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I'm fairly new to search engine optimization and most of my knowledge has been gained from reading this board (thanks guys).
I have a situation that is stumping me a bit. I have two sites ahead of me in a keyword that have very few links (none with particularly high page rank). They rank in the top ten for a term that I would say is pretty strongly contested (Internet services related, high ticket item).
#1: The term in question is a two word phrase, and they don't even have word #1 on their site. Word #2 is all over it though. Page Rank: 4.
#2: A division of the company that has the #1 position for the keyword. They have a 8 page rank, with very few backlinks, none of which are higher than 8 page rank. There's no way they purchased their PageRank, right? Google doesn't do things like that if I am not mistaken.
Anyway, I wanted to see if someone could help me understand why these two sites are ranking ahead of my site, which is a page rank 6 and is optimized very well for the key phrase in question.
Thanks,
Chris
[edited by: Marcia at 7:53 pm (utc) on July 24, 2003]
A page that's considered well optimized for a phrase may have some but not others, and some pages could be getting a big off-page boost, like with inbound anchor text.
The page that just has the second word of the phrase on it and not the first may have the full phrase in text links pointing to it - or maybe even just the first word in some.
>>A division of the company that has the #1 position for the keyword.
That's actually how it should be from a searcher's point of view, if they're a division of the company itself. If they're PR8 and the "official" site they may have a very high profile link from a major authoritative source, and whatever links there are may have the search term in the anchor text.
There can be any number of reasons, and it doesn't always take a lot of inbound links.
Have a PR1 site that is #1 against 850,000, and the 2 - 10 all have massive PR's and links. Also a #4 against 6 million that is in the same situation.
Keep working at SEO as explained by all the experts on here, which is how I learned even at my age, and you could make it.
