Forum Moderators: open
You will have a list of several hundred or more good sites from your business sector, yes? If you do then take a spare PC, clear the cache if you have been looking at sites from serps. Visit the sites that you have on file, click through the front page links, no need to look at the content, go as deep as you think is useful info.
What have you now? A pc which has a large percentage of the better pages for your search term in it's chache.
What good is that? Well do a search in Google or MSN and you can see the listings that are likely to be worth being in the results. It's amazing the difference between Google and MSN. On the front page (100) for a term that I know intimately, Google returns very few pages from sites that should figure there. MSN is filled with on topic sites (unbelievably).
This can be done with software but it's amazing how quickly you can spot trends when a few links out of 100 are a different colour.
To put a background to this, the machine that I use for this has visited 900 sites which are all relevant and have real content for the UK on a particular area. There's probably 5,000 pages of the best content known to that computer. So with 5,000 of the best pages why does Google manage to pick up just 5? It's not a highly spammed area either, it's just that Googles attempts to fight spam have seriously effected its quality of results (IMHO).
