What's wrong here?

Good link count, optimized pages, but...

[m2c1r]

My one site just can't seem to make any headway... It is as optmized as I can get it (using guidelines from this board) for google, it has 46 incoming links (the current #2 has 49, #1 is a gov site with 100s) and yet I am ranked 312 by google (4.6 million results for kw).

I have other sites that are #1 out of 5.9 million, #2 out of 220K, and #3 out of 2.6 million for their kw's, so why is this one (potentially the most lucrative) failing so badly?

The content is good, most of the incoming links have exaclty the right anchor text, kw density is good, so what's wrong?

Maybe I don't have it as optimized as I think, or is there something else going on? It has never ranked well, and seems pretty stable at were it is...
Thanks.

[Mohamed_E]

so why is this one (potentially the most lucrative) failing so badly?

The parenthesized phrase "potentially the most lucrative" seems to me to hold the key to the mystery. My guess is that you are doing nothing wrong, it is just that your competition is doing better.

I may be way off, but you did not give us much information to work on! Not your fault, the TOS do not allow you to.

[jchance]

I'm having a very similar problem and I just don't buy the everyone else is doing better. I have looked at some of the PR2 sites which are 200 positions higher than my site and they have no inbound links, and basically no real content at all...

My site shows allinanchor: 26, allinurl: 7 allintext:26 and has a PR4 yet still shows in the serps as 250.

Maybe I'm missing something here? With other sites my position is usually pretty close to where my allin ranking is?

Any ideas? Anything else I could check to see what the problem is?

[cabbie]

I would be looking at whether they the domains belonged to someone else within the last 4 years.
Expired domain penalty is a possiblity.

[m2c1r]

Competition doing better? Well, some maybe, but not 300+! My content is better, and as was said, some of the pages ahead of me have no links, or way off content, no page optimization, and no other reason to be a useful search result, or even one that google should rank ahead of mine.

Previously banned URL- no, it's mine from a ways back, and before that it had never been registered by anyone, so that isn't it in my case.

If all my sites were bad, I'd suspect my interlinking strategy was too ambitious, but they have all been stable for a long time now, and have good PR. Even my 312 ranked site has PR 4, so it's not like it was black balled or something.

All I can think to do is keep building links. But considering I have as many good links as the page one people, I keep wondering if it is something esle as well...

[cabbie]

Could it be you are trying too hard for that specific keyword and the page is over optimised?

[m2c1r]

Over optimized? I just checked again- my kw density is 3.2%. It is a three word kw, with the whole phrase appearing 3 times (once in h1, once in bold near top, once at bottom), and single words scattered in text, all very human reader friendly.

Actually today the listing dropped to 319... although nothing has changed with it, there must be new listings appearing somewhere between #1 and me to push me down.

Very frustrating. I am at 36 on MSN for the same kw, which is OK, but that really drives no traffic, so it isn't much help either.

[James_Dale]

Are you carrying out this competitor search using quotes?
the phrase "online casino" for example has around two million competing results, but there is no chance of achieving a top 10 with fewer than 1000+ anchor text links (and a resultant PR7 or so).

I would be surprised if top 10 positions can be achieved for comparably competitive phrases with just 50 or so inbound links.

[sirlion]

Might want to check your code. I had this problem with a site about a year ago till I discovered a missing body tag.
I fixed that and the next dance I shot into the top 10.

[RussellC]

How old is the site?

[m2c1r]

The site has been up for about 9 months.

The kw is competitive for sure, but there are people on page one with 40-50 incoming links- and these are not all links from super sites and DMOZ, etc. that they have- just your standard mixed bags of links a lot like my site has.

I suppose an html page probem is possible, I'll check. But would I have PR4 with something like that?

I recently tried adding more content, around 35 pages or so, all unique stuff- basically html'd articles I had on the subject. Didn't seem to help.

I suppose there is no silver bullet, luckily I have other stuff that makes me money, but just from the number of orders I get from the tiny amount of traffic that does find me, I know this would be a huge winner if I can just get it seen. Sigh.

[Tomas]

It's interesting. Sticky me your site url and KW, I'll take a look if you need a second opinion ;)

[shaadi]

over optimised?

What exactly is this? Do you mean by Spamming here?

3.2%

Its too less try 18% or 20%.