How did these competing websites get a much higher Page Rank???

[birdfood]

Being working on improving the position of one of my key words for one of my sites and comparing my position to two of my competitors. Lately my site is on page two (now on page 3, google dance) and two competitors are both on page one.

Did a bit of digging to see what they were doing and this is what I came up with

PR
me PR 2 (down from 4 ages ago)
comp1 PR 4
Comp2 PR4

sites linking in (Alexa)
me 184
comp1 28
comp2 13

Site age
me 3 years
comp1 2.5 years
comp2 6.5 years

I've checked their inbound links and can't see that they have much better quality links.

Basically I can't work out what they are doing that makes them rank much better and be on page one.

I'm stumped on this so I'd really appreciate some ideas/suggestions/insights etc

[bfairo]

They are probably using some blackhat techniques like the alexabooster or something. I've known of people to drop millions in a day.

[Lutz80]

It's weird I had similar issues with a few sites of mine, I just kept plugging away, and what I came up with is that for some reason google saw the content on the competition site as better. So what I did was update with some great new content,and added some videos to my sites,also went and added a few more features and in a few short weeks I jumped back and knocked the competition out. In my personal experience after awhile I always go back and see what it is I can do to improve my sites as far as in the search engines eyes, as well as making the customer experience more enjoyable. Always look to improve your site, and I try to keep visitors interactive on sites that allow that. Have them submit videos, stories, polls, questionares and on. It seems to keep them coming back dropping my links all over the place, and improving my pr and rankings. Hope this helps you out somehwhat. Good luck to you

[dburk]

Hi birdfood,

There is probably a dozen reasons those other pages are outranking yours. It would be hard to say based on the little bit of information you provided.

It must be painfully obvious to you that Google doesn't rank pages based on PR, domain age or number of links. The info you provided demonstrates this fact.

So what does Google base their rankings on?

Relevance is the key factor. Some pages are more relevant than others so they will rank higher. When you figure out what elements influence page relevance then you will be on the right track.

Naturally, things like your target keyword included in the URL, page title, anchor text of inbound and outbound links, image alt text attributes and headings tags, to name a few.

Backlinks are important when you are targeting a competitive keyword, but it's not just the number of backlinks. Some backlinks are worth a lot more than others. Without getting into the details, lets just say that backlinks from highly relevant pages that get a lot of targeted traffic usually work the best. If that is how you define "quality" in your backlinks, then you are on the right track.

If the page you are trying to rank is the one in your signature, you could benefit by correcting the canonical issue.

[jazbo]

I just did a search on Google.com and you are number two for "green lasers". So what search terms are you actually referring to?

[webtrix]

Originally Posted by birdfood

sites linking in (Alexa)
me 184
comp1 28
comp2 13

How old are those links you've created? A week, a month? More?

[Steve Crooks]

First of all, that's a nice example of a good ecommerce site. Well structured, good on page SEO. I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about it. You are number two in Google USA with a double listing for the keyword "green lasers" and number 11 for the keyword "lasers"

I see that the majority of inbound links have the anchor text "dragon lasers" in it which accounts for the high ranking for the keyword "lasers". Also, I see a large proportion have the phrase "green lasers" in the anchor text.

Without knowing which keyword phrases you are exactly targeting it is impossible to give any advice as to what you need to do to improve rankings. However, some basic things that I did notice were you haven't got a listing in DMOZ or Yahoo directories and I couldn't see any H1 tags with your main keywords either. These are small changes that can improve ranking slightly.

Other than that, choose the keywords you want number 1 spot for and get as many variations of those keywords as anchor text from good external sites pointing to well SEO'd pages on your site. Also, look at your internal linking structure and ensure that your anchor text has the exact keyword phrase pointing to the relevant page. For internal links you don't have to vary the anchor text either.

Originally Posted by birdfood

Being working on improving the position of one of my key words for one of my sites and comparing my position to two of my competitors. Lately my site is on page two (now on page 3, google dance) and two competitors are both on page one.

Did a bit of digging to see what they were doing and this is what I came up with

PR
me PR 2 (down from 4 ages ago)
comp1 PR 4
Comp2 PR4

sites linking in (Alexa)
me 184
comp1 28
comp2 13

Site age
me 3 years
comp1 2.5 years
comp2 6.5 years

I've checked their inbound links and can't see that they have much better quality links.

Basically I can't work out what they are doing that makes them rank much better and be on page one.

I'm stumped on this so I'd really appreciate some ideas/suggestions/insights etc

[birdfood]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi birdfood,
If the page you are trying to rank is the one in your signature, you could benefit by correcting the canonical issue.

Hi Dburk, thank you for your insightful reply. I've checked and that site (the one in my sig) does have a canonical issue. Very good to know.

Originally Posted by jazbo

I just did a search on Google.com and you are number two for "green lasers". So what search terms are you actually referring to?

Hi Jazbo, the key word in this case is "laser pointer"

Originally Posted by webtrix

How old are those links you've created? A week, a month? More?

Hi webtrix, from my understanding, the age of those links varies from several months to several years

Originally Posted by Steve Crooks

Without knowing which keyword phrases you are exactly targeting it is impossible to give any advice as to what you need to do to improve rankings. However, some basic things that I did notice were you haven't got a listing in DMOZ or Yahoo directories and I couldn't see any H1 tags with your main keywords either. These are small changes that can improve ranking slightly.

Other than that, choose the keywords you want number 1 spot for and get as many variations of those keywords as anchor text from good external sites pointing to well SEO'd pages on your site. Also, look at your internal linking structure and ensure that your anchor text has the exact keyword phrase pointing to the relevant page. For internal links you don't have to vary the anchor text either.

Hi Steve, thank you for some very good points. In this case the key word I'm trying to rank this site for is "laser pointer"