There are many factors that google considers when ranking sites. One I have known about for a while is age of site. The maturity of a domain meaning how many years its been online has some important weight in your ranking. This morning on Webmaster Radio I heard someone mention Cool Seo Tool and I quickly checked it out. This tool not only shows you the age of your competitons sites, but also breaks down many other important metrics. Backlinks, keyword density, pages in site, and many other cool numbers to see are built into this robust and quick web based utility. Check it out for yourself at http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/