Why do several articles with no backlinks outrank my site?

why does my site not rank well

[brian11]

Hi, I am trying to rank my website for the keyword "Blue Widgets". It does not appear to have very tough competition. Several articles rank on the first page of google without backlinks. My webpage is over a year old now. I first built a couple dozen backlinks with articles about a year ago and then just waited. It did start to show up on google's 2nd page of results steadily for a couple months. Then about 2 months ago I started building backlinks again and my site dropped of the radar. It came back for a couple days and then left again, it has probably gone missing now for 2 months. I might have about 50 backlinks now.

Why is it so difficult to rank high on google for this? I just don't get it. How do you get a page to rank 1st on google for a low competition keyword? People make it sound so easy. Please help.

Thanks,
Brian

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:52 am (utc) on Jan. 7, 2010]
[edit reason] Removed specifics. See TOS re site reviews etc. [/edit]

[ogletree]

Do your links have anchor text with that phrase in it?

[Status_203]

How varied is your backlink profile?

Is it all still article links?

Are the articles one-article-per-site, or do you have multiple links from the same article posted on many sites?

When you say the existing articles are without backlinks does that include internal links from the same site? Do other pages on the site have inbound links? (Use Yahoo's site explorer to check). How varied are the sites' link profiles?

How old are the existing sites/articles/inbound links?

[aristotle]

Google may have detected something artificial about your whole set of backlinks, such as they all have the same anchor text, or they all come from article sites. To avoid this problem, what you need is backlinks from a variety of sources with a variety of anchor texts.

[CosmicLee]

There's no way for you know for sure what backlinks your competitors have. No tool will show them all.

50 is not very many backlinks. Work on more backlinks from a variety of sites. And like aristotle said, using anchor text is better yet.