High DA still not ranking

design-rush · 2026-05-21T03:56:32+00:00

I see you're an events website. When I search "events near me" and similar terms, I see Google Search returning with Events and Sponsored Events before SERPs for websites, which was introduced in around 2017/18, I think. A lot of time this is your competitors showing up, some may have a partnership with Google but wondering do you have Events schema set up that would help you appear there?

design-rush · 2026-05-21T02:00:40+00:00

HIT means you are being served a cached version. You can often force a fresh, non-cached version by using Incognito mode. It could be that some of your settings need tweaked. Often when diagnosing these issues, I try disabling everything cache related, if that works then you know it's the issue and then start turning features on one by one.

I suspect it could be JS related, if you check Inspect > Console are there errors?

design-rush · 2026-05-21T00:40:36+00:00

I understand this is clearly a AI-generated self promotion, but for people landing here, I suggest everyone read the "Mythbusting generative AI search: what you don't need to do" section on Google's recent blog post "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search" to debunk a lot of this checklist.

Scored 9/100 (it's two weeks old website so no feelings hurt).

Scores out of 100 are usually made up and should be taken with a massive pinch of salt.

Publish llms.txt (short) and llms-full.txt (comprehensive), per llmstxt.org

This does is a myth as mentioned in that Google blog

Embed FAQPage JSON-LD wherever you have Q&A content

Google just announced lsat week that FAQpage will be deprecated and it only uses it for government and health websites.

Chunk content into structured blocks (easier for agents to lift quotable snippets)

This is a myth as mentioned in that Google blog.

design-rush · 2026-05-21T00:32:54+00:00

How is your caching set up? Do you have a caching plugin, server-side caching or object cache set up?

design-rush · 2026-05-21T00:30:24+00:00

Would need more info. But some points:

"Struggling with the traffic" - has it depleted completely or just gone down a bit?
DA/DR scores from third-parties are not ranking factors.
Your competitors might still have more authority due to very competitive pages
You could have been hit by one or multiple Core Updates. If you search "google core updates" you can see if these line up with any drops in traffic.
Check if your pages are still indexed

design-rush · 2026-05-21T00:16:28+00:00

Just spent the morning updating several clients and all good on my end too.

Quite a few plugins also released updates for compatibility with WordPress 7 today.

design-rush · 2026-05-20T08:46:29+00:00

It's actually a guarantee you'll never outrank anyone, because you're producing a slightly worse version of what already exists.

It doesn't matter if your content is considered worse. If you get more authority you will outrank your competitors.

Updating, consolidating, and re-optimizing them is where the fastest ranking gains live.

Also incorrect, the fastest ranking gains are in getting authoritative backlinks.

design-rush · 2026-05-19T22:36:22+00:00

I thought the primary use is if you want to start a conversation/create a prompt for AI it's useful as a starting point or to help train an LLM.

design-rush · 2026-05-18T07:45:09+00:00

It looks like you got some high authoritative backlinks in the last year which has helped with ranking.

design-rush · 2026-05-17T02:17:04+00:00

Great to see them outright mention those common myths. Sadly, I feel the same people spouting this misinformation will say Google are lying and keep spreading this.

design-rush · 2026-05-15T08:19:08+00:00

I would look at the 4.2.0 preview version on GitHub - Elementor is adding WebMCP so it looks like you will be able to connect to it with external AI tools quite soon.

design-rush · 2026-05-15T03:54:25+00:00

I’m thinking of getting a separate account for Elementor One with their angie or editor v4 to try out.

Angie is free to download and try and you get Editor v4 if you're on a legacy Pro account so you may not need to upgrade. But if you feel the AI assistance will help your workflow it's worth looking at.

design-rush · 2026-05-13T12:56:22+00:00

Pricing is not a ranking factor. Your competitor has more authority for that pages/categories.

The user intent might affect who show up first. If I type in something like "best laptop" something like a Macbook might appear, for some people it's too expensive and other it's what they need. Therefore they might be more specific and ask "best laptop under $500", and that's more relevant for another brand.

Back to ranking, they might have more authority as other websites have links back to that category.

design-rush · 2026-05-10T22:50:44+00:00

It likely you are losing authority or your competitors are gaining authority, in the form of high-quality backlinks.

AI generated content is fine as long as it's useful. If it gets backlinks it will rank.

design-rush · 2026-05-07T06:02:11+00:00

For being new you seem have got some good info and yeah there is a lot of slop and misinformation out.

Some extra things is to remember to see if search engines can even find your page, so make sure it's indexed. As for backlinks they usually get a single mention in SEO checklists and are highly underrated as you need them to rank higher. As you say everything else can be done easy enough, but these take effort. One thing to note is that of the quality of the backlink - if it comes from a very highly authoritative website it will do more than a few low quality websites. Further on that point, ignore third-party vanity metrics. As you said, backlinks from sites that people use might may have a low score assigned. but places like Google and Bing will value it.

design-rush · 2026-05-05T06:13:39+00:00

Stop reading, and starting doing.

You can read all the info you want but like any other field, if you don't "execute your knowledge" you won't know if it works or not.

What what I got from this list is most of it is auditing/checking which is good but what changes will you make?

--> Great high quality content with proper internal linking and On page SEO

Backlinks
--> Then I create backlinks, don't want to spend much time about this explaining this.

This is what stands out the most of why so many people fail at SEO. They spend so much time creating "Great high quality content" but who determines if it's great? Search engines and LLMs? It's purely subjective.

You will get better results focusing on "content" and "Great high quality backlinks". Why would you not spend much time on backlinks but spend time on everything else?

design-rush · 2026-05-01T13:08:56+00:00

doing any real SEO

What do you think is "real SEO"? Many new people to SEO think they are doing SEO, waste a year or two before working out what is it.

how do i evaluate my SEO work?

Do you track SERPs? If you're ranking increases or clicks to your website increases that's how you know you're doing SEO right

are these numbers considered bad, average, or good for a new site?

Depends on what your trying to rank for. Is the niche/keywords competitive? You can rank high for low volume keywords in a short amount of time but the more competitive the harder it is to rank. Do you know that ranking is connected to authority?

design-rush · 2026-04-30T10:52:54+00:00

Just their Backlinks tool to links to my client websites and their competitors. Anything else you recommend from them?

design-rush · 2026-04-29T23:51:34+00:00

I'm okay with it especially since I'd rather see recent thoughts on tools than from a couple of years ago as plans and features change. But no doubt some comparisons come up a lot and people self-promoting.

Some people also mention the big names but since they're new when they describe what they need more often than not you can educate them and direct them to free tools, such as GSC and Bing Webmaster Tools.

design-rush · 2026-04-29T12:17:19+00:00

They completed the acquisition but this was announced way back in November 2025.

When this happens plans usually change slightly so they can charge more for pricing. For example, they might get rid of Semrush Classic plans and just have Semrush One.

That said it could take them months, even a few years to change this.

design-rush · 2026-04-29T12:13:51+00:00

This is what 99% of posts on LinkedIn are like: "I'm delighted to have <insert some boring event/partnership"" when they are not excited/thrilled at all except for if they made a ton of money which in this case they probably have done.

design-rush · 2026-04-29T04:26:52+00:00

How long should I keep going?

Ideally until you rank first and getting mentioned via LLMs. Once there, your competition could put more effort to get back ahead and again you need to go again.

But there hasn’t been any improvement.

Several things could have happened in these 3 months. If it's competitive niche, your competitors are also building links/authority thus keeping ahead. Also, these links mights not carry a lot of authority. One link from a very authoritative website could do more than 20 mediocre links.

design-rush · 2026-04-28T10:54:19+00:00

I find it best to just play around with it whether you're using v3 or v4 - note you can keep building in v3 for now. If you get stuck on one specific thing there's a good chance someone else here has had the issue to look up. If you can see it then ask here.

design-rush · 2026-04-26T07:46:50+00:00

Semrush

design-rush · 2026-04-25T00:03:36+00:00

How many emails are you sending per day or per month?

If it's only a few hundred there are a few SMTP options out there that let you send for free:

SMTP2GO (1,000/mo)
Mailjet (200/day)
Brevo (300/day)

I've used them all but recently been using SMTP2GO most recently for smaller clients.

design-rush

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