My competitors website is #1 for everything!

What is he doing that I'm not?

[askjoe]

Ok, here's the situation - a competitors website of mine has managed to come in within the top 5 listings of nearly every popular keyword in my industry. His website is nothing special - a basic yahoo store with the same products I carry. His link structure is no better than mine, and my site is - in my opinion - way more optimized for google than his is(ie. better links/backlinks, keyword rich text, good titles, good site setup and link structure etc).

Can you guys help me out here as to what he can be doing? Could he be cloaking - what does a cloak look like? Is it visibal in the source code?

What other means can deliver a high ranking other than keyword rich text, a good title, and good quality links - all areas I'm better than him at - as per the optimization techniques I hear about in webmasterworld.

Could you guys please provide me with a list of possible ideas/scenerios that could be going on here?

Why is google valuing his site more than mine. I really don't know what more I can do.

[webdev]

If you sticky mail me the url i'll take a look.

Cloaking can be invisible as the page refereshes before you have a chance to see.

[Mike_Mackin]

could it be relevant links?

[netguy]

First check out the links going back to the competitor in Google, then take a very close look at the source. I had a similar situation occur the other day with a competitor of one of my clients. On the surface, everything looked clean, then I noticed the competitive site had over 7,000 links back to his site!

Upon closer investigation, I see that he is using a clever (invisible) image map, with links going out to a dozen other sites. The pyramid then all comes back to the competitive site - giving him a PR8!

As I said, it's very clever, but I wouldn't want to chance it when Google finds out about them.

Steve

[HuhuFruFru]

please send me the url too

[GodLikeLotus]

is your user name your URL with dot com, because if it is I'm not surprised you have much competition

[Eric_Lander]

Though I cannot find any evidence of this, I've seen many lame Yahoo stores ranking well. My thoughts on this is because of two reasons:

• Many times, a Yahoo store is made to look like it is a domain itself. In essence, it it really one page on the domain, and the rest s fed through store.yahoo.com. While the PR bar for store.yahoo.com is greyed out, I've always wondered if it helps to carry PR over to the actual pages.

• The second reason may be out of sheer content availability. With a Yahoo store, it is entirely possible to have thousands of pages ranked within Google because the URLs are static in appearance. Often times, and maybe in your case, the store is using query strings to pull products. Many times, it can be tough to convince GoogleBot to review all query string URLs - though - some steps have been made on their end.

[netguy]

If they are on the 'up & up' and depending on how obscure the keywords are, it may just be a matter of how long he's had his domain. I have had domains sitting online forgotten for years with no activity, and just "test 123..." on the page and they still pull a PR3 in Google.

[askjoe]

What about hidden images? I've looked through his source code and didn't see anything? What else could there be?

[netguy]

As I mentioned... no hidden image map, but he's got something working for him with 6,730 linkbacks to his site! (although they are weak sites - only a PR5 on his).

[lazerzubb]

With that many links it's extremly hard to judge how valuable they are, and especially due to the nature of PageRank.

But there is so many things that he might do that you don't some which might be very small, and not very obvious.

Also check out Brett's quick rank [webmasterworld.com]

Which mention the most common things search engines use to rank a page.

And
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]

[netguy]

Looks like several are affiliate programs linking back to him.

[Chicago]

May i have the URL and top two keyword phrases too, please.

[msgraph]

Side note

There is no need for everyone to post asking for the URL or "Send Me A Sticky Mail Too". Just press that Sticky Mail link under the user's name and send a message. ;)