My website has over 300 inbound links (Google Webmaster). Most of them are quality relevant links. Another site recently moved ahead of me in Google organic search and it has no inbound links that I can find.

I know how to do a link search and the competing site does not have any inbound links from other sites.

How are they ranking higher? Any suggestions welcome.

Does the other website have more relevant content? has the other site been around longer? is the seo better?

inbound links are but one piece of the puzzle. my site has 138 inbound links, my competitor has 92 and their site is ranked higher than mine with more page rank too...(interestingly enough, what galls me is that I built their site...) because it has more meaty content and has been around for several years (mine is newer).

1 top quality link is better than 100 low quality links. Other than that there could be any number of thing affecting either site but it is impossible to tell without seeing them.

There are many ways in which google ranks websites, not all are from 'links'. They also look at how often you update your website, how relevant the website is to its keywords (ex: are you just spam), how long have you owned the website (is it brand new?--less points).

Hope this helps

My bet would be that the other site has more authoritative incoming links versus yours. Authority plays a huge role in how links are tied to a page's ranking in the SERPs.

A couple of the sites that rank above me have thousands and thousands of links (I'm guessing both backlinks and exchanges). Will Google eventually catch this as cheating?

I would not hold my breath waiting for Google to do anything about it. The best you can hope for is Google to devalue the pages that links pointing at the site are located on and even that may not cause the site to drop much. Google will generally not penalize a site for receiving links.

I came across a Realtor's site yesterday that was ranking in the top 2 or 3 for very competitive keywords. When I checked, this site had a couple of thousand backlinks - all from forum signature links and run-of-site paid links - no reciprocals.

Even though the pages these links are on have no PR on the Toolbar - a couple of thousand links of any kind seems to be pretty attractive to Google.

That's what some webmasters says, be careful where/who you link to.

Fore the benefit of some readers - some webmasters panic at that statement though and choose to believe that means that a site should not link out at all - which is not what you are saying.

Having the right links leaving your site can still tell Google that you are a trusted site, a good resource - and will help and not hurt your ranking.

My statement must have been too general, bottom line is don't link to bad sites.

Many times people claim that a site has no backlinks but a thorough check find out that the site actually has many backlinks and even quality links.

Can you post the url in order that we can analyse it?

heres a tool that gives you an idea of what links are linking to your competition and whether their page rank is forged or not. if they have a forged ranking then you might not want to link to them, because when the hammer is layed you might be affected as well. www.checkpagerank.net

There also a few highly volatile techniques involving several domains, google, and redirects that can get a site positioned at the top without having a page rank or inbound links.

You can use a site's positioning to point it, or redirect it, to another site. Hence, leaving the trail of inbound and outbound links behind.

Sometimes this is necessary to move domains, but you can discover interesting things about PR and positioning doing it that way.

I’m not sure if it’s been covered or not, but I have had the same problem. There are different reasons.

The age of the site.
The ‘quality’ of links coming in.
The links are in a different category than where they are pointing to.
The ‘quality’ of the content of the site.
Correct usage of META tags.

There are more, but this is just the basics that I can think of.

300 inbound links are not very many...I have around 2669 according to iwebtool...The authority of the site means a lot - 500 links from page rank 0 is about the same as 1 from a page rank 5 site...

I would check the SEO of your site - are important things as h2 and in bold? How are your keywords? Look at that site and see what they are doing differently and how you can try to get ahead of them for optimization.

You should also strive for anchor text links. Good luck!

Google would gladly choose 1 authority link than a bunch of low quality links.

You don't see all the links. Just because you don't see the links it doesn't mean that there are no sites link to the site. Also, it is not just the number of links but the quality of the links that matter.

[quote=realyte]You don't see all the links. Just because you don't see the links it doesn't mean that there are no sites link to the site.[/quote]

That is very true, but this was back in 208 and there weren't as many tools available then, nor were they of the same capabilities as those available now, and we don't know what the OP was using. Having said that, it have tried some recently which show little or none for my own site whereas I actually have thousands, so maybe in some cases things haven't really progressed.

How else is a tool going to search for all backlinks to a site but by using a search engine? A search engine, like Google (or Bing) has the resources and power to index millions and billions of webpages.

Unless a particular tool has been indexing their own web engine, the tool will be forced to use a preexisting index, most likely Google.

If that is the case, then they will be limited to what a search engine is willing to reveal about their indexing methods, which will not me much. If, let's say Google, were to give you an accurate measure of all backlinks to your site, then they'd be compromising the integrity of their algorhythm(s).

The very basic answer to the OP is that Google values the other site as more authoritative (content & value of links) on that particular keyword term.

Doug, very well put and I believe the stigma of outbound links is one reason why webmasters are not taking full advantage of comment systems on their sites. Take a look at seomoz.org and how their "members" consistently comment and rate every post that their authors write (although seomoz doesn't allow outbound links). If webmasters were more open to allowing outbound links for quality comments, these sites would rank much better with the appropriate control.

It is not the stigma, it is the work involved in moderating the spam that forces most webmasters to turn off comments. If you allow links in your comments you will be overloaded with spam.

If your competitors are ranking higher than you, try improving your site's social markers. Google (post-Panda) is now placing increasing emphasis on improving search rankings for those sites offering the best user experience. Facebook Fan pages and Twitter are two examples.