I had great link building success over the last 12 months, traffic is up and steady, and my PR is up from a PR3 last August to a PR6 now - but now I am hitting a brick wall - my methods no longer yield the same results. I started to theorize, perhaps now my site is more established, I need to look for even more powerful links - the small no-name-sites and blogs seem to have a much smaller effect. Alternatively, have you also hit problems with link building now? Anyone have any thoughts?
A PR 6 is not bad at all. And don't forget that the number of links between a PR 6 and PR 7 as a lot lot higher than the number of link you need to go from PR 1 to PR 2. Everytime the number of links to go to a higher rank increase. And with a PR6 I shouldn't focus on the pagerank anymore. You have achieved that already. Now focus on quality and getting more visitors. The SEO part is okay now, so go over to the business part and try to increase the number of rss subsribers for example. The number of subscribers is more important than the pagerank after all.
Content is king is really the case, huh? Should I focus all my energy on the content and forget about link buying? Good point.. I didn't think of RSS.
No, not entirely. But now focus more on the customer/visitor. If you write very good sticky content and people subscribe to your rss feed, there will also be more people who you might inspire to write about the same topic and if they qoute you or or what else, they will link back to the original source which is your website. So try to be more customer focussed and let your community you build up do the link building. By achieving this you will also get better quality links. P.S. Maybe you like this website about writing and building up a community : http://www.skelliewag.org/ *** For example I am subscribed to a tech blog called ghacks. I look everyday in my rss feed for new posts and this guy write everyday around the 4 or more new articles. I read the most of them and if you scroll down to the comments I noticed that many times there are some trackback links from people blogging about what he wrote and linking to him. So he build up a community with on this moment around the 10700 subscribers and many of these subscribers are also webmasters. He inspire these people to also write about what he wrote and so he get his backlinks. The nice thing is that the site is not older than 3/4 years I guess. And that is done by a visitor focused approach. Cool isn't it?
Unfortunately your opinion is disgracefully wrong. Also to the thread starter: you have a PR6, I really wouldn't worry about your backlinks at the moment. PR6 is really high and there are not many sites with a higher pr than this except large corporations... I would focus on building more and more quality content and getting those return visitors, generally try and make your site a better browsing experience. And ofcourse improve on your inhouse SEO and monetisation.
Everything reaches a saturation point and as with economies of scale, the effect diminishes after a certain point. For example, at the initial phases 1 input may provide 1 output, but as the output increases the proportionality decreases. Same may be the case with you link building success. Having attained a level, the effects are flattening out and it would worth concentrating on high quality links and other avenues for search engine optimization.
Why would you want to go higher than PR6?.. I think you've reached a point where you don't need to worry about PR... focus on getting quality traffic to your site, to increase conversions (which is what I'm assuming you want more of)... By the way, how did you manage to reach a PR6?.. Care to share any tips/advice?