new guy overtakes us in days

hi,

I'm an oldie from devshed forums, but I'm having a little issue with SEO.

I have a site: URL, and we were doing quite well - we started on july 2004, and we went up to about #5 or #6 quite quickly. however a few weeks ago, a guy started another site, basically copying us (http://dino.angry-lizard.com) and hes already jumped up to about #3 or #4 for some terms, and we've dropped back to about #10 or #11 without changing anything.

so does anyone have any ideas whats up with the SEO? we were fine until he came along :-?

computer

Sounds like you were doing fine until something in the algo changed. I doubt that the appearance of one site would cause you to drop several places in the SERPs.

Why do you think he is copying you?

If you want to hold your old position you need to start working harder on the backlinks.

heh well me and a co-admin are both mods @ Devshed forums with over 3 or 4k posts each, and link to it in our signature, yet if I do link:http://www.dynasig.net I don't get any Devshed results in the results (!). Is there anything obvious on the homepage that is deterring google do you think? We have google visiting us often too.. we had 3 or 4 bots trawling it this morning for a while...

I'm a bit of a dunderhead about these things and I may be wrong, but having read about these two articles I think they might help:

http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?t=14871
and
http://forums.seochat.com/archive/t-14202

HTH

hes using exactly the same keywords and 'tagline' as us, which is why we think we're kinda being copied... plus its a pretty unique idea that since we started advertising it around devshed, he came along and started the same thing, although he told us it was totally unrelated to us and he was going to do it anyway (yea! right!)....