Displacing A Competitor With Sitelinks

[kidder]

I was wondering if anyone has ever had any success trying to beat a competitor with "full" sitelinks on a generic term such as "widget sales" I'm not talking about a brand name here. We've just been pushed out by a big corporate that was just given the full monty of sitelinks for a pretty good term so the position is probably lost forever, to make matters worse we've ended up below the "local" results as well. I was wondering do we keep pushing on that term and risk over doing the link anchor text or is it smarter to look for other angles? Its not the biggest traffic term but its a valuable term to have when your pitching the site to advertisers.

[Robert Charlton]

My emphasis added...

I was wondering do we keep pushing on that term and risk over doing the link anchor text or is it smarter to look for other angles?

In my experience, repeating the link anchor text is the very worst way to go about getting Sitelinks, or for that matter to improve rankings. It feels like a strategy from the olde days.

Take a look at the big corporate site that's just pushed you out. I'd almost be willing to bet that its home page nav links do not repeat "widget sales"... or for that matter even "widgets"... over and over.

Make sure your anchor text is in the family (I don't mean stemming) and that it catches your target phrase somewhere, but don't keep repeating it for Google. The tricky situation is how to avoid repeating it when it seems to be most appropriate for the user.

[kidder]

Thanks Robert, I meant external link anchor as we continue to promote the website. I think the real problem is that they have over a million backlinks and we have about 4000... They have a lot of authority built into their own network of sites which gives them a massive advantage over us "little" guys.

[Robert Charlton]

I meant external link anchor...

Sorry kidder... In the context of "Sitelinks", I misinterpreted, as I was focused on the onpage nav, which is a big factor in SLs.

I wouldn't push inbound anchor text either. Google might not get around to it for a while, but they will eventually notice. ;)

I have found that the best thing to do with anchor text, with some very occasional exceptions, is to take what you get naturally... don't ask for specific text. I do think those occasional exceptions are necessary, but I know others will disagree, in both directions.

[goodroi]

I know from personal expereince that it is possible to dethrone a site ranking for a generic term & displaying sitelinks. I would suggest you look to build up the link profile for the entire site.

-Increase unique domains linking to you
-Increase level of backlinks to deep pages
-Increase synonym use for inbound anchor text
-Don't forget that link quality matters
-Make sure your internal link structure is good
-Don't abuse your internal links

This is not easy and it does not happen overnight. If you were previously ranking #1 then you probably have most of the work done. When you are successful of dethroning the competition all of this backlink work will likely result in you gaining sitelinks for the generic term (at least that has been my experience).

[netmeg]

In situations such as this I have been known to get extra creative with the meta description.

(It won't dethrone them, but it might entice some people to check you out)