Google Traffic - why so low compared to my competition?

[realmaverick]

I'm currently comparing my website with one of the our competitors and frankly, it's driving me up the wall.

We are currently receiving 25,000 visitors per day vs competitor 250,000 per day. 90% of each of the sites traffic, are from Google. This is definitely correct, before anybody questions it.

For the keywords I've checked, we rank higher for all of them.

They have equally as much content as we do, but we have 11.7 million pages indexed vs their 285,000 pages. They don't noindex any of their pages, while we do no index our 2 million member profile pages. If they're so f'ing great, why isn't Google indexing more of their crappy content?!

In the recent PR update, they went down to PR4, us up to PR6. Main inner pages, all have higher PR than theirs. (yes PR isn't important, blah).

They have slightly more inbound links, but of lesser quality. And it won't be long, before our inbound links, greatly outweighs theirs.

I am baffled, they're not just getting more traffic, but 10x more.

Is there something I'm missing here?

One thing that I am currently having a debate with my developer about, is the fact we use Invision Power Board, as our CMS. It WAS a forum software, but is now so much more.

On every page, a many ref to IPB, such as:

pb.vars['base_url'] = 'http://www.domain.com/forum/index.php?';
ipb.vars['board_url']= 'http://www.domain.com/forum';
ipb.vars['loading_img']

I want to rename these references, to something completely different. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but my concern is that Google is recognising the entire website, as a forum, even though its not.

What do you think?

Any other thoughts, as to why the competitor is receiving 10x more traffic?

Cheers

[Zivush]

I'm just bringing some thoughts and my takes:
* PR doesn't have weight in ranking anymore.
* You both have too many low quality pages.Too many pages for the traffic you get.
* Inbound Links don't have power as before. Even those called quality links. What are quality links really?
* I don't think the in-page code matters.
* I would consider improving/deleting/no-indexing pages that aren't get traffic. If you change the #page/traffic ratio, you may improve the site in front of search engines.

[realmaverick]

Zivush. The closest example I can give is DeviantArt. Our site is full of user generated content, just like DA. I can't pick and choose users work to no index. First of all, there's no criteria for which I could do this by and it's morally wrong.

PR at least indicates the credited link juice going to a domain.

Clearly the competition isn't suffering, with traffic 10 as high.

Inbound links do have power. And a quality link is from a trusted source, it's contextual. I'm sorry but Panda might have stirred things up, it hasn't stopped using links as its main ranking factor.

Any suggestions other than no indexing my members hard work?

Many thanks

[deadsea]

It sounds to me like they are targeting a high value set of long tail keywords that you don't even know about. I'd suggest doing a deep dive on keyword targeting. They are obviously ranking for something.

Get keyword data on your competitor, pay for it if you have to. Rewrite your page titles and adjust your anchor text. Copy some of their page titles. Use the adsense traffic estimator.

[topr8]

If your assertion that they get x10 your traffic is correct and

>>For the keywords I've checked, we rank higher for all of them.

then there can be only one explanation (as mentioned by deadsea) and that is that they rank higher than you for a lot of keywords that you don't even rank for.

the first thing you need to do is find out what search terms they are getting traffic from ... in your case this is easy to get, you obviously have access to their log files (or else you couldn't know for sure their traffic levels) and thus you need to get hold of not raw numbers but what the actual search terms are for their search engine traffic.

once you know the search terms then you can make a better assessment.