Why can't i outrank a low quality article?

First of all stop focusing on shitty metrics which Google doesn’t use to rank your website.

How do you determine good content? If you have +2500 words content and the competitor only has +1000 words it does not mean nothing.

Your competitor might use better keyword optimization and more accurate, not bloated content. Also like others said, they likely have a hidden pbn.

However if you feel that you did everything perfect and should overra nk your competitor, let the content sit for a while and do not “over optimize”.

cooxer said:

First of all stop focusing on shitty metrics which Google doesn’t use to rank your website.

How do you determine good content? If you have +2500 words content and the competitor only has +1000 words it does not mean nothing.

Your competitor might use better keyword optimization and more accurate, not bloated content. Also like others said, they likely have a hidden pbn.

However if you feel that you did everything perfect and should overra nk your competitor, let the content sit for a while and do not “over optimize”.

Click to expand...

I judged the quality of the content not by the number of words, but like i said by the value provided through the content.

Thank you for your advice, i will follow it just like other suggested, and won't do anything to sabotage the articles. I'll forget about it for 2 months and see how this plays out afterwards!

200 said:

But the link would still show up as a backlink to the site- using tools like ahref or similar - correct?
Otherwise what is the point.
(do not know so much about PBNs)

Click to expand...

The point is that Google can see that you got that backlink. Any other crawler for example Ahrefs can be blocked and it won't be able to crawl the PBN site and store any info.

Add Some Qual Backlinks

As a woke whitehatter* who does not build backlinks whilst outranking niche authorities with 60+ DA with my 10+ DA, what you describe is like a low hanging fruit in all honesty.

Two possibilities:
1) your on-page SEO is not good enough
2) your site and/or post is too new

In the case of nr. 1:
In case you've created one single post on a high/low search volume keyword then that's not good enough. May I suggest looking at this one keyword as a cherry stuck underneath a plastic cake cover, implying here that the cake itself is missing entirely. Looking at the bigger picture now, the more ground you cover the more ground is covered. One post covers just a tiny bit of it. If you're not sure what I mean by that (having explained it from 2 angles now metaphorically-analogically), then in my opinion this is something you should figure out and work on to get a bit more of an edge over your competitors. When you said you "deleted" some posts, this might have been the exact opposite of what I just suggested unless these posts were totally irrelevant to the rest of the content on the site.

In case of nr. 2:
In case you've been seeing your post go up ever so slowly, may I suggest just giving it time to rank and adjusting your expectations accordingly. Maybe you've done everything right already. It takes Google time to test your post against other posts based on user experience. Building random backlinks with tracks left behind can bring you down in the long run and that'd be no fun. Been reading these horror stories of ppl getting hit big or small with Google updates while mines keep going up regardless... (note to self: fuck backlinks)


This all is assuming that that one post of yours is already an absolute SEO-optimized MONSTER (likely isn't when it's not ranking 1st while competitor's content is low-effort at best). I bet you tried to copy your competitors rather than going off of the actual search intent trying your hardest to provide value which frankly makes you deserve the position you ended up with. Just another parrot bringing nothing new to the table.

For my defense, I could be wrong in everything I say because I'm assuming (not to offend, but to try and get to the bottom of it) you might be strapped in cognitive bias, in other words overestimating your stuff.

Firstly stop using DA as "quality" metric. It isn't. Period.

Now If i was in your place, I would check the following things (assuming you have already checked the backlinks)

1. Size of your website ranking on #2
2. Internal Linking Structure of page ranking on #2
3. OnPage of page ranking on #2
4. Backlinks to website ranking on #2 (not page but website)
5. Age of website ranking on #2

Are you Analyze your competitors?

There is no guarantee that you gonna rank for anything since there are possibly thousands of factors involved in the algorithm (google being dumb af also helps).

Simply stating that "your article is better" or that "you have more backlinks" means exactly nothing. So, yeah... it is what it is.

Make more blog posts and try to spread your eggs in different baskets so you can avoid this common frustration of not ranking properly (every seo has to deal with this shit).

kurosaki4d said:

Hello,

I had this article that was in 6th position two days ago, of all the articles that are on the first page, mine has the most valuable content, my website speed is the best among them, longer quality content.

Two days ago, I worked even more on my content, updated it added more values to it, it outranked three more competitors, and my article now is at 3rd position.

The article in the first position is a high DA with 730 words with dozens of good backlinks. Since my article has one backlink, I don't think I can't outrank it for the time being.

However, the article in 2nd position has 0 backlinks and has an article that it's 1000 words long.

My article has 2600 words, with 1 backlink and much better content, I'm not praising I'm just stating the facts.

One particular note on that 2nd position competing article is that it has been written in 2017 and their DA is much lower than mine.

Why i can't understand, is WHY the hell can't I outrank that 2nd position article considering the shitty stats it has?


Anybody has an idea why? I'd appreciate getting your expert's opinion.


Thank you very much for your time

Click to expand...

I snagged a 1000 volume kw with a DA of zero and no backlinks. I still don’t know how site is 6 months old. Article 3 months old.

Google is not perfect..Sometimes it makes mistakes...

Are you sure your page has better UX than your competitor's? When it comes to page 1, especially the top 3, the metrics matter. It's not always on-page SEO, backlinks, relevancy... All the things others have listed are worth checking out, but not always them but your site's metrics. Maybe the competitor's page has more images/videos, has longer user retention, lower bounce rate, and a higher number of page users click? Try to find ways to improve those metrics.

Might be a hidden PBN. Keep linking meanwhile.

Do a quick site search for your competitors domain + the keyword you are going after. Have a look at what other pages are associated with that term and if those pages are linking back to the ranking page. Could just be that they have a bunch of topical authority.

These things happen; sometimes by accident (an algorithm quirk or exploit), other times due to site owners employing some iffy methods. As the others have suggested, a good PBN is most likely at work here. There’s not much that you can do about it other than getting more quality backlinks and hoping for the best. Perhaps the next Google update won’t favor whatever it is that they are doing. Regardless, you can’t fight what you can’t see, so just keep rolling.

Build quality backlinks as your competitor has links which are blocked from the tools like ahrefs,moz etc

Hidden PBN use

@bobrock2053
Nicely thought! I did a search for the internal backlinks for that page, but they weren't any except for a category page which has 0 traffic, so this confirms that it's not internal linking. But this was important for me to keep in mind and that got me thinking about my internal linking so i did some optimization of my own. Thanks

@Thulf
You bring some very good points, words of wisdom right there.

The page has enough search volume. But i seem to be barely getting any traffic. Perhaps the two first articles are getting most of it.

As for the content, i analyzed the search intent before writing it, i might have used as inspiration some of the structure and questions to answer, i just added more questions and answers related to it to make it as detailed and cover as most ground as possible. But like @nst1m suggested, maybe this might affect the user experience. So i guess will have to wait and see.

With that said, you bring a fair point about "cognitive bias", when i read my comments again i feel that i'm emotional, and when we are we tend to think and look at things differently and in a wrong way in terms of business decisions. So thank you for pointing that out.

As the other suggested i'll wait it out, i'll check on it in less than two months from now.

I guess you could try indexing the page on the search console and refreshing your content based on the organic keyword recommendations. That should get your site on top.

Or yes, backlinks.