Hi everyone, Recently I started in affiliate marketing and referring people to sign up to a certain site, and I get compensated for that. Now my niche is Free Microsoft Points and that is also my main keyword. I have a few things I want to share as well as ask a few questions. One website I have been looking at is freemicrosoftpointsnow.com When you search for free Microsoft Points in Google it is on page 2 result #3. Now my site: microsoftpoints.net I have way more inbound links than the other site, and most of them have PR, and about 75% if not more are dofollow links. (I have around 1,000 inbound links, the other site has like 50) My site has also been around longer than the other as well. I just don't know what they are doing that I am not. And I am on page 13! And then the other day there was a new site that was on the 3rd page 5th result and it was only 9 days old. And the site didn't even have any meta keywords or descriptions, no H1 or H2 tags, and no Alt tags. But now the user added the tags, and remains on page 3. So I just don't understand how they get ahead of me. My site has been up for about 7 weeks and I have 1,000 inlinks, and good on page SEO yet I am getting beat by new sites that are only 1-2 weeks old. So I don't know how those sites are so ahead of me, leaving me in the dust. Any ideas on what I can do to increase my positioning in the SERPs? Thanks
Go for some high PR backlinks, NO FOLLOWs are also nice for SERP. (Tested on my site 20mil competition and i am already at top 10 for my main keyword.)
You are targetting quite a competitive keyword. Although there are only 133,000 competing pages it is getting 135,000 searches a month, which is phenomenal. On the face of it, this is worth going after. Most SEOs would advise looking for pages with fewer than 100,000 competing pages and over 1,000 searches a month. For a kw with just over 100,000 competing pages the search volume is phenomenal. That's what worries me. There must be a lot of very skilled people optimising for that keyword. How did you get your 1,000 links and what type of links are they? Do you build links steadily adding the same number every day or at least every week? How do you know the age of the competing sites? If you are constantly building keyword-rich links you should be climbing. I would need to know more about the quality of your links and the structure of your network, like how many web 2.0 pages etc...
I see Rob, I will try to gather more Nofollow inlinks, thanks. Well about 400 of those links is because of a forum...I have a couple thousand posts there and they just racked up there. Otherwise, the other links are mainly from commenting on blogs or articles. I don't do a steady amount everyday, more towards every week. However, lately I have slowed down a bit as it is hard work. But feel free to assess my site, you can find all the info you need: microsoftpoints.net
I haven't looked at your site, but here's a couple of guesses. Are your links from link exchanges? If they're from link pages, the links are worth nothing! Also, linking out to other sites SERIOUSLY drains your juice. I'd need more info though to make a diagnosis.
I never used any link exchange or link referral program. And I do not link out to other sites except for the referral link. However if I did link to other sites, I may use Nofollow tags.
Hi. I've just checked out your site and it's obvious what the problem is. Yahoo has you listed as having 127 backlinks, and they're basically all from notebookreview. From a single domain, each link after the first has less and less value, so most of them are pretty worthless. You really need to build links.
Ok. Here's where i think the problem is. If you put xmicrosoftpoints.net into it you get 940 links. If you put xwww.microsoftpoints.net into it, you get 127 links. I'm not 100% sure on this as i've never researched it, but you'll probably find that google only index the www version. That's probably where your problem lies. (the x is to stop links appearing)
This is very strange. Your sites www version is listed in both google and yahoo's directories, and has 3 google backlinks showing, but no indexed pages. Your non www version has 127 indexed pages. I've no idea what affects this has on google, so am totally guessing, but i'm sure it has something to do with your ranking problem.
Yes, the reason is because for some reason it only became a link for www so I put that to get backlinks, but then just stopped and used the non www url because I had more links and just built on that. Anyway I have a 301 redirect that directs all traffic to my non www url, and this URL is the one on page 13 on Google and page 3 on Yahoo.
The most important thing is to increase your count of quality backlinks. Just keep building them and eventually your ranking will increase.
There could be many reason why your ranking dropped to 13th page. Get relevant dofollow anchored backlinks from minimum outbound links pages. If you have doing some link exchange between both your sites, that could be the cause. Remove linking from your both sites and you could see some changes. Sometimes, google gives penalty on excessive link exchanges http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356