Question: If you go to Google and type – moisture meter – we are listed on the 5th position and the link goes to this page:
http://www.professionalequipment.com/xq/ASP/moisturemeter/ID.17/qx/default.htm
The keyword “moisture meter” is listed on this page almost 12 times, and our competitor #1 :
http://www.moisture-meter.com
only has the keyword moisture meter 4 times.
My questions is how come he is ranking higher (#1) than us when our page contains the keyword moisture meter 12 times? That is double the amount of keywords he is using on his page.
Shari’s Answer:
Before I give my answer, I have to admit that this particular question cracks me up. I get very few emails from people complaining about a top 10 Google position.
First, never make the assumption that because a site has a higher ranking than your site, it automatically makes more money than your site. I have a lot of clients who obsess over what their competitors are doing without looking at the big picture.
Is your site receiving quality traffic from Google for this keyword phrase? Is your site receiving quality traffic from Google for other relevant keyword phrases? Once visitors arrive at your site, are they doing what you want them to do (filling out an order, subscribing, browsing, bookmarking)? These items should be the main focus of your time.
Does your site have a large number of related links to it? It appears that your site has over 1,600 links to it whereas your competitor’s site has none. If this is the case, then your competitor will not likely stay in a top position for very long.
What caught my attention was that your company appears to have multiple Google listings, ToolDeal.com and ProfessionalEquipment.com. Google considers spam to be “pages that deliberately trick the search engines into delivering inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality results.” If I were in your shoes, I would make removing the redundant search engine listings a priority, and not wonder what a competitor is doing.
The most efficient way to make redundant listings non-spam, place a 301 permanent redirect on the site you do not wish to promote.
Another way to communicate to the search engines to not index a site is to put the Robots Exclusion Protocol on the site. I prefer to do this with a text file rather than the meta tag, because it’s easier. All you have to do is create a text file with the following typed in:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Make sure the robots.txt file is placed in the root directory on your server, which is the same directory your home page is listed under.
Or, you can take the redundant site down, and submit the pages to the engines to get the 404 Error (Page Not Found). If the search engines see the 404 Error, they will not return to spider those pages. This is the most tedious way of doing it.
Back to the Google question, “Why is my competitor’s page ranked higher than mine?” It might be higher keyword density and keyword prominence. It might even be that the keyword density of your site is too high. It might be that your competitor is spamming. No one, except for a Google software engineer, can give you a definitive answer.
Shari Thurow is Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs, Inc., a full-service search engine marketing, web and graphic design firm. This article is excerpted from her book, Search Engine Visibility (http://www.searchenginesbook.com) published in January 2003 by New Riders Publishing Co. Shari can be reached at shari@grantasticdesigns.com.
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