Hi everybody. I have recently started a project about very specific cities as travel destinations. Not a country, just cities. Right now i have one web site with information and a related forum. I have searched the competion and i found out that most of related websites are complete outdated junk, very bad designed and visually unpleasant. BUT they rank #1 in google (and other se), they have tones of incoming links, and they are very old (some 10 or 15 years). So the question is, if i can beat them with fresh information, good design, some SEO and dedication to the project. Can i beat the "age" and the links that they have collected over the years ? I would like to know your opinion about whole this... Thanks.
Without more information i would say you should quickly rank in the top ten if your sites information and content is any good. But it may take a while longer to get to the top spots. Old domains with many backlinks are quite hard to conquer.
Some of the competition web sites are very cleverly backlinked. 2500 back links is not easy to do. I can't do that myself ! But their information is very old (some 2003 catalogs on their home page for example) are showing clearly that they made those web sites for Adsense (or other service) in mind. You don't get ANY real information from them. BUT if you write the name of the city in google, you see them 1st or 2nd. And their PR usually at 5. Thanks for your help !