Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

First be brutally honest with yourself; is your site in the same league as those that always come on top? I'm not suggesting it isn't, but pushing your luck is often a suicide note to Google.

I'd first consider on-page issues, and all the specialist directories in your area, before I'd ever think of link exchanges; non-competing usually means not wholly relevant. And across-site exchanges do stand out like a beacon.

The content of my site is first class, and honestly deserves #1-4 ranks for most queries. Anyone in the industry would tell you this.

In fact I have some very high ranking pages, but I'm not able to push up into the SERPs unless my pages themselves have a good number of backlinks. Being that my site is news-oriented, it's hard for me to build content for not-new things and rank well, because I don't get IBLs for those things.

Many of my competitors can post just about anything on a certain subject and rank well for it, regardless of whether people link to the specific page.

My partners are sites that have no sneaky SEO stuff going on or anything questionable. All of them have been online for many years.

Linking to those sites from any kind of menu bar would only be done if there were an immdiate benefit to visitors or it impacts your sales.

I don't sell any products ... my site is stricly ad supported.

In fact, this is not completely contradictory to the fact that a good amount of fresh content is also a positive ranking factor, although that may seem so at first sight. I guess particularly a news site may have some trouble with this catch twentytwo.

I know this has nothing to do with your initial question but maybe it gives a hint why competition is so hard for you. If a high number of deep-backlinks is your only means to push pages, there is probably something "wrong" with your overall site-structure.

Fair enough, here it comes:

You have more links pointed at you than any of those websites, so questions I would ask are:

How long have you been online for?

How long is your domain registered for?

What is the percentage of links to your homepage, or do you have alot of deep links to articles etc?

Do the links that are pointed at your homepage include the anchor text 'news'?

Are you listed in dmoz.org, and are your competition?

Do you have proper titles for each page and unique meta descriptions for each page.

Remember that a website that has thousands of links one way to it can still rank poorly if the Title is poor, and content on the page is either not original, or simply not on topic.

Most IBLs are to articles.

The name of my site includes 'news' but not 'widgets', so i do have a lot of links with the former, but not with the latter. I'd like that to change with any possible link exchange.

I am in DMOZ.

All pages have good titles. They don't have meta descriptions.

This makes a difference. Any ideas how long your main competitors have been online for besides the 5 year guy?

Are all of your pages indexed, and do you use a proper sitemap. Increasing the number of page indexed helps as well.

Make sure your site navigation is good. Try moving links to important parts of the site closer to the top of the page 'in code'.

You may still be suffering slightly from a filtering effect.

I would look at something along the lines of a press release and article writing with distribution instead of linking reciprocal from home page to home page if you can afford the $$.

If you can afford the article writing and distribution it could end up well worth it. I would link to the home once from the resources box of every article with a variation of the keyword you are talking about. I would change the variation each time I send off a new article. As well, get a second link from the resources box to another main subcategory of your website, preferrably one with part of your keyword in it (news)

I am just starting to get a working sitemap.