Hello. I am desperate, since yesterday I finally (accidentally) started to spy on my competitors. Their pageranks are insane! I myself have PR0. Domain is 2+ years old. I have a forum with 2000+ members, now building a Wordpress based magazine about my niche with SEO links etc. I had PR1, but it dropped after trying to submit to multiple directories. Now for example one of my competitors, has a simple forum, 1+ year domain (none of our domains are related to our niche), no SEO at all or anything, and they are PR2. And there are others out there with even PR3 with domain age only about 1 year. I am obviously doing something wrong. I want to know what might that be. I tried doing research in google (link:competitor.com link:www.competitor.com, link:http://competitor.com) - and I get one page back (a directory kind PR5 page, which links to them without "nofollow" as well as to 700 other sites), but I don't think all the PR2 comes from that. I tried various ways of finding out how they are achieving their PR so I could duplicate that, but nothing pops up. How is this possible ? Help.
Nothing to worry about PR as long as SERP is good. You your self said you had PR 1 and dropped to PR0. So that may be a small penalty by google for your works and your competitor some how escaped from the penalty and build a good PR after their continues work.
Google panelized you. how many your website daily traffic and can u give me your and your competitor website URL so i will check and after give me good reply for this
What about link building if the site is in my native language (as my competitors). Do I still run around to english-based blogs and comment etc ? And seo555 - Ok, google penalized me. Any ideas for how long ? Or how to get the penalty off ?
Page Rank and Search Engine Optimization both are different things and if you want to improve page rank then go with String On page optimization. if your website more search engine friendly then your website get good page rank definatly.