It appears that this morning both MSN and Yahoo have decided to reward me for weeks of hard work by placing my site at #1 for my most important keyword - the nature of my business. All of my other keywords - about 10 in total - are being returned in the SERPS between #1 and #8. I've been busy building up links over the past month or so and Yahoo now lists some 18,000 backlinks, MSN 3,000, and google, erm, 19 ... Although google has given the site a PR4, it's still only showing 19 backlinks and NO organic SERP results! However, if I search using allinanchor:, my main keyword is listed at #24 - others between #30 and #68. My question is this: does this early success with Yahoo and MSN in any way indicate my likelihood of success with google ... or is it a matter of returning to the drawing board to plan a new strategy?
Looking at your links, I would change strategies. I saw several automated blog comments (unlikely to count in Google) and some sponsored sitewide links (also much more likely to just be set at zero). Those kinds of links will help you in MSN/Yahoo, but Google is much better at filtering them out.
Each search engine has its own way of ranking websites. Your No. 1 position in both Yahoo & MSN does not necessarily mean that you will get a better ranking in Google.
kneukm03, I also thought that sidewide sponsored links could count against me, but my main competitor has purchased the EXACT same sponsored links ... and his site ranks number #1 for ALL the important keywords in my industry in the organic google SERPS. In addition, his site has more than 1,000 google backlinks listed from the same sponsored sidewide links ...
Rank in Y can indicate rank with G. But success with MSN does not indicate pending success with either G or Y. Speaking from experience.
Just to clarify, I don't think it will count against you in the sense of a penalty. I just think it is likely that they will give them less weight as a link than yahoo or MSN would - Google is making an effort to root out paid links, and sitewide links are the kind of thing that are more easily identifiable. So for those links, you could end up with benefit in Yahoo/MSN that you don't get in Google - making it harder to tell what you'll actually end up at. The other thing is that your competitor having them doesn't necessarily mean it's the reason that they are at #1 there - it could be that those links don't count much, and they're getting ranking for other links that they have. For instance, I just ran SEOElite (good tool if you're making enough to afford it) on the competitor - he's got a lot of junky links that probably don't count for much. 400-1000 links on the page in addition to his, etc. - but he also has a decent number of high quality listings on related sites, or links with fewer outgoing links on the page and OK PR. My bet is that those are the links that are getting him to the top of the rankings.
Thanks for the indepth reply kneukm03 - it's much appreciated. I think that the benefit in MSN and Yahoo is worth the low cost of the paid links, but agree completely on the need to obtain high quality listings on related sites. The only drawback, of course, is that this is very time-consuming. My site is only three months old - the competitors more than three years old, so he's obviously had the time to build up reciprocal links. Would you suggest that the best strategy for me to pursue would be to exchange links with similar-themed sites that have a good Page Rank, and then hope that google deems such links to be worthy?
That's kind of hard to say. Personally, I think Google gives weight to links from even irrelevent sites, just not as much. I don't think the co/op would work otherwise, and I've plainly seen it have an effect. That's a whole different debate, though. I would prioritize relevant, good links because they can give you some traffic on their own and however good their algorithm is now at determining what is relevant, it will probably get better in the future, so you'll want those links most. But if you have the time, I personally think it's worth it to get any link that's going to get indexed and where the site doesn't have some penalized SEO-method on it. But to be honest, in your particular niche that is going to be hard to do because people with jewelry or travel or whatever sites won't want to link to it. If a site is willing to link to your site, it's probably going to be relevant by default, so it may not be something to worry about.
Noticed that its is the case on my behalf GOOGLE has only been linking 14 of mine for about a year or so whilst on Yahoo and MSN I have a steady increase of links? ____________________________ London escorts Escort agency London
basically google is very selective in determine how many links you got. anyway, if there is PR4, then there must be some good link coming in