Rankings confusion...please help!

Maybe they have better or more relevant backlinks. Or maybe their backlinks are really backlinked.

HI Shaun,

First off this should probably be in the SEO section so don't be surprised if it get moved.

But to respond to your OP.

It has been some time now since the number of backlinks was the deciding factor in rankings. Of course they are still very important but all the backlinks in the world will not rank you if you fall foul of any of the "penalties".

i.e. a bad backlink profile (anchor text, low quality links, links from bad neighborhoods) or low quality content, thin affiliate sites, over optimized on-site SEO, too many ads etc.

So the first thing you need to do is check you have not fallen foul of any penalties that may leave you lost in the rankings.

Your site on page 3 probably is not penalized or would be lower down the rankings but if one is nowhere to be seen that may well be in trouble.

All backlinks are not made equal. The PR of the link, how many links are on the page it comes from, the diversity of domains and maybe even the content of the site it comes from may affect the ranking power of a link.

100 low quality links will be easily outranked by half a dozen good quality links.

For a better measure of "rankability" look at SEOmoz Page Authority in Open Site Explorer. That takes into account not just the amount of links but the quality and domain diversity.

Also Search Rankings is not all about Page Rank! The content of your site is now crucially important. Relevant, useful, unique and readable content

Check for link quality, link relevance, natural link distribution social signals and on-page relevance.

I found it easy to understand this conundrum by replacing the word "links" with "website".

"Maybe they have better or more relevant WEBSITE."