How to Beat Sites With Thousands of Links?

Irrelevant, well linked sites hogging the top10.

[caine]

I can't quite get my head around this one.

Basically for most of the industries that i am involved with regarding web sites and their performance in G, everything looks good.

However one industry in particular, seems to either have been bought by the top ranking web sites, which i very much doubt or they are there becuase of the amount of incoming links, and not their relatedness to a specific term, i.e. service or product.

The problem is that the top ten actually have not a great deal to do with the industry, yes associated but not actually offering the service or the product, which i am struggling to understand, as i can't see any possible approach of getting my clients website into the top ten. regarding PR its 5, i can boost this, but some of these companies websites have a scary amount of backlinks 10's of thousands.

I've looked at a rebuild on the domain, new domain, alot of different idea's, but there is no way that i am geared to take on links of this sort of scale

I don't think its a PR issue, i think its a pure number of incoming links issue

Anybody else seeing this? Any idea's?

[phantombookman]

Caine
I am hopelessly beat in my field with some keywords. There are grandfathered sites, many of which have not been touched for 5 years, that are all linked with each other as they were the first sites.

You cannot get links from similar sites or those mentioned above so it's game over.

I really believe Google should reduce the weight it puts in links.
If they concentrated the algo on identifying good sites with good relevant content then it would be a boost for searchers and a blow for spammers.

Whilst people could manipulate the algo to do so would mean making a great and useful site.
If they can get it right then by definition sites really will be ranked in order.
Come on Google give everyone a chance!
Regards
Rod

[BigDave]

What is their relationship to the actual search term?

There are a lot of terms that people have a tendancy to think only apply to their industry, when in fact they can apply to a lot of different things.

"Orlando" is a word that a lot of people in the travel industry would probably consider *theirs*, but what about all the residents of Orlando that are looking for city services, or local shopping.

It might even be important for those looking for information about Tony Orlando and Dawn, that don't even realize that there is such a city.

So, do those sites have an actual reason to come up in that search even if they are not in your industry? Are they irrelevant to the search term, or just your view of what that search term means?

[werty]

Caine, this might sound stupid, but have you attempted to buy advertising on those sites? You said thet they do not sell the services, but offer related info...sounds like a match made in heaven.

[willybfriendly]

Anybody else seeing this? Any idea's?

Very much so. I just had this conversation (argument?) a few days ago. In today's google I would happily take 100 low PR links with good anchor over 1 high PR link. I have seen many examples of high ranking sites with little, or in some cases, absolutely no on page content related to the search terms. One I am familiar with shows only 94 links in Google, but around 1000 in ATW. It redirects (via HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH") to a purely graphical site with zero, zilch, nada text content. It ranks #1 on a singular keyword (widget), and since stemming shows excellent rankings for the plural widgets.

Ideas? Patience. These anomolies show a flaw in the current algo which I believe that G will deal with in time. There has to be some weight given to on page factors (beyond the Title tag, that is).

WBF

[pmkpmk]

One of the best inbound links I have comes from a PR2 site (I'm mostly PR5). It probably doesn't do much for my Google-ranking, but it sends a constant stream of qualified visitors.

How about trying to get some (a lot) of low-PR-links from sites which are not that important in your industry, or only remotely connected to it.

Probably it doesn't help much in terms of PR, but you might get visitors you haven't thought of before?

[jackson992]

It's easy to talk about being patient but it's been over a month now

[HarryM]

If I were to search on Orlando I would be looking for the novel by Virginia Woolf, or a DVD of the film of the novel, or even the 16th Century Orlando Furioso. I might even get annoyed that Amazon is way down the list behind all that travel stuff.