I have never bought or sold a link. I have never done that. I have only tried to gather links from article submission websites, social bookmarking, directory submissions, etc etc. BUT, recently my site fell from #2 to #18 and now it keeps swinging between #11 to #18 while my competitor is doing soooooo much better. In fact, he has two of his page showing up for one keyword. I did a little research to see why is he doing well and I was shocked to see the HUGE number of sponsored links has has under his belt. I mean he has links on wordpress.org, washingtonmonthly.com and a LOT of sites related to my niche. This is sooooooooo heart wrenching!!! I have done nothing but to do proper SEO, I have never violated any of the Google TOS or guidelines for webmaster and if I did, at least I fixed it right away (duplicate meta, not found error etc) I wish I could do something about it. I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way and I am sure there must be many other webmasters who must know how I am feeling! PLEASE can you give me an advice? First, I want to get out of this depression! It's saturday night and I am depressed really and second, please tell me what should I do? Should I report him? If I report him, would Google also hurt my rankings in some way? What to do? :s Thanks for listening! z
Sites that sponsored templates, bought links, etc. rank higher than other sites (most of the time at least). I would suggest you to try to build some quality, strong backlinks. There is no other way. If it's going to be a linkbait, buying links or some three way exchanges... it's up to you.
ofcource you are right. and i am totally agree with you... I have website for which i bough links, and it has more than 15000 links in yahoo site explorer, and google shows more than 500 back links. And PR 5...
Yeah but the point is Google was suppose to stop this. This would kill webmasters who do not have that kind of money to promote their websites by spending thousands of dollars!
Where is there a code that says that life is fair- Yes it's heart wrenching but regardless of the fact he has "PAID LINKS" the fact is he has links- spend your time building more links instead of complaining about him, it's not helping your sites is it, figure out a way to double or triple your links and still be holier than thou
You might. You might also rank number one. Based on what you're observing going on, which do you think is more likely?
I guess you can report him. This will release your depression Also, try to get links from some high PR pages.
It is difficult to believe, but 99.99..99% of payed links are newer penalized. Maybe the SERP impact (not PR!) of these links will be reduced, but not completely. So, relax and prepare to have a budget-war...
As you said, he has link on related site (..a LOT of sites related to my niche) It means very clear, he is working and you are not
I think a good way to work with this is. Sponsor some wordpress themes. You pay around $20 and you get tons of backlinks. And sometimes you can get PR 5+ backlink for free..
For example to have a TOP for some highly competitive keyword my monthly budget is about 2000-3000$ per key. But the profit is much higher.
Guys, guess what. I did a little more research and what's amazing is that there is HARDLY any site on the top SERPs that hasn't bought any link! Everyone buys links! I am so god damn late with all this link buying! I am just too scared of getting penalized
That's not a big surprise after all. The competition in most of the niches is pretty high and buying quality strong backlinks helps a lot.
I think it's one ot those times where you have to take your chances - buy a few high PR links and see what happens
Well, I don't know much about buying links. A little help in this regard would be highly appreciate. Also, if there is some other way you could help me with getting links without buying them, that would be great. Any ideas?