Matt_Pellerin - 7:19 pm on Jan 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

Hi All,

I am a real estate agent who webmasters my own sites, so I am in no way an expert but have a deep interest in all of this so I read up all the time, test things for myself and try to get a basic handle on this as it evolves.

I usually just lurk, but here goes...

For the entire year (I'm pretty sure) of 2004 I was #2 on Google for my main KWP "city real estate" and the #1 site was/is hosted by the same company, with many of the same info pages, much of the same words on the home page (some paragraphs were even indentical), and the exact same IP address. One major difference was that my competitors Meta title was "city real estate" and mine was/is "city real estate - city homes for sale".

Then came our last update. I got spanked, and had done nothing to the site in the weeks before the update, but still I got bumped down from 2 to 14.

This of course baffled me and I began searching high and low for some rhyme or reason. One thing that struck me about a week later was that my competitor had changed their Meta title to match mine. Now they are "city real estate and city homes for sale" while mine remains "city real estate - city homes for sale" with the only difference being they have "and" and I have "-". Now I know Meta tags are not copyright infringment, but it does make me wonder what effect all of these factors have had on my site vs. the #1 site.

Now with their new Meta title, we are very close to being the same, at least as far as our home pages were concerned. So, I changed some wording around on my HP and have moved up to #11 now, but that is not good enough... I need help.

Does anyone see an issue with the above mentioned? Or did I simply slip, or did 12 of my competitors all of a sudden get better?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.