I run a website http://www.haloreachbeta.com. One of my competitors runs the site haloreachinfo.com. We both target the keyword "Halo Reach" as our main keyword. He generally hovers around the 3rd spot on google for that keyword, whereas I generally hover around the 9th spot, and I can't figure out why. He has a lot more backlinks than me (50k vs. 8k), which is all I can figure. However, the vast majority of his links are just reciprocal trades (which I'm told google punishes for) and wordpress blog comments (which are nofollow). I have my fair share of that as well, but I've also got a lot of good clean links from interviews I've done for the site, article marketing, dofollow video blogs, etc. I've always been told that good content will win out, and on that front I should be killing him here. He's an internet marketer who made the site to make a quick buck, whereas I'm a Halo fanatic that made the site because I love the game, and it shows in our content. His posts are typically quick 2-3 sentence blurbs whereas mine are entire multi-page writeups with screenshots and everything. Further, I put up a lot more new stories and articles whereas he just sticks to a post or two a week. The forums and comment sections on my site are much more active as well. The other difference in our sites is that his is wordpress and mine is drupal, and I've heard wordpress is ideal for SEO, but really enough to put him that far ahead of me on google given how much better and more frequent my content is?
I was not aware that Google punishes for reciprical links. If sites are relevant, they are good. May not carry same weight as before.
From my computer, you are ranking 8th and your competitor ranking 9th. nyone seeing the same result ? where are you from ?
In my computer u rank higher than the info one you are at 8 th position and he is at 9 th position Google has more than 64 data centres as i know ..so it differs from place to place .. leave it least and go on with your link building
Does Market Samurai use the same location, because it tells me he is 3rd vs my 9th as well, and he's getting a lot more traffic on that Halo Reach search term. I think it's in the US that I'm ranking 9th vs. his 3rd, which still begs the question as to why I'm ranking so much lower there, since that's where my content is coming from and is aimed to.
Supposedly Google punishes reciprocal links and paid links, but I have never really seen it happen to be honest. All my sites have benefited from these backlinks and clearly they help given there are entire boards devoted to them in DP. I would focus on link building if I were you, given that he has more backlinks. Get backlinks from high pr, niche sites.
As far him outranking you with a lesser site, and crappier links - you have to put what you know about SEO on the background, and only trust your experience. A lot of SEO advice out there is BS, and it comes down only to your experience, and you will learn that it is a lot different what is generally accepted as good SEO. From my experience, the quality bar goes down considerably, as you start ranking with some links which before you considered lesser quality.