Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I got a site going for two months now, it has pretty good rankings on G for obscure and 4-5 words phrases, so everything is going well with my 1000 pages views a day...
The thing is my new site is aiming at the top spot of this niche and my competitors are really well established and old sites that have thousands of links from like all the related sites in the niche...
This will not be easy and I don't expect exceptionnal results in the first year but still... I can't believe how many links they have...
The thing is that both sites have a huge on topic link directory and they list nearly all of the sites in the niche, from personal pages to hobby sites to blogs about the subject, everything.
They don't force the sites to add a link to their site in return but it seems that a lot of those sites will link to them anyway.
My question would be: is builsing a good on topic human reviewed link directory the way to go for my site as well? I seriously think it will the only way to achive such a huge amount of on theme links...
Do you think the thousands of links that they recieve from sites that are in their directories actually help them to rank? My guess is that yes it helps them a lot even though those links are not quality one way links... They are still really on topic.
I have maybe a hundred onw way quality and on topic links from several sites so I'm not especially worried about penalties, I just want to know what would do in my position.
What I will do in the next months to increase visibily:
-Buy G-ads for keywords AND on chosen sites
-Build several community oriented services (photo galleries, forums, rating of content, comments, article submission, etc...
-I always search for good inbounds in my topic but those quality sources are starting to disappear as they already gave my site a link for the most part...
Any help about the link directory strategy and other strategies are welcome!
Thanks in advance,
Fourchette
Some tips would be appreciated!
Thanks
However, even if the links don't help towards their PR, they may help determine the theme and relevance of their sites, which can affect ranking in some cases.
Of course these are just empirical estimates....
Yes, both of my biggest competitors are pr5 with a lot of backlinks, in the thousands.. Those backlinks exist because both those sotes have a link directory, and many sites in their directory give the, a recip link...
I think you comment about those link helping to build relevancy and theming for the site is a good idea, so I think more and more that should do the link directory myself!
Just for the traffic anyway, those thousands of links must send some good traffic anyway...
The problem in my niche is that there's a lot of small sites out there, but every site owner wants to make a recip exchange and there's not a lot of people out there who are willing just to give a link away to sites like mine who want to be an authority in the niche...
SO i guess the only solution to have a big amount of links like that is to build that link dir...
what do you guys and girls think?
fourchette
I guess you're right about that, but just to reassure you my site's directory would not be the only service offered on the site... But I'll try to think on other ways to make them link to us apart good content which we think we have already...(we could have much more of course)...
The thing is like I said most of those sites won't link to anyone except if they have a link back... that's what makes it difficult.. There are some blogs in my industry who could blog about our site, but maybe like only two or three really interesting...
BTW, I'll start a blog myself in the industry to fill that gap, but not before a couple of weeks...
Anyway, I can't think of other ways to have these businesses link to me as for 90% of thos sites the only link they have is to portal sites who also link to them.
Any ideas for a good link incentive for that kind of business who wont link out for anything?
I would suggest trying to figure out an innovative way to locate outbound reciprocal links on your site. Don't simply dump them on pages devoted to nothing but links.
As a latecomer, you shouldn't try to compete by attempting to replicate those huge "link directories." Instead, try incorporating your outbound links on your blog pages, or perhaps cluster them in small groups of "interesting sites" which you scatter through your site. This will take a bit more effort, but the results should be better for the people you are linking to, which will result in more natural traffic patterns, and should eventually give you an edge in obtaining reciprocal links -- particularly from webmasters who are aware of the importance of "natural" patterns in the SE algos.
Two more comments:
1. A PR 5 with thousands of incoming links is not impressive. It is not unusual to see well established, older sites with PR 5 that only have a couple of dozen incoming links. This is a strong indication that many of your competitors' thousands of links are irrelevant, or doing them very little good.
2. Having 1,000 page views after two months is quite impressive, particularly in this age of the "sandbox" effects (factors that seem to favor older, more established sites). You are already doing something right, so don't get discouraged and don't rush off and do something risky, which could damage your site.
I understand your comments about not doing just a link dump page, but that is not my intent. I actually wanted to create a good and useful niche link directory where I actually write the descriptions for the sites that are listed, so that the users can find a real value in the directory.
Also as there are many mom and pop 'offline' business in this niche, I would make some kind of geo-targetted services link dir, again I would write all the descriptions myself, and maybe offer a page for each business where they can post a blog, post their special events and messages to my users...
You can checck out this thread to see what I intend to do
[webmasterworld.com...]
As you can see it's not really a simple recip link dump, do you think that presented in that manner, it would be a good idea to go ahead and start that niche dir in order to get more links?
Thanks
