Hissingsid - 11:32 am on Apr 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

night707 said

We had this No.1 spot since years with loads of selfproduced, expensive, exclusive content that has earned tons of organic inbound links from odp, yahoo etc.

We are in the same situation on a 9 year old site but only for one term, all of our other target terms have maintained their positions. I've found it really difficult to understand why we have been dropped to #9 on .com and #3 on .co.uk so I've been trying to understand why the two sites that have moved in to the top 2 slots have achieved it.

One of the things I noticed for them both is that when I look at them using Yahoo site explorer they have loads of off theme inbounds that look either bought or exchanged from low quality sites. They both have no DMOZ listing and none from authority sites in our industry.

We have DMOZ, links from .gov.uk sites, links from authority sites, Google directory, Yahoo directory and many links from good quality sites that just decided to link to us with no prompting. We were so stuck at #1 that we hardly ever tried to encourage links to us.

For this particular term another factor seems to be outbound links to directly on theme pages. One site that ranks #1 on .co.uk has a home page with some copy and links using the term to individual pages each on a company that provides the thing in the term with an outbound affiliate link which is a simple link like this http://www.example.com?track1234. I guess that this makes it look like an authority site. Not really what I would have though Google would want because it is syphoning money away from the great Goog.

Best wishes

Sid