Have you seen this before?

[WilliamI]

Our client is in a very competitive category, and we're helping them stay on top of their rankings.

An interesting thing is happening on Google, when searching on relevant words for the category, all but one of the top 10 returns has a lower PageRank than our client... and a couple have no rank.

I've not paid close attention to competitive PageRanks for a while... but I can't remember seeing this before.

Any ideas?

[mfishy]

I would bet that if you do a allinurl search for the keywords you are speaking of, the sites ranking high with lower PR have a lot more links with that keyword (anchor text).

[WilliamI]

I've spent a little more time analyzing the competitive sites (big ticket online stock brokerages). Typically, these are sites where there is little, if any, in-bound links to their sites other than ad banners. These types of companies spend significant effort tracking down and controlling in-bound links (for legal reasons). They would be happiest if there were no in-bound links other than their ad banners.

The primary differences that I can see when I compare the competition with our client are in two areas:

1) The competitive sites are slightly better at using relevant words like "stock", "online", "trading", etc. in their text links (but not by a wide margin).

2) Each of competitive sites direct ad banners to their home page, while our client utilizes deep-site landing pages. (Can the Google crawler follow the typical ad banner redirect and count that as an in-bound link? I never thought it could.)

However, our client is much better than the competition at displaying printable relevant copy on the home page.

[martinibuster]

deep-site landing pages

What's going on with the main page?