Hi grandin,
First, there are some differences between the sites.
a) some of the text and meta tags are different e.g.:
<META content="Landlord Mortgages Buy To Let property" name=description>
on lml.co.uk
and
<META content="Landlord Mortgages provide all types of mortgages for landlords and their property" name=description>
buytoletmortgages.co.uk
In other words you describe that your site offers mortgages in the second version, which may alter google's opinions
b) they are hosted on different types of server
zeus for lml
apache for buytoletmortgages.co.uk
Can't see why this makes any difference only that their settings and filters may be substantially different too
c) the domains were registered at different times
Feb 99 against April 99
One would have thought that that would favour the earlier domain but for this search term it doesn't.
d) they have been promoted differently, at least lml is much better promoted than buytoletmortgages it has many more back links and much higher representation across the net
As a summary look at:
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=lml.co.uk&word2=buytoletmortgages.co.uk
Also look at hotbot backlinks etc (acorn provides tools) and you'll see that lml is much better represented.
Again you would have thought that this would have favoured lml generally but not necessarily for that term.
All these things help explain why lml has a higher overall page rank than buytoletmortgages.
It also explains why lml are top of the yahoo search (#1) under buy to let mortgages (well done).
Google, however, have many ways of ranking a site, and some of it involves how specific your site relates to a term.
The mere fact that lml has many incoming links that are not specifically "buy to let mortgages" may confusingly dilute its exact relevance to the term.
and also the fact that:
e) buytoletmortgages has the search term in the domain.
helps this domain in this context.
However, remember that google's algorithms have been built up and changed for years and rely on some pretty obscure neural networks to determine which factors make it in the ranking stakes, and it changes on every update. Noone can tell you anything definitively, only their experiences, of which yours is a valid contribution.
-aqls-
