Good Afternoon all! I still struggle with the understanding of Googles theory and link relevancy to one's site. How come our competition can have links pages, with completely irrelevant links to the industry, and continue to rank 1 or 2 for keywords, as well as better PR? It would be easy to set these pages up, but it is my understanding this is not the right way to go about it. Has the PR thread hit 250 yet?
My advice to you is to observe what people are actually doing and what actually works rather than listen to all the superstition and Matt Cutts nut hugging that goes on around here.
Hims a her! But thats okay! Any further advice? What about all the chatter on the penalties for this? Most of what I have been reading says this is wrong, any thoughts on if G will be penalizing? All that I have read says, relavancy to your site..
Time for me to wear my "white hat": If you want a defensible, long term ranking - then I would recommend steering clear of the link farm. Those that rise fast to the top, can also fall quite fast as well.
You'll probably find after this PR update that your competitor will drop in the SERPs as Google starts to clamp down on paid and irrelevant links for the sole purpose to boost someones SERPS results. People are saying that's why this update is taking so long to happen becuase Google are making sure their updated algos for detecting paid/irrelevent links is working correctly.... Cheers .... Gerald.
Firstly the rankings in the search engines are determined by over 100 different parts so if you are trying to compare things based on links and PR alone you'll drive yourself in circles. Never worry about the competition. Understand SEO is done for Search rankings and it simply is solving percentages. If the competition is # 1 and has solved 80% of the SEO puzzle then you need to solve 81% and you will be # 1 Peace
Find out where your competitor is getting links "from" that's more important than where she links to. Look also at the anchor text. She could be getting a few great high ranking, relevant sites linking to her with good key words and is getting good serps in spite of the links pages. Lisa
If I had to give a shot in the dark answer without knowing the domain. I would say its domain age and the age of the links pointing to that domain.
I would suggest carefully following your comepetition if you understand that...Nobody really knows what works for if we did we wouldn't have to constantly talk about it.
The competitors site is probably older and has had more seo done to it. I'm not sure what you're talking about here.
Thank you all for your insight, gave me a little better understanding. Knowing what is ethical, but needing to question none the less. I belive alot of the links on the link page in question have been reciprocal, and irrelevant, nothing that I would really care to follow. Thanks!
It is the great quandary, in that we do not know what Google thinks is relevant or related. We can presume very relevant links have greater value than somewhat relevant links and even more value than slightly relevant links but the issue is we don't know the value to assign any of them. Therefore the best solution is to solve as many pieces of the puzzle as you can. Also need to remember for long tail keyword terms, often times the competition is listed up at the top due to pure dumb luck.. So following what they have done is not the best method to use to optimize your site for SERP rankings. Peace!
Ive done some checking - the competition in question does have alot of reciprocal linking to these non-relevant places. As well as, some of the sites that are linking into them, non relevant, have links using the "keywords" for our industry, pointing to their sites. I realize the importance of linking, and have tried my best to get relevant sites to link to us, as well as improve the site itself. Its just so dang aggrivating, and I would like to understand the why..they can get away with it!
Because way back when, reciprocal linking was natural ,when it occurred. It was typically done with site A saying hey this is a cool site and linking to site B Then at some point the person who owned site B found out site A was linked and sending traffic and they did the kind thing and placed a link back to site A The spammers entered the picture and now with have to deal with MattC telling us about google links cats books vacations ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz... You get my point. Anyhow you're in business for the long haul and hard work does pay off in time. I can tell you how to eliminate the competition, but it will cost you. Write the sites linking to your competitor, ask them what the competitor is paying, and then out bid them.. Outbidding the competition works beyond Adwords and Ebay ;-> Peace!