Page ranking and linking

[nrgnrg]

I am a newbie so bear with me. Our company has a product, which is also a trademark and a domain name for the product. A law firm has one page on their website that discusses complaints from people about our problem. It is treated on the firm's website as a consumer affair. The law firm uses the trademark/name of the product only on that page. The rest of the website is devoted to other consumer product problems.

Can anyone throw out suggestions as to why this page (and other competitor's pages) would be coming up as number 1 or 2 on the first pages of Yahoo and Google search results?

Also, when I first found out about cloaking I suspected that both this law firm and competitors were doing this. However, after using sim spider and HTTP Viewer which has a google option(snip), and checking the google cache, it does not seem that there is cloaking.

I have been reading on this site that others can benefit in page rankings by virtue of their website linking to your website. Do I udnerstand this to be correct?

[edited by: paynt at 5:41 pm (utc) on Mar. 12, 2003]
[edit reason] url snip [/edit]

[Susanne]

Google sees the page of the law firm as relevant to the person searching for the product. Even though a website hasn't optimised for a specific keyword, they can still be #1 in search results if the PAGE is relevant enough. Maybe the page has a lot of text on it, the product name is mentioned in the page title, description, heading, body, alt tags etc.
If there would be a lot of competition for that word, the law firm wouldn't be #1 in SERPs but in your case maybe only your company and the law firm mention the name of the product on a web page/site. Maybe the lawfirm has a high overall rank in Google with many indexed pages and lots of incoming links. It is possible that a big well established site receives traffic for words they aren't optimised for, even if those words are only mentioned once, twice or a few times in the site.

I have been reading on this site that others can benefit in page rankings by virtue of their website linking to your website. Do I udnerstand this to be correct?

You menefit from having INcoming links mainly. There are also voices saying that a site should have also OUTgoing links to "authoritative" sites within the same field. But use your time to hunt for incoming links first. Cheers!