Big Drop and Outbound Links

Have I been penalized due to the nature of my industry?

[pdivi]

I run a b2b 'community' site focused on an industry that has been a bit late in coming to the web. Most of the businesses in my industry are very small, and it is safe to say that their websites were built without the help of SEO experts. As a result, my site has hundreds of links out to low page rank sites.

My site was #2 for my target search term a year ago. Every month it seems to drop a few slots, and now I'm at #60.

I've looked into all the obvious explanations for the drop, and the only one that makes any sense is the links to low PR sits.

Is it possible that this one factor has created such a precipitous decline? If so, what's Google's purpose in driving a wedge between the page rank 'haves' and the 'have nots', and what can sites like mine do about it?

[Marcia]

pdivi, unless you're linking out to penalized sites or bad neighborhoods it's unlikely rankings would be gradually dropping because of the sites you link to having relatively low PR or being unoptimized.

What's your PR, and is there anything in the way you're linking out that would cause unnecessary drain on your own PR for your most important pages?

There could be so many factors involved it would be impossible to be able to pinpoint anything, but is there a possibility you could be doing more within safe, legitimate boundaries to give your site a boost in rankings?

Are there possibilities for getting more high PR and/or authoritative inbound links to your site, and do you have outbound links to authoritative sites? Also, sometimes there can be a possibility of cross-promotion with similar types of niches in some industries - complementary in some way, but not competing.

How about optimization within the site? Could there be more content added to increase the number of applicable keywords the site ranks for?

[DerekH]

pdivi
Just a suggestion...
Some people here put their "problem site of the day" in their profile so that others can make public or private suggestions that might be helpful.

Being in a "late developer" field doesn't explain your problem.

You need to ask yourself whether you're suffering from
a) Your site dropping
b) Other sites rising

You're assuming (a).
I suspect it's (b)

Look outwards, not inwards my son....
(Gawd, I sound like Confucius now!)

DerekH

[DerekH]

Well, what do you know, I've been here exactly a year!
I was just peeping at profiles, following on from my post, and there I was, "another year older, and deeper in debt"

Since I'm rapidly rushing towards becoming a silver surfer, or more likely a wavering webmaster, it's nice to be one again!
DerekH

[BigDave]

You need to ask yourself whether you're suffering from
a) Your site dropping
b) Other sites rising

You're assuming (a).
I suspect it's (b)

I agree. If your industry is just getting going on the web, there are probably some of them that are improving faster than you are.