Why a company that has good SEO can still not rank

[Rlilly]

In my industry, company ABC invented "widgets". They are a monopoly multi-national company, is the Authority in our industry, have the most traffic, most backlinks by far and plenty from .gov, .edu and major publications and from authority authors, have tons of anchor text related to their main keyword, have the most social signals by far. Have huge resources and content.

They also have a in-house web and SEO team

Yet for "widgets", they are not no 1, they have been around position 4 and 5 for an internal page for a year or so now. There homepage is way back in the SERPS..

[goodroi]

If an internal page is outranking the homepage that is buried deep in the serps, I would look to see if there are any potential penalty issues. It is possible that having the "the most backlinks by far" might have triggered a link penalty. Even if you have several .gov or .edu links, there might be some poisonous links as well that will sink a good website.

Another possible reason they are having trouble is that spending alot of money and effort in the wrong direction will not help you rank. I still come across companies that spend thousands of dollars on meta keywords optimization which stopped helping Google rankings years ago. Big companies with big budgets aren't perfect and sometimes they make big mistakes.

[scooterdude]

It could as simple as that Google likes sites no 1 to 3 more than the "originating" site

So, wikipedia, ehow, amazon, youtube, have been known to out rank the mightiest of sites, in google SERPs, for no discernible reason :)

[backdraft7]

So, wikipedia, ehow, amazon, youtube, have been known to out rank the mightiest of sites, in google SERPs, for no discernible reason :)

are these sites not among the mightiest of sites on the web?

[outland88]

Is this a commerce site? If it is that may be the simple answer. Since I do a lot of research I have to divert to very deep pages now to find the index pages of many commerce sites.

[Rlilly]

@outland88 Yes, it has shopping on the site at suggested retail prices. But since it is a major brand in its field, folks usually buy their products through many other channels.

[scooterdude]

And the sites out ranking this brand, are they themselves brand shopping out lets, one man an his dog SEO's(respect to these guys, some do remarkably well, 'doffs imaginary hat politely'), free encyclopaedia , really popular mfa's

[Rlilly]

@scooterdude yes one of the sites is a huge brand name shopping outlet. The other sites are also large business.

[bsterz]

I have seen large brand sites get outranked by little guys quite often. I have often thought that this may happen, because the smaller sites do not have amount of "brand restrictions" or have to have the look of a major brand online. Due to this they may do more in terms of SEO or simply have less to optimize. For example many of the large brand sites I see often have homepages with little to no info and are very corporate looking. While a smaller site may start the selling process/widget listings right on the homepage. Just a thought.

[Dymero]

I would make sure they're not doing anything in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines. Just because they have an in-house SEO team doesn't mean they're not keyword stuffing or buying links or something.

[Rlilly]

@dymero, I see no link buying and I do not believe they are doing anything which would violate Google's guidelines.

[canuckseo]

Could also just be a technical issue - maybe they have something as simple (and stupid) as noindex on the homepage? Or could be crawler issues - not able to crawl the site properly. Personally that's where it'd start - look at the technical side first as in my experience ranking issues start there. Doesn't matter how well optimized you are or how many links you have - technical issues will kill your rankings

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

This reminds me of when BMW didn't show up in serps because they employed an SEO who was up to naughty things. It's very possible that the site has some sort of penalty.

CanuckSEO - technical issues can indeed hurt your rankings but fixing those issues generally sets a site back on course fairly quickly even if some pages may take years to get above water again.

If they have some of the best incoming links around but also 100x the number of shoddy links when compared to a similar site the good links may not be strong enough to hold? Only Google knows.

[scooterdude]

Guys

The company the OP refers to is not suffering !

According to OP, They're merely number 4/5 rather than numero uno for their own invention :) :)

Unless the widget query includes a brand and in not just generic like say "vacuum cleaner", they are always going to be out ranked by the top most tier of websites per Googles human/digital ranking system

[backdraft7]

I always prefer a few spots under #1. The 2-5 positions (above the fold) seem to produce better for us. The #1 position get's lost especially when it's followed by images. Bottom line, enjoy any position above the fold.

[moxie]

Bottom line, enjoy any position above the fold.

Wise words; some people have a tendency to get crazy over wanting the first spot, which in turn also makes them the main target.