time of this Google test if somebody stays more on my page than the average time, my page will be ranked better?

Does it mean that if I'm unlucky Google can measure the time of some stupid user who leaves the page faster than average visitor? So the page will be ranked lower only due to stupid user?

Do you have suggestions about how Google measures this time? Maybe use the date from Google Analytics of my page?

nightflower said:

Also, make sure you’re not overoptimized. I’ve had sites that had twice the DA, better content, more citations and everything in place but stuck on Page 2 - why you ask? Well in the end it was a combination of being a “black sheep” (too different from the top 3) and having weird topical context from the links built (run majestic on the top 3 and see how you stack up topic wise).

Click to expand...

Here is Majestic compensation of my page vs pages on P1, P3, P4 and P10 of SEPR.



Is that the right majestic tool?

I'm seeing that the P1, P3 and P4 pages have links from "From Homepages". I fenced this in red in the photo. Are these PBN links?

Am I the black sheep?



Thanks!