The subject that I want to make a website about has only 1 serious competitor I am concerned with. The other sites with this same subject stink! However this 1 site has a HUGE facebook fan following of over 200,000 people. Do I stand a chance at even coming in second at Google going up against a site with this huge of a FB following? Keeping in mind that Google does "favor" websites with large FB fans.
wot?????? who says it?? I don't agree, Google don't use facebook for their search result. in fact google thinks that social media shit is disturbing their search result by spamming and linking to irrelevant content. but if you're G+ fans are 200,000 than I bet you will definitely have an edge over SERPs
If the competitor is famous/globally known, then don't think you can beat it. Instead try to tie with it. I've been fighting with Discovery channel and wikipedia for 4yrs. Its not worth it, although I'm happy with 2nd.
Same here. Instead of discovery, I'm up against microsoft and wikipedia. I've blown away all of the smaller players as easy as 1-2-3, but these two giants are incredibly strong. To make things worse, the ones that I am fighting with are indexed since like forever and the pages have more than 500 unique linking domains pointing to them. We're also talking about dozens and dozens of external PR1 - PR4 links, plus the internal ones feeding them with even more link juice. Then you have the overall domain ability to rank pages, the 10+ year age factor etc. It makes quite a fight. It's not really funny.
Can't say but its top 10 in the world. Only I don't have NASA, a tv station, and a full line at walmart like discovery does!!! I feel your pain. The thing that upsets me(and probably you the most) is how wikipedia is on top of 90% of all Primary keywords. Maybe google should rename the engine and call it. Google Wikipedia(and whatever else) search.
Oh It is so nice to see I am not the only one who wants to take on the "big boys" Just to be clear, I don't have the 200,000+ facebook fans. My comepetitor does! I know that Google does not do their search through FB but they do put some weight on how active your site is in the social networks - or at least so I am told they do. Hence my reason to question if this is even achievable - How much weight on social networks do you all think Google does? I can be happy with 2ed place if I must. The site I am up against has been around forever, but at the risk of sounding like I am bragging I know I can create a more user friendly site then what they have.
Facebook fans doesn't mean anything these days though considering you can pay $200 and have 100,000 fans.
Wiki has established an enormous overall link popularity base and therefore the ability to rank pages is incredible. The real problem appears once those external links start to roll in and it becomes literally impossible to beat them within a reasonable time frame. The good news is that once you do it, there probably won't be a lot of people who could or even would want to try and take you over. My problem is so serious that not only am I fighting with an incredibly strong page (PR6 just to give you an idea of how strong the backlink profile is), I'm fighting with a 100% relevant page. In other words, I've seen wiki ranking high for various stuff but the page itself wasn't really "about it" completely. This one IS 100% about it and that's what annoys me the most. So yeah, you're totally right. It does upset me that they are able to rank them up rather quickly on their own and later let people make them "fixed" at the top spot by feeding them backlinks all the time. Social signals might become more important as time goes by, but they're not even nearly important today as some would want you to believe. Mostly the people selling these types of services.
no.only Facebook likes don't depend on Google crawling.Google in order to cache a site follows many rules like incoming traffics,bounce rate,number of back-links etc.so don't be afraid by seeing the number of Facebook likes.thank you
Don't afraid of your competitor and his fans.Study your competitor a bit..find his flaws..offer your users with solutions. Do study what are the disadvantages of using that website make it useful for you.About the fans....Don't pay any attention..Some people buy fans .
Thank you ALL SO much!!! I am most appreciative of each response here, as I have learned much from these posts. I know it won't happen over night, but this idea is something I plan to use to make my fun $ out of, so time is something I do have on my side
[QUOTEMy problem is so serious that not only am I fighting with an incredibly strong page (PR6 just to give you an idea of how strong the backlink profile is), I'm fighting with a 100% relevant page. In other words, I've seen wiki ranking high for various stuff but the page itself wasn't really "about it" completely. This one IS 100% about it and that's what annoys me the most. So yeah, you're totally right. It does upset me that they are able to rank them up rather quickly on their own and later let people make them "fixed" at the top spot by feeding them backlinks all the time.][/QUOTE] I have the same problem 100% about the keyword I'm fighting. HOWEVER, wikipedia is always low quality content as its written by practically anyone. Not professionals in whatever keyword it is, but still its top leader! Grrrr.
@truivia You can check this http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/ http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/