Hi. My site is 5 months old and is PR3. I have 10,000 backlinks and receive 25000 hits daily where 70 percent of the traffic is from google. This "new" competing site is 2 months old, PR 0, has about 100 backlinks. I was wondering if you guys could give me any advice on how it's possible that this site ranks 30-40 something for a keyword while I rank 80 something for it. I do have duplicate meta tags because wordpress creates an identical page for pages that have comments, but this competing site has the same problem. I use meta tags (not too effectively) but so doesn't this site but I make use of heading tags. I also use my keyword in the title of every post I've made. Thanks for any advice you can give
Can't say for sure without the URLs for your page and their page as well as the keyword phrase you're talking about.
Without knowing the URL if I had to guess... I would bet they have more inbound links from relevant sites with keywords in the hyperlink text relevant to the search phrase. What I mean is that with Google at least, how a URL ranks for a particular keyword has less to do with the content of the page, and more to do with its inbound links. For example, I can make a page about "Turtles" rank well for the keyword phrase "Auto Loans" simply by getting 100s or 1000s of pages on auto related sites to link to the turtle page mostly with link text of "Auto Loans" but also scattering in some varied but related link text like "Auto", "Loans", "Auto Loan", "Automobile Loans", and "Car Loans". The "Turtles" page doesn't have to mention the term "Auto" or "Loans" on it anywhere and yet it will rank. Want to have fun? Build links pointing to an escort service with your ex-gf or bf's telephone number as the link text... It's VERY easy to get an escort page to rank on page 1 when someone searches for a person's phone number. Takes very few links since a 10 digit phone number is such a unique piece of text and so few pages on the web will have that person's number on it... But I was kidding... Don't do that... Never know when you might want to take them back!
hey guys. I do in fact have much better backlinks than him and even if he does have more relevant backlinks than me, considering that I have PR3 and 100 times more backlinks than him, I have "much" more linkjuice than him. My site has also been linked on large sites such as ITWire, compucentre, and I think cnet.
PR is not at all related to Serps and traffics, may be google liked your competitor's content. Sometime the rank new websites much more higher than they deserve, for their quality content.
Cruzlunatic I am sorry but you are wrong if you are talking about Google... As I tried to explain above, the # of inbound links to your page and the PR of the pages that link to your page only affects the Page Rank of your page and has a miniscule affect on your rankings for a particular keyword phrase. Your page's PR is only 1 of 200+ ranking factors that Google is looking at when they decide where you rank for the search phrase... so even if all 200+ ranking factors were equally weighted PR would only have a 0.5% affect on your overall ranking. But at Google at least, PR is weighted very low in comparison to things like the relevance of the pages linking to you and more importanly, the link text used to link to you. So my page can easily have 100th the # of inbound links as your page and my links can all be from PR0 sites while all of your links are from PR3 sites, and I can still outrank your page if the link text used to link to my page is more relevant to or more closely matches the search phrase than the link text used to link to your page and if the pages that link to me are also about the same or related topic as my page. How you rank for a particular search phrase has very little to do w/ the PR of your inbound links... That is why everyone will tell you, don't focus on PR when looking for links if you want to rank at Google. Focus on finding relevant sites to link to you and focus on getting them to use link text containing the keywords/keyword phrases you want to rank for. PR is far too overrated. Now, you may outrank him at other engines like Yahoo! just because you have more links and from higher PR sites... but that does not hold true at Google... Google is all about the relevance/quality of links... Relevance of links over quantity of links.
thanks for the advice. I have been linked to by PR3/4, PR5, and even PR6 sites. I guess my competing site has much stronger backlinks than I do. Could it be anything to do with heading tags and stuff? If you need to see, my website is in my signature the competing site is www.windows7fans.com
in the other persons blog they use H1 tags for post titles on the index page, and have fewer links off the main index. have a look at both in google txt cache. theirs. http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:http://www.windows7fans.com/&hl=en&strip=1 yours http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:http://windows7center.com/&hl=en&strip=1
What keyword is the site outranking you on? Having keywords inside of the domain can be a big advantage.
could be: title tag. keyword density. outbound links from page. anchor text of links. additional relevant content on your blog. internal linking, and "authority hub" linking.
The site proably has higher quality incoming links. For example if you google how to make money online - the first site has 0 PR but it has great incoming links