Can someone please explain ?

[expo]

Hi,

I am hoping someone can explain why a news page on our companies site ranks above our clients site when searching for the clients name?

Until recently when your searched for our client our site came top and the client's around 5 or 6. We made some changes to our site,(changed page title anchor text) to knock our site down the rankings, however it still ranks above it and I am asking you guys if there is some obvious reason for this that we are missing?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated !

Thanks,

[Duncan Pollock]

Heaven (not to mention Google) alone knows, but does it really matter? Searchers reach Renfrews hireLeisure either way.
The sheer volume of sites on the web and the incredible number of computations involved in deciding their search engine positioning surely make absolute logic and consistency of results more a matter of pure coincidence than anything.
I think you should just be grateful for doing as well as you do!

Duncan

[lbutton]

your news page ranks higher because #1 it has more links to via other news and links plus more words total count #2 title on news page is specific to topic --- main page title is too general

problem wasted space in title no mention of where in the world it is and noone will search for the term.

[MathsIsFun]

Duncan, you have hit upon a very telling point.

To maintain "equality and objectivity" Google needs to process the whole world through one impartial algorithm ... and they must get very frustrated trying to get the weightings right.

They see some sites ranking unfairly high, so they adjust a few parameters, rerun the whole thing, and "OOPS look what happens over here, now".

Imagine they increase the penalty for overusing keywords, but oh no!, CNN get dropped because they mention "news" too much ...

... and it is no doubt several orders of magnitude harder than that !

[incrediblehelp]

I wouldnt be to worried about it, but I do think it is a linking thing. You need more IBL's with "Renfrew shire Le isure" in it. To be honest it would good if you just tried to get more IBL's with any of your primary keywords in it.

[bobmutch]

expo: What you are seeing is not uncommon but can be fixed very easily. The key phrase has results of 371 and the key phrase has results of 36,600. The first question is, is it a keyword that will bring traffic to there site. Are people searching on that keyword. Is that is a keyword that will generate traffic and does the client want to rank high for that term. If they do it should be quite simple to get #1 Ranking for them.

Thier home page has a PR6 and yours has a PR5. They are showing 172 links on Yahoo for the client.
You are showing 379 links in Yahoo for linkdomain:www.tunaweb.com
It looks like to me you are ranking over them because you have more links.

Yahoo's link and linkdomain commands are more acturate than Google's link: command.

client's name.com is ranking first for allinanchor:client's name and first for allintitle:client's name but doesn't Rank for allinurl:client's name. You may want to put up a page for them with the key phrase in the URL like client-name.html and optimize that page.


Check out the McDar Keyword Analysis Tool (http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp). You will see that they are way behind in backlined compared to the other sites that are ranking above them. (Look at the Yahoo backlinks not the Google backlinks.)

They are #1 in allinanchor so they don't nessarily need links with the anchor text being client's name, but they do need more links.

Also the 6 sites before them have PR of PR7, PR5, PR5, PR5, PR5 & PR6 and their PR is PR5. As their PR may be just a low PR5 (just barely above a PR4) and the other sites could have high PR5's that may be another place where the other sites are out doing them.(Not sure why the McDar tool is not showing the correct PR values.)

So I would say more links as PR don't have alot of weight for Ranking I wouldn't worry about the PR. Run a mini Reciprocal links campaign for them and get 100 or so links with client's name as the anchor text. That should do it.

[tcampione]

To bobmutch's point, inbound links with your keyphrase as anchor is most important. But, to answer your question about why your site comes up higher, it is probably the 'new page' phenomenon.

It has happened to me a dozen times. I get my site listed on a page that has nothing to do with “Audience Response Systems” and three weeks later. . . it shows up in SERPs ahead of me. Eventually, it falls. But it can take weeks.

The good news is that your link from tuna.com is considered ‘relevant’ to the keyphrase. So, that link will be valuable to your client.

[stephenmunday]

If it is important to your client that they rank higher than you for their company name, then you have a problem.

However, they may need to be told that it is more useful for them to rank higher for their targetted keyword phrases. You can turn your higher ranking news page to your advantage by using their targetted phrases as anchor text when linking to their site, which will then boost them in their ranking for these phrases.

[expo]

Thanks for all the replies, some very interesting points indeed!

As our site was ranking #1 above 2 directory sites with many thousands of inbound links we had thought that the page structure must play a large part in it so by making some changes to www. renfrewshireleisure.com we could quickly boost its ranking without having to get 100's of links.

Your replies have been very helpful but I have one further question:

As the Renfrew shire Le isure site is relatively new (just over 4 months) could it be affected by the 'google sandbox' or is simply a case of being patient and getting more inbound links and in time the rankings will improve?

Cheers,

[incrediblehelp]

Yes expo I would have to only "assume" that the Sandbox Effect is holding you back slightly. Of course there is no statement from Google that this actual effect is real, but many have tested this theory to be true.

Just concentrate on getting real back links to your site and in time you will rise to the top.