Competitor rank

[Parvesh]

Hi

We have been doing SEO on one of our properties for 4 years now. We had a new competitor jump in and is now ranking above us within 6 months. I verified various parameters including link backs/etc. but cannot see as to why Google would rank them above our page despite us following all ethical SEO practices/updating content etc.

Do you guys have an experience/thoughts on this?

• P

[donford]

Hi Parvesh, there could be lots of reasons why I can list a few for you and tell you about my personal experience.

Reasons why a new domain could be outranking a well established domain

1. There site is just plain better, users like it more, it has a higher CTR (click through rating), and could be running a multichannel marketing campaign that is driving users to their site more then others in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page).

2. The site is using a black hat aggressive link building which provides short term gains at the expensive of long term gains.

3. The new site is actually just a new domain for an old established competitor who is 301 redirecting their old site to the new site (passing all their link juice).

4. The new site has a higher domain authority / page authority. I know this may seem somewhat unlikely but imagine I launch a website  tomorrow and my brother at CNN writes an article about it, which gets picked up by MSNBC, FOX, ALJAZEERA, MASHABLE, YAHOO and several other popular sites, my domain authority just went up big time.

Last year we had a competitor obliterate us for some keyword terms during a 4 week stretch of time. Their website was new, their design was poor, and they were clearly paying somebody to do link building for them. Because we had them marked as a competitor here at SEOmoz we were able to view historical data about them, it turns out them went from about 30 in-links to 70,000 in-links around the same time we noticed them killing us in the SERP's. The following month they were off the first page for nearly every single one of those keywords, and we were easily out ranking them once again.

The moral of this is there still are black hat tricks that can get a new site ranked very high very quickly, but it will not last. Maintain focus on the long term goal of being the industry leader, and let the black hats fill up with rabbit droppings.