Silent_Bob - 10:40 am on Mar 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

I'm well and truly stumped by it. I've tried everything I can on-page - de-optimised some pages, over-optimised others, played with h1 and h2 tags etc.. and its done nothing to change my rankings at all - neither up nor down no matter what I've done. This suggests to me its more off page factors that are being given greater weight.

My main site is a shopping site. We have many competitors and we all sell pretty much the same items. No matter which item you type in on both the .com and .co.uk the same sites are appearing at the top. There's one site which we've basically switched places with. We were ranking 1-3 and they were ranking 10-20 and now its vice versa. Its not as simple as just PR though as all of us in the top 10 or 20 have PR4 or 5. A lot of the sites at the top for my keywords in the UK index at least are ones that dropped after Florida - spammy kind of sites. If google's efforts are to reduce spam, then they aren't doing a very good job of it. Nor are the results getting any more relevant.

My site offers an affiliate program, and one of our affiliates have basically created a whole site that just links to us with the affiliate url (we are going to put a stop to it in fact). I'd call it an affiliate farm, and yet they rank higher in google than we do. I'm getting pretty bored with google now. I think if yahoo's new search engine provides good results they have a great chance of taking over at the top.