Google Conundrum

[webzilla]

Hello. I hope somebody could answer my two questions below regarding these 3 websites:

SITE 1: www.favorsbyserendipity.com - site rank 5; backward link 111

SITE 2: www.myweddingfavors.com - site rank 7; backward links 1,550

SITE 3: www.beau-coup.com - site rank 6 ; backward links 1,500


QUESTION 1:
When you do a search on Google for "wedding favors", SITE 1 appears first, which obviously has less links than SITE 2 and 3. What could be causing SITE 1 to appear before SITE 2 and 3? To me, they all appear to have the same level of quality links and content-rich pages.


QUESTION 2:
Also, if you look at SITE 2, it has numerous links pointing back to itself in the form of forwarded URLs such as www.online-wedding-favors.com/new.html. The thing that perplexes me is the significance of "/new.html" after the URL. Why not just have the URL itself redirected to SITE 2 directly. Also, if you take the "/new.html" out of the URL, the URL is just a blank page. Is there a good reason for doing this? Does this increase SITE 2's PR on Google or its relative position?

Thanks!

Webzilla

[awall19]

q1: they probably either have lots of low pagerank links or they use better anchor text in their links (meaning more links with wedding favors in it)

q2: I do not think it raises their pagerank to use an interior file.

the reason they are using multiple domains like that is perhaps some form of trickery...either cloaking or trying to make the links look like they are spread over many more sites than they actually are.

[seoguru]

Originally Posted by awall19

q1: they probably either have lots of low pagerank links or they use better anchor text in their links (meaning more links with wedding favors in it)

q2: I do not think it raises their pagerank to use an interior file.

the reason they are using multiple domains like that is perhaps some form of trickery...either cloaking or trying to make the links look like they are spread over many more sites than they actually are.

Awall19 I though even backward links from interior files count. Are you sure of this...

[awall19]

inner pages count as backlinks too, but he was talking about why specifically they were using links from an inner page of a site that does not exist vice using links from a home page that does not exist.

each page does have some finite amount of pagerank.

[seoguru]

Ok.. I got your point...