I have competitors who are doing the following: 1. Joining forums (and any other site that allows you to have a profile.) 2. Making their profile into a little mini sales page there are a couple of links to the product. Their username is always some variation of the target keyword. (They never make any posts on the forum) 3. Getting thousands of really low quality links (FFA junk) ... And this is within days and pointing them at the profiles they make. 4. Ranking extremely high on Google & MSN for the target keywords (for some reason Yahoo seems to be a bit smarter about this so far and isn't ranking these profiles as high.) Right now he has 3 of the top 5 listings for my most profitable keyword with these profiles on Google. More information: the keyword in question is something like Viagra (but it's not that, it's another similar product) ... I don't want to give the exact product name for obvious reasons (I'm already having enough problems!) I'm just stunned that #1 Google is so stupid that they are ranking all of this garbage so high... and #2 That he's able to get this many links so quickly and all indexed... I am thinking it has to be automated... I have to admit, partly I want to fight fire with fire... Make profiles or other junk domains and try to send thousands of links to them and see if I can do the same thing. I don't usually get involved with any sort of blackhat stuff (I'm assuming this qualifies as black hat?) but I'm just so frustrated that my site (which is really good and has quality links to it... at least in comparison) doesnt rank at all while these stupid profiles rank so high... For more back story, my site used to rank #1 on Google for a few months before dropping down to about #35... now it only ranks around that area and not even the home page... for some reason the homepage isn't ranking at all. I know this is a bit of a ramble... But I'm frustrated. I'm looking for some guidance... Either towards the light or towards the dark side. I'm not sure yet... Let me know what you think.
It seems that the competing site is ranking by the sheer volume of links to their site. Quantity maybe beating quality in this case. This can be overcome by acquiring a large number of links yourself (not necessarily low quality ones). Publishing an rss feed (and submitting the feed to rss directories) with full links in the content of the feed would be a great way to do this. It sounds as if the niche is a very popular & competitve one from your post so I'm sure there are many "scraper" sites out there who will directly scrape the content from your site or just use your rss feed to update themselves. This will lead to a lot of backlinks. Also consider link baiting.
you observation is right, same experience i have from my end as well for couple of my niches. competitors are getting ranked higher based on how many links they have. lots of those links are sitewide as well. in fact, one site ranked high based on its sitewide links (over thousand) from a high PR forum. no matter what google tells, buying links still works. so does comment spamming to some extent. unfortunate but true