realmaverick - 3:23 pm on Oct 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

Good evening/afternoon guys,

Google is really puzzling me of late. Actually baffling me. I thought i understood it, it appears not!

Problem
Competitors are cheats. They buy links, 99% of which are off topic spam. Yet it's rewarding them with over 400,000 visitors a day. Go figure.

The site naturally gains links, but not enough to keep up with the competitors spam. I've not focused on link building for some time, because myself and my devs have been busy developing a new version of our website. But I'm losing ground, so I decided it was time to start actively building links.


Bit of background
*Website is 5 years old

*30,000 visitors per day.

*Established and ranks well for tens of thousands of keywords, with thousands of number 1 positions.

*Main competitor has hundreds of thousands of spam links and is getting 400,000 visitors a day. So lots of room for growth!

*On-site SEO appears fine. Targeted Titles, H1, URL's. Though H1 differs from the title a little, to make it appear more natural.


The Plan
*A new, powerful but balanced link building campaign. Targeting multiple pages, each with several variations of the keyword, including more natural anchors such as: click here, link, website etc.

*I created several pieces of link bait, which were a great success. Getting links from all major authorities in the niche I was targeting and naturally the smaller sites then followed suit. Generating a brilliant drive of high quality links.

*I invested in SENuke for social network and social media type links. I've not gone overboard with this, as I'm still getting to grips with it.

•I hired somebody to build high PR blog comment links, mixed with some lower quality ones to try to keep it natural.


The result? After a month, literally nothing. It's as though the entire process hadn't happened.

What did I do wrong?