I have spent the last 2 weeks exploring my top competition, how and why they rank higher than me on the search engines results, why some of them have PR higher than me and why some have lower PR but still they are higher on the results page. And I have found some very interesting facts, I have followed their back links, went into the pages to find their links trying to figure out how did they put their links their. I have reach some conclusions like some of them run a network of blogs only to get links to their main sites some run social media profile-pages and other pages like Facebook fan pages or content pages like hubpages, to link to their main page. But those social pages also have high PR and have too many links pointing to them (like link wheels). Almost most of them are getting links from article directories like article base. I did not found good back links from blog comments, there are some blog posts with their links in the bost that have a huge number of comments and have high PR. But never detected the links on the comments themselves. Some good links also came from forum discussions, but also with too many replies on the forum posts and I have also found large number of links pointing to that forum post. But here is my best finding and I am sure you all know about it, their High PR links that points to their main pages have: the search term they are optimizing for as an anchor text. Those pages have high PR because they also built links pointing to those pages through article marketing. There are too many social media links pointing to other social media links that point to their main pages. All of my competition even those who have lower PR have at least 10,000 back links more than my own website. The page on the second place have 42,000 backlinks that are PR0 and the page itself is PR4. And all the links came from social media sites and articles. Some of the article directories were owned by the same webmaster. All my competitors are using an automatic article marketing software (that also spin their articles) some of their articles have no meaning at all, because it was rewritten by a software. Some of the social profile pages also were generated by a software, because of the emails they are using there, and the content they have published on those pages. Now I know how they can manage to always update their blogs and in the same time build thousands of backlinks to their blog posts and main pages. So YES automate or die trying. If your competition are using an automated link generation software or service, they will always be on top, but also use the software wisely, do not generate thousands of backlinks to your main page at once, use your imagination.
It that really what everyone believes, that automation is better????? My experience has been the opposite.
automation is better if you're sick of doing hard work and want to get better rankings fast. Though in the long run, I believe that quality backlinks are the way to go.
Have you noticed that long tail keyword will be dead soon, Google now with it's fast search and completing the search term automatically will kill the long tail keyword and the competition will focus on the main short keywords. So mybe you are doing well now with the manual link building for pages targeting long tail keyword but soon the traffic from those terms will vanish. that's why it's time to automate and target high traffic search terms and compete
Not true. If you want to find how to jack up your 1990 Mazda Miata, would really type in something like "jack up a car" and expect to get a result related to what you're looking for? Wouldn't "how to jack up a 1990 mazda miata" work a lot better? The first search is going to give you results for cars you've never owned and the car you're looking for probably isn't going to be on page 1. You can do that for most searches and most people don't want to spend a half hour searching through pages and pages of results just to find what could have taken them seconds with a long tail keyword. Google Instant is a joke at best. It will be lucky to stay afloat, let alone kill long tail keywords.
the keyword is sometimes, for example, if you do a scrapebox blasts and actually take the time to think of general but appropriate comment, then chances are, the comments will stick
To OP, you did a great job analysing your competitors. I do pretty much what your competitors do and does the job. The only thing I can add is that avoid Xrummer and stuff and do the stuff semi-automatically. I can tell that your competitors use blog distribution networks like FreeTrafficSyste and as for the social media they might be using a network where real people bookmark their pages. So see there's not that much automation there but paid services.