I'm gonna make a short comment about what I have encountered. I'm not sure whether any of you have notice this but here goes. This is what happened. So i had a website ranking well for it's targeted keyword in google. It was at position 3. I got there by building a small blog network. Contents were relevant and they were strong links. But I wanted to hit no.1, so I decided to get more links to my site. I started buying links (3rd party). They were strong links with juice of course. Unfortunately, they were not as related as the ones i built. Somehow, those new links kind of overlapped the relevant links and I lost my rankings (Dropped to the 2nd page) I then took off those not-so-relevant links and my rankings dropped even further. I'm just wondering if any of you experience SEOer have ever encountered this problem. Link diveristy and anchor text ratio are well below 20%. What I took from this experience... is... not to build links from stronger irrelevant sites even though it's flooding with juice
Unfortunately Google's updates have made link building really difficult for Webmasters. I have personally seen drops in sites that I thought had great links with juice, but according to the newest algorithm updates, they were not "juicy" enough. Since so many people in the past were buying links, that's a big Google slap in the new updates. The ONLY links to your site that are going to matter these days, are super high authority sites that are still in their top rankings even AFTER the Google Penguin and Panda updates. DO NOT buy links, it will kill your site. DO NOT create tiny blogs that have only a couple articles on them DO NOT link to everything and anything remotely close to your topic These are the main three things link builders have been doing and Google has made them pay dearly for their efforts. You need natural juicy links from guest blogging, or other webmasters linking back to you in your niche. Google will slap just about anything else, with only a few exceptions. And ALWAYS remember, content is king.
Personally, I've come across alot of sites that breaks all the rules and still rank at the top despite the many updates. If you do a search for acne treatment, how to lose weight fast etc you'll come across some of them. How many of us actually succeed just by publishing great content on a blog or site? To start a blog targeting XYZ - posting great content about XYZ and just wait for the market to link to your blog? Most of the time, there's only so much you could write about XYZ. I think it's about time we realize that we can have the best content regarding a topic... and google will still not rank it!
Very false, VERY false. I have several sites following exactly what I said and they are doing GREAT! First off, you don't just wait for webmasters to link to you, you can actively go searching for them. Talk to them, ask them to view your site and link to it if they like it. Also, you can actively search for webmasters to guest blog on. ALL of that will do wonders for your backlinking strategies. Google's updates are coming out literally every couple months. So these "wrongly" done sites, WILL feel the wrath of Google at some point, unless they are currently changing their strategies. The problem with those HIGHLY competitive sites is that they have SO much invested in paid traffic, paid SEO, paid linking etc etc. that Google will have a harder time affecting them. Each Google update only affects a small percentage of sites in the search, so each update is affecting more and more. And to say there is only so much you can write about XYZ is absurd. If you cannot think of anything else to write, hire a professional, because I promise you a pro WILL find plenty to write about. And more than writing something different every day, it's about expanding on topics, getting new tips, and being active in said community.
If you want to go the paid link route, and I still believe that it DOES work btw, make sure that you keep your own private network clean and "lived in", they don't really need a lot of content, but they do need to be on topic and they should be able to pass a Google human reviewer (even though you'll probably never get one). But if you want to go the paid link route, you can still do that too, but you need to be picky...SUPER PICKY. Check the URLs first, check the DA and Trust Flow. Check how many links are pointing to the domain. Find out how man obl's there are and how many are going to be the max on that domain at any given time. Find out if they accept links to only relevant categories. Check the history of the domain and find out what other sites have been on them. Were they also blog networks that have a penalty? High PR power links still work, I don't care what anybody says, but you need to be smart about it. You also need to offset them a bit with other lower pr, but quality links as well. That's not to say that what RJLandsdown is saying isn't a good strategy, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. Hope this helps.
That sucks. I would have to say the that best strategy in that instance would be to keep the less relevant backl links and try to add more strong relevant ones, perhaps weeding the irrelevant ones out slowly over time and not all at once. Gotta love that Google algorithm. Like juggling flaming knives while balancing on a unicycle isn't it?