One of my keywords "Dog Food Reviews" I am sitting in second spot. Have you guys experienced taking the first spot from an authority site? How hard was it? How good did it feel? How long did it take? How hard would you rate taking over for the keyword "Dog Food Reviews". I am in 2nd place right now.
174,000 backlinks on yahoo vs. 1,300. Newer domain year old domain vs. 3 1/2. Site links don't mean authority site. There is no right answer on how hard it is to be #1. It ranges from very easy to impossible. I think in your case, it is going to require some work and time. It might be easier to target other keywords that will bring you more traffic with less effort.
Just running my tools over your site and the top site, I'll see if I can spot anything that will help.
OK, I only analysed the first 1000 links for each site. Well done so far on getting the 2nd spot (I assume your site is dogfoodchat.com). What I can see is that dogfoodanalysis really doesn't have that many links targeted with the exact anchor text "dog food reviews", only about 18 You on the other hand have about 575 links with "dog food reviews" in the anchor text, almost all of them however come from DP sig links. But seriously, with almost all your targeted links coming from one domain you just ain't gonna get that top spot. You need to get targeted links from other domains. Another thing I noticed was that all the pages linking to you had a PR of 0 (at least in the sample I had of 1,000), dogfoodanalysis had most coming from PR 0 pages but had a large portion of PR3 pages pointing to it too. So see if you can try and mix up your link profile a bit and make it look more natural. Hope that helps a little. if you want more detailed stats I suggest you get yourself the free version of "SEO spyglass" awesome tool for analysing backlinks both of your own site or a competitors.
I have alot of links with the Anchor text of dog food reviews including "Dmoz and Google Dir" along with a bunch from bloggers. Hopefully I can take it over in the next 6 months I figured the better I rank for these terms the better I will rank for "dog food" which I am in 31st spot.