Competitors frustrate me!

Just wondering if someone could clear this up for me.

Scenario: I've been slowly but agressivley building links to a website geared around a couple of keywords, I'm up to about 400 or 500 links at the moment and I'm ranking well for some of them but not others. My competitor puts up a page on their already well established website targetting the same keyword. That page jumps to number 2 within a week!

mywebsite.com = 4/500 links
competitorwebsite.com/targeted-keyword = 0 links

mywebsite.com = 4/500 links
competitorwebsite.com = thousands of links

is it the value of competitorwebsite.com that is buggering me?

Can someone clear that up?

 

Yup it is.... that website is already well estd. and just need to add a page to it and jump to the high positions... it's based on the internal link structure..

Manish

 

Yep sorry. Once a website has become established and themed it is a killer. An example of this is my rugby forum. The major tournament in the Northern hemisphere is the 6 nations. It runs from Feb to end March. In jan I put up a new forum dedicated to it (new forum as in a new section on a phpbb forum). It went straight in to the top 10 for the main phrase.

Once a site gets established it is difficult to match it, until of course your site becomes established.

You mention zero backlinks though, but I suspect this is just crap google reporting and that he has one or two good quality ones. On my forum I have a handfull of backlinks that inlude the Welsh rugby union, sky sports and the BBC. Job done

 

One way "around" this problem is to target secondary keywords - the so-called long tail of search. Go to the Overture, AdWords, and Wordtracker tools, and you'll see lots of related keywords to yours. Target those, one or two per page, and you'll get a lot of traffic that way too.

My point is that you shouldn't aim at the highest target initially, as you will fail - as you can see. Aim lower and wider, and success builds up. Eventually, all those pages will be considered unique content by SEs, and you can then point them to a new page you created, and you'll be all set.

And work those links! Make sure they are on-topic and from good websites.

 

I get traffic from hundreds of keywords every day. it might be the name of the player, a club name, an incident etc. OK so I try to keep ahead of the game by making sure I rank in advance for up and coming players, so when they get drafted in to the National team and people start searching for them my site is at the top. But IMO this is what web marketing is about. You market your site for Christmas all year round, not wait until novemebr .

 

it's definitely the value competitorwebsite.com but how come he uses your keywords?

 

Well i also have this problem .. does it mean if i have a site on travel which has 5000 backlinks and the i do a site on sports such as travelsite.com/sports , will i rank well for the sports site because the travel site has 5000 quality backlinks?

 

I was looking through the stats of a friends well established website a few months back. I nearly fell of my chair with the amount of keywords linking to his site thousands of times over for some of the phrases, and those posts on his blog were added just a few days before. Anything he puts there gets Googles blessing on it.

 

If it is in a subfolder then the original domain will carry the weight. It also depends on your navigation structure though.

If you cross link your sports area to relevant pages within your travel area. like the page on madison square gardens linking to your boxing section or your wrestling section etc, and the jets ground mentioned in your New york pages to your page in the sports section about the jest, then the search engines will understand it well.

 

I have the same 'problem'. Even if I try, I can't prevent a new article on one of my sites to jump to top 5 rankings within 2 days from posting. It's a great problem to have.

Once you get authority status, everybody else is doomed.

 

Ain't that the truth

 

Now how do we get that "authority status"

 

Great Domain
Lots of Highly Relevant links, ideally from similar Authorities.
Great Content
No Dodgy Stuff
Not sure about this but I have a suspicion that a big AdWords budget can help as well.

 

What if you have a well estd. site that is top of the rankings for 3 years. Number 1 / 2 on many search terms which is then bought by a competitor (I work for the cometitor). The domains then have the registration info changed so that the address on the registration is the new corp address. The sites had not changed and the SERPs all dropped. (not the whole story, but if I can get an answer to this it might shine new light on why I am struggling to get the sites back onto top rankings again).

The previous owners may have been guilty of black / grey hat practices pre Google's release of Jagger, so that may have caused the drop too.

S

 

oh ok thx for this

 

I was told by a google rep that when a domain changes hands the link benefit is wiped clean, and the domain is treated as a new one.

 

This kind of makes sense when you think about it.

Another characteristic of these 'authority sites' is that they seem ride out the updates and algo changes with very little fluctuation in the serps.

 

Ahhh - darn it.. Thats bad news.

It does make sense, but you know - I wish it weren't true.

 

That doesnt mean you can't beat it.
It will take you longer, but you can beat them if you put effort into it.

 

Where did you get that info? I'd like to read up on that theory.