What is so different about these pages in the SERPs?

[slinky]

So I've taken a look at a couple of different sites and competitors but cannot explain why the same site keeps coming up so highly ranked for some terms.

(This is really frustrating... if I have to wait until 30 posts just to post links... I can tell you, it's not conducive to being in this community!!! Yes, I know about spammers!)

Search Bing for "statute of limitations california" and then do it in google.

The same expert guy comes up at the top of each one. Findlaw comes up second. acollectionagency comes up fourth in Bing but on the 4th page of the SERP in Google. And thelaw comes up fifth in Bing and nowhere to be found on Google.

What is the secret some of these guys have in keeping their pages up at the top? Is it better with really short urls? Are longer category/subcategory urls bad? What are the other factors that just makes such a huge difference between the 1/2 and 4/5 here? Does anyone have insight?

[swerdlow]

Are you asking why ExpertLaw ranks well?

The Domain's been registered for 6 years, the California statute page has an exact title tag match, looks like a legitimate legal authority webmaster'd by a real lawyer, listed twice in the DMOZ, Alexa 16k so its obviously a well known site, 100k+ indexed pages on Google, close to 300k yahoo inlinks, the page itself has followed links from answers.com and ehow.com

its just a really authoritative page.

[sultanofseo]

(This is really frustrating... if I have to wait until 30 posts just to post links... I can tell you, it's not conducive to being in this community!!! Yes, I know about spammers!)

you answered your own question. we see all the time that spammers with bots/tools like xrumer or others make automated posts on forums that promote poor user experience. lot of new members also sign up with a sole intention of spamming some links or get a few quick backlinks. i wish all the forums enforced such policy which would stop spammer to develop or use such spamming tools.

What is the secret some of these guys have in keeping their pages up at the top?

there is no secret really. they know what they are doing and they have been doing it for a while, thats all. you develop a game plan and target to outrank your competitors. with enough time and hard work, you will be able to outrank atleast few of them.

more profitable a niche is, more competition you will face and more money your competitors will pour into promoting their sites. you just have to do all your competitors are doing and then some to outrank them

check to see how old their domains are, analyze their site to understand their onpage optimization, and most importantly their backlinks. see where they are getting their backlinks form and how many links they have. some wiil be useless links but there will be lots of quality links as well. you need to understand which links would worth go after and get as many backlinks you can from the same or similar sources your competitors have.