As a whitehat SEO how do you manage in a highly competative market?
-
I have a competator that has literally hundreds of sites like this:
http://www.wire-shelf.com/tag/cleaning/
that don't have a huge amount of page authority, but he is getting citations out of all of them. The site is obviously useless, and just a place for some SEO company to keep adding more links to their various clients, and creating google citations for them at the same time.
Once you have filled out your information on every single local database and obtained all the legit citations you can, your competitors are still beating you by having more citations, from various sites like the one above.
Is there any way to stay whitehat and actually succeed? or should i just follow suit, and make 100 crappy websites full of crap and put links in them. seems silly, but it seems like the only way to compete these days.
-
We all feel your pain. Looking at the local landscape of SEO firms in our market you see a lot of this. Ryan and Dignan99 have it right I think. Five or six great links will overcome all the spammy stuff.
Look at great content ideas. Do a day of out of the box thinking about on site content that will draw a crowd. Use the standard content ideas to start ( Tips, Forums, Contests, Opinion, events). You need real sites to notice you and real traffic to overcome the less imaginative but prolific 4000 links to a url crowd.
In my experience it takes components of at least three for this type strategy, meaning not just the content, but the distribution of it, and the promotion of it. All three areas have to be good. Where throwing together a bunch of low quality sites is a component of one thinking. Low quality linking and SEO (Like most things I suppose) are symptoms of taking the easy road, and the course of least resistance.
So, not only can you write some great content ( or have a professional do it) that will draw some attention, but you can also promote that content through ad words for a short period, and face book ads, with a very targeted campaign to the bloggers and movers and shakers in the Industry.
It's the old my blender can blend an i pad thought process. I bet if you really find something interesting and unique to demonstrate on the site, promote it well, and distribute the information in a thoughtful targeted manner, you can and will out rank the dark forces.
-
Looking at the wire-shelf.com page, it does not cross the line to black hat at all.
Yes, it is clearly articles written for the sole purpose of providing links to their site. The articles are long enough and written well enough (not great, but ok) to pass a test of whether it is legitimate content.
With that understood, the page is very low quality. It has 5000 links from 7 sources. The page has about 10 different articles on it. The page is full of Google ads, many of which are to competing storage companies. What this page does primarily is offer a low quality link to your competitor.
We all hope that Google will catch up at some point and be able to eliminate these type of sites in the form of another Panda-style update. It will happen at some point and when it does you will keep your ranking, while your competitor will drop like a stone.
In the mean time it cannot be hard to beat this particular tactic. If you take the time to write one quality article and it gets picked up by a dozen quality sites, the traffic and link value your article would offer will outweigh all the crappy articles like this from your competitor.
-
Hi...
I definitely can understand how frustrating it is to be in such a competitive market and industry, especially when people seem to be using blue/gray/blackhat type of strategies that seem to be pushing them ahead.
My best advice is to stay the course and know that these get to the top quick schemes will eventually be dealt with by the major search engines.
In the meantime, try to learn as much as you can about:
Organic SEO techniques
Local SEO techniques
Social Media Marketing
Genuine link building, which includes building relationships with local businesses, communities, and blogs.
Building relationships with your customer base
You have to start somewhere, and like I have said before, Rome was not built in a day. So work on each strategy, and move on to the next. By the time you are done many of the search engines will have caught up to your work and your rankings should improve.
SEOmoz is a fantastic place to start, from the beginner seo guides, to the forum posts. If you think this will take too much time, consider becoming a client of one of the pros.
Best of luck
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
-
Finding Resources for Content Marketing with a Difference?
We have been creating written content for a client over the last year with great success. Locating websites across the internet to publish our articles was not difficult, just a little time consuming. Now we have decided to take this a step further by creating a comic strip for the same client. The only problem is, we are having great difficulty finding a site that would be suitable for publishing this content. Its not an infographic, or slideshow, or video and its not a written article. The usual search operators are no good as this is our first attempt and REAL comic geeks are so serious about the art im scared we'd be pulled apart. Does anyone know of any resources which would publish this type of visual content? Thanks for your help! Hayley
Image & Video Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
WordPress image file names SEO question
I’m using a plugin to upload images directly from Adobe Lightroom to WordPress and while the process is very convenient it adds “wpid-“ to the beginning of every image file name, so my “seo-friendly-image-title.jpg” becomes “wpid-seo-friendly-image-title.jpg”. The plugin author claims that it’s a WordPress thing and there isn’t anything he can do about it, yet it doesn’t happen when using the same plugin to upload to the NextGen Gallery Plugin instead of the built in WordPress media manager. I’m not really a fan of NextGen though so I’d rather use the built in WordPress media management. This is obviously an SEO forum not a WordPress troubleshooting forum, but I wanted to give a bit of background. My question is whether that “wpid-” at the beginning of all my image file names is going to cause any sort of SEO issue. If not, I won’t worry about it, but if it does I’ll have to either find another plugin or just go back to exporting from Lightroom to the desktop and then uploading through WordPress. Thanks in advance for any input.
Image & Video Optimization | | StephenWeigel0 -
Do UBL or Localelize work in non-US markets?
I am planning on launching a local SEO campaign in RU, DE, UK, AU, SW, FR and ES... is using UBL and/or localelize worthwhile for me or are those US focused services?
Image & Video Optimization | | theLotter0 -
Local SEO
Would like to read articles on local SEO that have been recently published in the past few months. Has anyone come across good articles on this topic?
Image & Video Optimization | | casper4340 -
What is the SEO benefit of embedding YouTube videos on a page?
Is there SEO benefit to embedding YouTube videos made my other people or companies on pages? The indirect benefit would be a better user experience and increased perceived value and usefulness of the page which could lead to more links. Are there any other benefits?
Image & Video Optimization | | ProjectLabs0 -
Local SEO - Confirming an Address that Does Not Receive Mail
Hi guys, I have a question that might have been asked previously but warrants asking again. What is the best workaround for Google Local verification for a business that is located at a physical address that does not receive mail. I have a friend who lives in an area that does not receive mail. This particular person tried using a local PO box to verify, but as it turns out that is a poor option a) because it is not allowed within the guidelines of Google Local, and b) because the listing was not accepted as a unique address and is listed without an address in Local because of this. Is there anyone with recent experience in terms of getting around this and verifying perfectly legitimate businesses in no-mail areas? I would have thought Google would have provided a workaround for those types of businesses. Any thoughts / experience would be appreciated!
Image & Video Optimization | | toddmumford0 -
Local SEO, identifying citations
Hello, How do I identify free local citations to target for bobweikel(dot)com I want to rank first for several local results such as nlp boise life coach boise personal coach boise and related terms. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
SEO benefits of linking logo to homepage?
Hello All, It will be helpful if anyone can list the benefits of linking the company logo (on every page of the website) to the home page, and how important it is in terms of internal linking / SEO factors. Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | NortonSupportSEO0