Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In my opinion, once your on top its hard for new competitors to take over your rankings as long as you keep up with the smiths, if you know what I mean. Being on top for so many years gets you natural links back. But what about the new guy coming in? Poor rankings equal little natural backlinks. High rankings equal many natural backlinks.
Any opinions on this for starting new domains?
I have top rankings now with little effort on my part with backlinks unless its natural.
Today, I often advise new sites to work with off-site promotion of various kinds to get their foothold and establish that first visitor base. Social media, PPC ads, sponsorship of newsletters, whatever you can come up with to "prime the pump" and break into the competitive circle.
It also helps first to intentionally target the longer phrases that contain the shorter, more competitive keyword. And then watch your logs to see what keywords your actual Google traffic is using, and work to improve rankings there, rather than trying to pull something out of thin air.
I see many new sites on my very competitive niche, it took them about a year. Never get complacent (like I did :)
Why should it be any different online? Sure, I'm frustrated that my online efforts are taking years to mature... but at the end of the day, it's good for everyone if it stays that way. I just did a soft launch of a sister website to my original. New domain etc etc. I'm hoping my established domain can give it some leverage. I'm hoping linking them together on the home page won't flag me for a penalty, as they are naturally useful to eachother and my visitors, but that's a different matter...
I'm not expecting it to be easy. I've not had much money to invest in my online endeavours... But I've had the time and the patience. My main site is now nibbling at the feet of my heavyweight competitors in some key search niche phrases... Should be drawing blood in good time...
and crucially, lots of time to build your brand awareness, reputation, and trust of whoever walks through your door...
Excellent insight and precisely where the first-mover advantage by those who recognised the potential of the Net in the early 90s have had a huge advantage over those who didn't join the party until 2000+.
I feel one of the key advantages the "older" site constructors have is an in-depth knowledge of how and what works for most SEs for their widget sector plus, I reckon in many cases, their coding knowledge which has developed alongside the Net's expansion together with the introduction of each new standard.
Obviously this does not apply to some of the much more complex sites in existence now however a new site trying to "go up against" a well-establised site will probably need a large budget to get the right kind of people capable of challenging the incumbent.
Brand new sites for the first-timer with no helping-hand boost will have their work cut out uless it is very widget niche.
Naturally YMMV!
