Google Dance Macabe

Okay I have learned OODLES about SEO over the last six months. I diligently avoid black hat techniques like hidden text, non-relevant key words, key words spam, etc.

Today out of morbid curiosity I check my competitors back links 16 - we have well over one hundred and have recently added approximately fifty (ball park figure).

My competitor's page link is four.

My site's page rank is five.

I have done EVERYTHING white hat I can think of - running optimizers, getting quality back links (paid and non-paid), open directory listing, yahoo directoy, quality content, non-spam use of keywords. This is not a conspiracy theory about who or what is out to get me. I work really hard on providing quality content that is easy to navigate and useful for the end user.

Our site has a total of approximately 2500 pages and our competitors probably have less then one hundred. They list bare minimums of information while we are comprehensive in what we provide.

Not that any of you will be suprised, we rank WELL below our competitors for our four primary key words....when I say well I mean the middle of the second page. We'd drop even lower during the last update but have returned, which I was hoping for duing the last update.

We are not penalized because we appear but our serps are not what they "should" be - we do VERY well in MSN and Yahoo (#2) but not google. I was able to get on the front page ONCE for about two days.

Any thoughts??????

How old is your site?

I don't know the exact date, but I would have to say that it's AT LEAST over two years old. I have only been here since June.

I might mention I have done all the standard stuff, but not too excess - alt tags, key words, etc.

This is driving me utterly batty......

I did the time thing after we went from about twenty pages to 2,000 plus. I am STILL waiting and we dropped some too.