My competitors all seem to use "junk" pages to rank / backlink, how to compete and not cheat
-
Hello,
Page 1 of Google for the word "copier lease" and most other valuable copier leasing terms are dominated by the same 4-5 for organic (PPC too of course, but organic is what I want)
They all use some SEO company, so when I go and look for good link oppertunities, most of the pages I find are just SEO companies who of couse would never be interested in a competitor's link.
Examples:
ajaxunion blogspot com or excellentpoly blogspot com and the list goes on, all just AjaxUnion "blog pages".
blog homerenovationguide com /2011/06/15/repair-or-replace is just inhouse SEO making ranking pages for CostOwl.
So, its hard NOT to want to throw up a blog farm and do as "the Romans do".
What ideas do you all have to get backlinks in this market of Copier Leasing that would hold up.
Thanks
-
What did you pay in legal fees to set this up? That's something that needs to be considered as well, to make sure this is viewed by the government as a legitimate scholarship and not a contest.
-
Have $250-$500? Good.
Setup a scholarship for that amount and then create a page on your website that lists the requirements:
- Description of the scholarship
- Criteria (who can apply)
- Award amount
- Contest guidelines (if it is a contest)
- How to apply
- Deadline
Then, make sure to place a highlighted reference to the scholarship program on your homepage (so that others will link to you homepage).
Now, find 5+ colleges or high schools that have .edu domains and email their engineering department that you have a scholarship you are giving away in a contest and ask them to link from their website to your website so that their students will be informed.
In your content guidelines, tell them that they have to write an article that describes why they are the best candidate for the scholarship and then upload it to their own blog with a link back to your homepage.
Then just pick the best candidate and announce them after the deadline.
We did this for a client and garnered 4 .edu "do-follow" links, and over 30 .com/.net/etc... but the real plus was the upgrade to PR4 from PR3 and the shift from position 9 to position 4 on the first page of Google for their top keyword as well as several other page one take overs for relevant keywords.
Inevitably you will loose some of the links as people will take down the article... however, we retained about 85%.
Best of luck!
-
I agree, and getting outside the box to get legit backlinks that are not just "business focused" like being on a copier company maker website or BBB site often lead to tunnel vision. Many of the listed suggestions I have never tried - but will.
-
Situations like this are tough. In a competitive niche the sites that are ranking #1 are still spammers...just smarter spammers than the ones that got caught by Penguin. I was recently looking at the backlink profile of some sites in the car insurance niche. Yikes! These sites have in some cases millions of backlinks but they've been smart and instead of linking back with 100,000 links saying "car insurance" they've got a few saying "insurance for cars", a few saying, "automobile insurance", a few saying, "quotes for truck insurance". They've spread out their anchor text enough that Penguin hasn't picked it up.
At this point it would be impossible to compete against these sites by using completely white hat measures. (At least I think it would be...perhaps some incredible white hat SEO superfreak could do it, but not me.)
But, think of this. What is the point of Penguin? It really is to combat all effective types of webspam. And, penguin is just in its infancy right now. Google figured out how to go after obviously manipulative anchor text and now it's learning. This is why it has taken so long for new Penguin refreshes to come out - because it is difficult for Google to apply algorithms that effectively eliminate spam but don't take down legitimate sites.
I believe that over the next couple of years, Penguin will get more and more refined. Eventually these sites that you see ranking at the top using webspam will be gone. Then, the good sites will rank.
Ultimately the best option in my opinion is to start now at creating awesomeness and eventually you will win. But the problem is that that could take years.
So, if you are looking to make a quick buck then join the party and spam away. But otherwise, I wouldn't do it!
-
Even though you seem to be a little against it, the first thing I would do is report their nasty link farms. Sooner or later the algorithm will get smart enough to detect link farms by itself. There's nothing wrong with speeding up the process.
As for the rest of what you can do, most tips I had were already listed by others. In spite of all the algorithm changes, content is (still) king. The best thing you can do is create as much content as you can.
-
Aggressive approach would be reporting domains with non relevant links to Google.
-
but did you create google +Local Business Page? or just a regular Google +Business Page?
Its important to create a Google +Local Business page as well and connect it with your site
-
Great actionable stuff here! I just did the schema.org and did the "business" one, and did see some more favor from Google after just that simple addition.
Ohh and don't be afraid of your competitors, real contextual quality links outrank junk content link farms - TRUE
-
"What ideas do you all have to get back-links in this market of Copier Leasing that would hold up."
-
First make sure you go through the getlisted.org process for local - this will give you some solid links as well -structured citations even no-followed when connected and verified to your site are boosting your rankings, thats based on my experience.
-
Second go for links to competitors who are NOT ranking for this 'specific' keyword but are contextually in that industry,
-
Get yourself a video on the simple part of leasing and this info, embed it on your page that you want to rank, tag it properly and promote it on youtube, Use 'all' features available for videos on you tube, (captions and stuff)
++if you can add it to your site with a video sitemap and some links (not much)
- Mark up your site with semantic markups - schema.org - as much as possible
i can go on, but if you will make sure your site, speed and stickiness is there you should get up there quickly.
Ohh and don't be afraid of your competitors, real contextual quality links outrank junk content link farms
-
-
"These may suck, but I am not in your niche Just be creative as your competition obviously is not"
They don't suck, and are what I need to get the wheels of progress moving. I think of links in a convention sense, and whats there vs. what could be there. Linking to a "how to lease a copier" is what everyone does, but NO ONE has done anything creative.
(please do send me the SEO writer you like)
-
Please let me stress though if your onpage and social strategy are not there link building is not gonna do it by itself.....
That is why I recommend really delving into SEOMOZ resources, as they give a well rounded idea of the intricacies needed for an "Internet Marketing Strategy"
-
LOVE IT Cody, I actually used a recent image from Office Space for a PPC campaign and it did capture attention. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoIRL0p2PSY is what I think you are referring to. I will start the wheels spinning on how to "one up" whats already on the web, and make it better...the whole point of the internet - make it better - they will come!
-
I'm not quite at a "$2500/mo deal" so there has to be something between $2500 and nothing for building links around my content...
So I am in a much more competitive niche, and without giving to much away I do not spend a dime on link building, and compete neck and neck as a local business against national brands... With that said, my point above is you do not necessarily want to "Build Links" in the old school way, you want to create a content strategy that defeats you competitors crappy content strategy.
Copier Leasing
Copier Technical Whitepapers
A Funny MeMe Campaign about funny copier "offfice stories" or using the Office tv show
an infographic about the history of copying but maybe a funny take that goes WAY back to even Egyptian times
These may suck, but I am not in your niche Just be creative as your competition obviously is not
There are of course other white hat tactics you should be doing, that once again you have a plethora of resource material as a pro member that are not associated with content strategies (but many are)
If you cannot write these find a SEO copywriter or agency that can help but with even a 1,500 a month budget you could do wonders (in my opinion against a competitor like that)
and PS if you need a great copywriter I have a name I could pass you privately that she does great work PM me
-
I can definitely relate. I work in the auto realm which is less trusted than the government according to a recent study.
Anyway, rather than just writing good content, go after viral content that people will share. Maybe pull out an "Office Space" Esq campaign where you get even with office equipment. Stapler vs hammer? Monitor vs ground? Projector vs office chair? Printer vs a large amount of fireworks?
Then reach out to bloggers and humor sites to link back to your video.
-
I like the "Roman Empire fell It was more of a "desperation" cry than a real strategy. Quality content is working, and I'm not complaining, but "copier leasing" is just boring, so what I can do much more easily in the B2C world, the B2B world is not so "social". Most people that lease a copier have facebook, twitter, etc blocked even in their workplace.
I have been all over the site, and agree that more SEOmoz reading is helpful.
I guess my still "open" question is based on a few people (listed on this site as reputable SEO companies) $2500/mo and the first thing they all want to do is build backlinks as that is what I have 8 or less and only a few do follow. I create quality content, and it gets indexed and organic traffic, but it will never compete with my competitors who sit with hundreds of referring domains and pages.
I'm not quite at a "$2500/mo deal" so there has to be something between $2500 and nothing for building links around my content...
-
"So, its hard NOT to want to throw up a blog farm and do as "the Romans do". "
Yes, but the Roman Empire fell, and fell hard
Content, Content, Content - Would be my advice to combat a spammer! But BETTER content and and EVEN BETTER content Quality not quantity, make sure you are smartly using social and trying to do everything the right way and the tortoise shall beat the hare!
There are hundreds of resources here on SEOMOZ that can help you with an Internet Marketing and Content Strategy Start with the Blog and work your way to Whiteboard Fridays and even last couple webinars have been really informative and timely
Hope this helps
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/whiteboard-friday
And I am sure others will add more sources and ideas
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should my backlinks point to my home page or to internal article pages?
Hi, I run a fitness blog and I get the majority of my backlinks through guest posts that I write on high quality sites. Sometimes they allow me to put a backlink within the article, and I'll link it to a relevant article of mine. However, in the "author bio" section my backlink anchor text is usually just my brand name. I was wondering if this backlink should point towards my home page or is it more beneficial to point it towards an important article of mine? Thanks
Link Building | | jeremyethier0 -
Backlink question
Hi all. Here's the scenario. There is a company who provide financial services to their online clients. On ALL their clients sites they have a "payments-by-us" style logo with backlink to their homepage domain name. This means they have over 3,000 links from a multitude of non-related websites - with just 3 or 4 anchor text keywords in these backlinks. No surprise they have been hit by Penguin My questions What it the best practice for these type of linking LOGO's. Should they link to a dedicated page,and NOT the homepage? Should they have branded + anchor text, no text, or just branded? or a combination of each Should they even be a link at all as they are coming from such a diverse group of sites? I understand how Penguin penalises for overuse of money word keywords as anchor text. This is something that has definitely happened here (by the bucket load) ... Assume the anchor text is "Green Chips Finance" and that phrase is also overused and a bit "stuffy" in their homepage. Here's my question - could simply lowering the prominence / significance of "Green Chips Finance" on the actual home page, help in reducing the impact of the damage caused by the thousands of backlinks with "Green Chips Finance" as the anchor text? I say this as they have a similar number of back links saying "Red Chips Finance", but there is no mention of "Red Chips Finance" on their homepage other than in the keywords and a couple of standard text mentions (no H1, H2, alt text etc) ... interestingly, "Red Chips Finance" (not the real words) is Google No1 whereas "Green Chips Finance" has been demoted from longtime No1 to about 4. Cheers
Link Building | | BinaryTris0 -
Are sites that "smell of SEO" being demoted?
I'm working with a site owner who recently hired an SEO to work on just one particular type of keyword. It seems like the more work the SEO did, the lower the keyword gradually dropped. Granted, the "work" is pretty low quality - anchor texted bookmarks, comments and low quality articles. We're doing an experiment where we are going to disavow those links and see if the previous rankings return. Another site that I am consulting with has a lot of good natural links and then some anchor texted links, but from decent sources - some guest posts (on good sites - not a spammy site that exists only for guest posts) and some places where decent websites have agreed to link to the site. The anchor texted links do not make up very much of the overall anchor text. There is good diversity and lots of brand and url anchored links. It seems like the more the SEO does for this site, the more the rankings drop. And it's not all about anchor text. The SEO placed a link in a relevant directory, using the url as anchor...rankings dropped a little. They obtained an expired domain with relevant and very natural links and 301'd it to the new domain...rankings dropped several places. And so on. Occasionally the rankings will pop up a little, but overall it's a downward spiral. Check out this post by Gary Taylor. He did an experiment where he took an established site that was ranking well and threw some spammy links at it. To quote the article, 'every day goes by my ranking for the term “domains” is getting harder to maintain.' He recently tweeted that he has been removing and disavowing links and the rankings are returning. I was looking at searches for real estate related terms in different cities. In some cities, the top sites are ones that have ZERO obvious SEO done to them. There are sites ranking on page 3 that have been SEO'd, and not all of them have poor SEO. Many are what I would consider really well done. Some of the sites ranking on page 1 have under 10 links. There was one with 2 followed links and they were not from super authoritative sites! To complicate matters though, if you look at searches like "Toronto Real Estate Agents" some of the top sites have lots of keyword anchor texted links. Perhaps this should be a blog post rather than a Q&A, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts. My personal thought is that Google's main goal with Penguin and the unnatural links warnings is to make it so that not only is it not profitable to try to manipulate the SERPS, but that every time you try to do so, you potentially do your rankings harm. I used to say that Penguin could only affect a site on the date of a Penguin refresh, but I am thinking now that Google has managed to roll Penguin into the algorithm to some extent so that it can demote the majority of any work that smells of SEO. Thoughts?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
Does the feature "Competitive Domain Analysis " include subdomains?
Hey guys, I have set our domain as www.domain.com at the campaign settings, but i'm not sure if the link analysis ("Competitive Domain Analysis") does include subdomains? Does anybody know this? Greez Chris
Link Building | | lordcyphon0 -
Penguin and Backlinks
I have been looking closely at my backlinks. I readily admin that I have not worked on backlinks in years since for e-commerce there is little white hat opportunity but here is what I find in doing a detailed analysis. I mostly have back links that are pointing to our nicely ranked site (well it use to be pre-penguin) being hyjacked by crappy sites that just put us on the their site in order to try and rank. I have no way to prevent this. They are like a cancer. Point me to the Doctor. Is Goggle penalizing us for these guys listing us in long pages list to create pages that obviously exist for one reason...... To display Adword Ads....isn't that a twist that simply sucks for use but has Google making money either way. If they want to penalize us for them stealing our link then we should get a say in accepting the link. Advice on dealing with this? Do I have to hire someone to create enough good links to overcome this trash that I have no control over ? Perhaps my competitors are doing this. I simply can't tell. Any advice is appriciated.
Link Building | | freestone0 -
Wikipedia Backlinks
Does wikipedia nofollow backinks help your site to rank higher in google? I got a niche related backlink from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_(film) The page has pr 5... does this backlink count? (My backlink is in the bottom of the page anchored "Movies 2012")
Link Building | | prunarevic0 -
Different Ranking for "dermatology jobs"
Ranking for "dermatology jobs" (<cite>www.dermbuzz.com )</cite> on google.in (INDIA) is on first page whereas on google.com (USA) its on 6th page
Link Building | | getpromoted0 -
"Links" page Value?
I was wondering, Is there any value in these days to advice clients to create LINK US or LINKS page with bunch of reciprocal links on it and solely for link exchange, I remember reading somewhere that, it is little useless in terms for ranking nowadays? Am I right? Thanks!
Link Building | | DigitalJungle0