AprilS - 6:45 am on May 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

I'm writing this out of pure desparation...

Our site is in a very competative market - for example - one of our top (2 word) key phrase comes back with 5,870,000 results on Google. Anyway, I have tried for over 2 years to get listed in the top 10 results with no luck. I have optimized our site till my fingers were bleeding (well..not really) - but our pages are nicely optimized - and when it comes to products, we usually are #1 in Google for any of the 1,000+ products we carry... but most people don't know the exact name of the products so they use a generic keyword phrase for our industry....this is where our site fails!

For the most important (generic) keywords in our industry we don't even show up on the first 10 pages of results on Google.

I have been doing manual link requests constantly - every day, but it seems like it is not enough - I can't catch up to the competition. The thing is, I've been doing my best to do what the majority of people on this board say to do - but I've seen many companies jump to the first page of search results as soon as they started their businesses online - and they are basically doing everything they "should not" be doing...But it works:
- getting reciprocal links from non-related sites
- getting links from any PR site 0+
- creating complete garbage sites with unique URLs [same IP address] to point to their main site.
- Etc.
At first I thought it was just a fluke and Google and other search engines would eventually weed them out... but its now been over 8 months and they are still in the #1 position. I've estimated that with the money they've made in 6months doing everything against the books - it would take me 3 years to generate that kind of revenue.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice something like this - but it just seems like with the industry I'm in - competition is cut-throat and some webmasters are doing all the things we've heard/read we're not supposed to do - but by seeing their results... I'm wondering how much truth there is in what I've read @ webmasterworld. [just food for thought I guess]

I aplogize for a long post - It has just been so frustrating trying to get to the first page of search results and basically not moving at all (we've even used a few different SEO companies)

Has anyone else experienced something like this? If so...what did you do? I need more sites linking to us and I'm at a point where I will almost do anything to get those links! I'm looking for a LOT of links - cause at the rate I'm getting links - I will never catch up to our competition - they will always be quite a few steps ahead when it comes to reciprocal/back links.

just an FYI - I've used Arelis - but the majority of its results are our competitors. So at this point I use Arelis to just spit out some URLs and I weed through them and visit each site before emailing - tedious and very slow.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!