Irratic page rank results - why?

[girlie]

Hi,

Hi- I've changed the title and reposted this question as I didn't get any insight. I really am going around in circles for this; so any help that can be given would be really appreciated.I know that you guys have the knowledge so really hoping you can share it!

Thanks -

background:

I run two sites: www.ragsmetals.com and www.yourgoldfund.com: They offer similar products but to different markets: one is predominently trade, one predominently customer focused. They vie for the same keywords.e.g. Buy Gold

My Issue:

I have been trying to build www.yourgoldfund.com up from an SEO point of view; it is FALLING in the rankings; I am doing NOTHING with www.ragsmetals.com and it is rising in the rankings.

I checked webmaster to see if there were any warnings as a result of penguin (found out how to do this on here - thanks for that!) there are none. I have optimized the pages a lot. I have put time into getting in bound traffic, and even more excitingly some experts (from reputable domains) have just linked to our site because they like our content! So to me things should be improving .

NOTE: My OSE listed inbound links are incredibly diferent from google Webmaster.

What can I do. I am a scientific person so I love the fact that I have 2 sites to compare...interested to hear your thoughts.

Many thanks in advance

[matbennett]

It's worth noting that most sites that get affected by penguin don't get bad link warnings.  The pattern seems to be that if you get a manual review & penalty you get the warning, but if you are just ranking poorly because of the factors surrounding backlinks that penguin introduced you don't.

The biggest give away to whether you are being affected by penguin are the dates at which your rankings drop. Compare these with the algo update history and you'll soon know for sure.

I'm guessing that is a pretty competitive niche, so I'd imagine it will be difficult to get much comparable data for the two sites until they are better established and have a lot more links.  However that is definitely the way to go.