HEEELP! Why are WEAKER Sites Outranking me?

I am in a small niche.

All the terms have a rank less than 100,000 when in quotation marks.

I used to be #1 for almost all terms, but now I am losing my rankings to sites that have FAR less inbound links than I have.

I've used articles, social bookmarking, forum posting, directory submissions, etc.

To protect my niche, I am going to change my niche to CAT FOOD.

But here is the info:


_______________Competition_____________Rank_________Anchors
Cats food .............84,000...........................9................... 59
Cats Foods............53,200...........................7....................19
Cat Food...............66,000..........................3....................34
Good Cat Food........6,000...........................3....................11
Good Cats Food.......8,000...........................6.....................9
Good Cats Foods.....12,000..........................3.....................2


NOW THIS IS MY COMPETITION, a site I am ranking slightly above (on some terms) and slightly behind (on others).

______________________________________Rank_________Anchors
Cats Food..................................................8.....................0
Cats Foods................................................7.....................0
Cat Food...................................................7.....................0
Good Cat Foods...........................NO TOP TEN......................0
Good Cats Food...........................NO TEP TEN.....................2
Good Cats Foods.........................................4...................0


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Now, sorry its confusing with my "Cat Food" replacement.

But -- how is this possible? Their domain is older.. but in this tiny niche shouldn't it be easy to dominate?

I've lost some of my rankings after some link building work. Is this the reason why? Or is this such a small niche that this does not matter?

 

difficult to say without seeing the 2 sites involved.

numbers of links don't really come into it though, its the quality, and yes the niche should be easily taken, unless your competitor is just better than you?

it could be all sorts of things at play, is the ranking loss very recent?

 

Still not enough information. Install "SEO For Firefox" plugin and give us some readouts from that. SEO just isn't backlinks and age- it's a lot of things. Real-world examples would help too. No use in hiding your niche.

 

I would guess the websites above you look more natural than yours. They aren't trying to game the system to rank for these keywords and whatever you are doing is looking unnatural in the eyes of Google.

The biggest mistake webmaster make are not getting enough variations in their anchor text. Think about this... if you get 100 natural links you probably would get 60-80 different anchor text used. Most webmaster pound away with just a small handful and this doesn't look natural.

Good Luck!

 

I've created some variety in my anchor text .. but yes, I should've created more.


I installed SEO for firefox.

I have over 4000 inbound yahoo links.

Some of the top sites have 1000-3000

Quite frankly I dont think my competitors are even DOING seo.

 

Good point. But what does "natural" look like? It's too hard to tell. Getting a couple of thousand links with the same keyword is actually common if you get an article on the frontpage of Digg.

 

This might be an easier solution than you think... from what it sounds like it has nothing to do with links..your competitions on page SEO just sounds better than yours for those specific keywords. I'm sure if you compare both on page seo his is more optimized for those "keywords".

many times long tail keywords with less competition under 100,000 it's easy to dominate top 10 of google serps if your on page optimization is the better of the top 10.


Hope this helps cheers!

 

Howz your on-page SEO? It's also possible that they have some very natural strong backlinks. Just the numbers aren't good enough. You need to see PR and quality of their backlinks and compare them to your backlinks.

 

I'd say that my backlinks are all higher quality. I am wondering if my page and titles seem too keyword stuffed.

 

I have a theory. If you just did some link building work, was any of the outbound links to an unrelated site? Has any of the links you have now changed formats or is there PR less than yours?

The reason I ask is because I have found that bad outbound links can hurt your SERPs. Make sure all your links are on the up and up. Hopefully that will solve your issue within a month or two.

 

I have an outbound to Copyscape and I have an outbound to someone's similar site in my same niche (who i sort of work with).

My site also has a TON of links to on-site articles at the bottom. About 20-30. They are all for keywords within my niche.

Could this be an issue?

 

if your already questioning that...then I am probably right. You should fix your on page SEO and you'll rank higher than them. To test my theory copy their on page SEO and then tweak it just slightly. You should out rank them shortly after. Goodluck