Interesting but fun

[Herb_Blonger]

I enjoyed doing the competition analysis. While I briefly looked at my competition, it was interesting to visit each site and analysis it. I'm very encouraged. However I did find something interesting that I'd like some opinions on. Please look at position 9. It has a PR 4 more BLP and BLD than anyone by far. It is fully on paged optimized and in the Yahoo directory. It is an ecommerce site. Any opinions on why it's not ranked higher?

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The top line is my site which is at 26 up from 237 just a few weeks ago

[lindiop]

Hi Herb
I'd be just a little worried with that matrix. There's not a lot of green on there. In fact I don't see 1 clear line of green, which was the criteria we were using. Could take a lot of work to rank there. Is the traffic worth it?
As for your PR4 competitor it might be lack of keyword density, if it's an e commerce site with not much text. Alternatively, have you checked out the anchor text links he's got? He might have lots of backlinks but all from low prestige sites.

[Jim Sewell]

I don't know but I'm anxious for a reply from someone who does because I have seen things like this myself and it always makes me question whether Google is goofy or am I not understanding something.

[Herb_Blonger]

About the matrix. I've included all options as opposed to the ones specified during our research. The matrix has changed some since we've started. Using the columns told to us by The Challenge, lines 2,5 and 9 were all green at the start. Currently lines 1 and 5 are still all green using PR, BLP, YAH, Title, url, Desc and Header.

Looking at the sites themselves and the MS numbers, I believe this is a very beatable Niche.

Please point out anything that I'm missing. I have no experience and could be wrong.

[lindiop]

Sorry Herb, I'm so used to looking at the full matrix I forgot we were using a modified set. It's a little more red than I like to see in a matrix but I'm a bit cautious so I expect you'll be fine.

[akalafr]

IMO it can be 1 of 2 things although I don't know everything google uses to calculate who ranks where. 1st the sites near the top could be doing the google dance and eventually the one in the 9th spot will start moving up. I'd keep an eye on them as they could be a contender.

2nd the anchor text in the #9 sites BLP's might not be optimized for that keyword. Lets say my keyword is fishing poles. If I have 400 links and the majority of those links have anchor text that say "check out my awesome site about fishing" and only a few actually have the anchor text "fishing poles", then google probably would rank that site lower than another site with:

100 backlinks where the majority of the anchor text is "fishing poles" and a few that are "check out my awesome site about fishing". Google reads the anchor text and decides what the page is going to be about. That's why anchor text is so important.

I hope that makes some sense. Again this is just my opinion as we all know google has their own agenda and none of us can say for sure.

[Herb_Blonger]

akalafr,

That's an interesting point. It is an ecommerce site and I would expect many of the backlinks to be more using a broader term than my niche.

Thanks for the input.

[akalafr]

I don't want to get too far ahead or confuse anyone, but there was another post talking about a function in MS where you can analyze your competitions links.

If you go to MS seo competition module where you have the top 10 sites, click on the arrow right by their url name and it drops down a selection where you can analyze the anchor text and pr of that sites links. This will give you an idea of how many links they actually have with that keyword in the anchor text.

Also it lets you check the PR of the pages linking to them. One advantage of this is that you can see where the links come from and potentially get a link from the same place if you feel it's a relevant and quality site.

[Herb_Blonger]

I think you're right. Only 37 of the 430 backlinks have an anchor text related to my niche with only 25 of those an exact match. Thanks for the MS tip. Very cool!

[Jim Sewell]

Wow, akalafr - I ran that against my non-Challenge friend's charter fishing site and it makes a TON of sense now. Thanks for cheating a little bit and sharing some spoilers. I'm not even going to look into my Challenge site with it yet but it's an eye opener!

Something I realize is that having your main keyword phrase in your domain name is very useful! If someone links to you as mysite.com then your link text is by default your keywords. It's better than if they were something irrelevant... if only by a tiny amount. One competitor has 35 links to various permutations of URLs. Imagine having all 35 of them count for your keyword phrase.

Disclaimer: I'm no Google-guru and may be way off base on this so consider this as only the musings of a newb and not anything to invest any confidence in unless confirmed by someone who knows what they are talking about