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Ok, here it comes.  I'm Dutch speaking, my customers too.  The link to the homepage of the dutch part of the site is http://www.sixlight.com/NE/Verlichting.html.  The keyword is lighting in Dutch being Verlichting.  De other site that is ranking first appeared six months ago while mine is 4 years old and was for two years on #1 for that keyword.  Some weeks ago I started to drop together with the historical #2 and this third jumped over us from 10 to 1 in a few weeks.  The one actual on #1 is http://www.lichtkoning.be

So in my initial post I was comparing sixlight with lichtkoning.  Both are ranking in the top 10 with the homepage.

Hope this helps.  I leave it to you to see which one is the best.

SEO Majestic gives you a chart with the quantity of your links and also here I am better of than the other site.  Actually I thought Domain MozRank is giving an indication about the quality of your links too.

I agree with you that sometimes keyword stuffing is helping to get higher in the ranking.  I developed a theory that says that you get higher with every keyword you add until you pass an invisible line and then it is over.  So stuffing is good as long as you know where to stop

I compared my site ranking #10 for a given keyword with the site ranking #1 for the same keyword.

This is the result, the first value mine, the second value theirs ..

Domain authority  40  21

Domain MozRank  3.76  3.30

Domain MozTrust  3.57  2.43

Total External Links  32,567  571

Total Links  300,000  47,000

Linking Root domains  249  30

Linking C-Blocks  131  19

On top, my site is older, bigger, has more text, source controled, no dead links, more landing pages, more social networking, etc etc.

Anybody sees the logic ?

Rik

Thanks Marek for the usefull words.  Yes I still use meta-keywords as there is also Bing and Yahoo.  But of course you are right about differing the description tags.  I will change them asap.

Actually all this is about the Dutch version where I have "only" +4.000.000 competition for the keyword Lighting in Dutch.  I don't even want to try to compete in English with that word.  But then I compete with the Brand names and get my English speaking customers anyway.

Thanks again !

H-tags, titles,speed, and much more, I am very aware of the importance and using.  What worries me more than being dropped on #3 is that a site, appearing from nowhere, in 6 months can get to the top.  This site is in all ways inferior to mine, I mean inferior in terms of what google thinks is important.  Their content is fresher of course and they have less nearly dupicate content.  But it seems to me that history has no weight anymore.  It seems that once you are ther for three years, you are damn dificult to be caught.  Seems I am wrong.

For my understanding, analysing the results for years, sooner or later the mechanism, the algorithm behind (from Google) must become clear.  Thousands of people are on top and after making an inventory of everything possible that can be important, I don't discover new things anymore. It seems that they have some secret arguments left as, as you told yourself, in many cases the logic based on what is known is far far away.

And no, their domain is as bad as mine I started my site without knowing that a keyword in a domain name is important.

What I see is that in the top 10 there are 9 .be domains and only mine is a .com.  Maybe Googles starts to give importance at local domains.

And no again, I don't have many G+1, but they don't neither.  I have many pages on Facebook, a page on LinkedIn, a blog with my Google identity, an author link on my site pointing to this identity .... I'm getting out of arguments !

Maybe, I never got attention for PA and DA.  Only after starting to use SEOmoz that I became aware.  But my links are good, are many, my content and keywords optimal, my code good, my speed fast.  I have some nearly duplicate content as I have 27000 products on my site and the difference between product A and B can be very small giving nearly identical product pages.  But this was as such since the beginning.  Maybe Google has more attention for this now than some years ago.

Thanks for your answer.  No, I am quiet sure that my platform is the best what I can get in my country.  I was aware that a platform can be important for ranking as speed is important for google.

Six months ago a competitor e-commerce site appeared in the top 10.  Now six months later he is at #2. (for the main keyword in my sector in Dutch language, competition +4 million)

My site is 4 years old and since three years ranks at #1 or 2. I'm now at #3, behind the competitors site.

My competitor has a HomePage PA of 36 with 2295 links from 26 domains, root domain DA 23 with 175000 links from 30 domains.

My site has a HomePage PA of 49 with 6975 links froms 238 domains, root domain DA 40 with 310023 links from 269 domains.

I have more specific landing pages, better and more content, code W3C checked ....

Can somebody explain why a younger site with worse figures gets a better position in Google ranking?

Are you telling me now that I shouldn't be worried that much about SEOmoz flagging 6000 errors on duplicate content as long as my pages get indexed by Google and my site ranking well?

OK, I understand.  I saw others doing the same.  I only never guessed why they did group products where only the color is a variation.  Now you gave me a head-ache  as this is a very very major change in my approach if I want to group my products on one page.  In case I want to set up canonical for the preferred version, I need to sort out how to do this programmatically as I might have 27000 different product pages, HTML-wise I only have one.  But this can't be that hard to find out.

I stay with one doubt, however you might be right.  My site is 4 years old and for almost 3 years was on Number One in organic Google in Belgium with a competition of more than 4 million.  If Google at one time had considerated my approach of one page per product as duplicate content I never would have get there.

Highly appreciated, your comment as well as the one of donford.

Thanks.

Thanks for your answer and yes it makes sence.  However my products shift in brands, every brand has families and every family has product codes.  As the product code being the keyword - many visitors are looking for the product using the product code as a keyword - the SE doesn't have any problems to show the right page. If a visitor use the family name or the brand name in a search, my site has specific landing pages for those searches.

I launched my question because I am worried that my site will go down in the organic ranking because Google could consider all those product pages as duplicated content.  I never worried before because I'm in the top 3 for years now.  I only started to worry the moment I started to use SEOmoz and they give me thousands of errors for duplicated content.

Mainly, how much must a page differ in content to be considered unique and not risking a penalty from Google for duplicated content.  Or otherwise, how much must a page differ for SEOmoz not considering it anymore duplicated content.