Seem to be getting left behind my competitors.

Is it simply a case of more links?

[Karma]

Hi all,

I'm in a pretty competitive niche, and like to think that my site is as good as my competitors. I seem to constantly be looking/requesting new links from other relevant sites and have a pretty good success rate.

I made some major url changes towards the end of 2008, removing the www. prefix and changing/reducing the length of my pages' URLs.

Using the Yahoo site explorer, I have:

1050 links to the old www. domain
500 links to the new non-www domain

My competitors have:

#1 = 200,000 inbound links
#2 = 13,500 inbound links
#3 = 4500 inbound links

Using this data, and comparing the above sites using Alexa/compete, it's obvious that I'm #4, the problem that I have is that their growth far outstrips mine, and looking at the yearly trend is getting kind of depressing!

Any ideas? Do I simply need to keep writing content and sending out link request emails?

I'd like to aim to be #3, but getting another 3000+ links seems almost impossible.

[wheel]

It's probably a case of 'better' links, not more links.

My next nearest competitor has almost exactly 10 times the number of links that I do including a full fledged affiliate program, press releases, and every directory money can buy.

I've held the top spot for a year or two, they recently bumped me off and we've flipped back and forth a bit between 1 and 2. So clearly it's not just volume of links.

I'm working on getting more links to my site, but I'm concentrating on individual one-at-a-time links from popular, relevant sites. So you know what my answer is :). Get more of the right 'type of links'.

[Karma]

Thanks Wheel :)

Comparing the sites over a year, they seem to jump significantly in some months, so would you put that down to gaining a few 'good' links or many 'normal' links?

I guess it's impossible to know.

[cnvi]

Quality not quantity. Heres a tip on an easy high quality one way link. Doesnt cost too much. Contact your local better business bureau and get your business accredited. After you are approved and listed, they will link to your domain.

[Karma]

All the links I have so far (that I've sought) are relevant and (imo) are good quality. I guess I just don't have enough!

[nealrodriguez]

bbb is kind of expensive for one link - est. $700. getting to know some authoritative webmasters in your niche and penning some hot guest posts could work. you may also want to try digg/reddit or stumbleupon if you've got an idea of how to promote content to the popular sections; you could pick up on volume quickly. job postings on some college sites could help too.

[nealrodriguez]

btw: bbb is expensive just for link purposes; but if you are trying to grow a business it could help in terms of giving your site credence. so depending on your business objectives, it may work for you.

[martinibuster]

This may or may not apply to your situation, and if it doesn't it might help someone else.

If you're not doing this already, you may want to look into driving more longtail phrased links to inner pages that are less general and more specific, i.e. instead of anchor Green Widget, send an appropriate anchor to a deep page about Fiberglass Green Widget, then other links to another page about Wood Green Widget, etc. until you have all the subcategory/longtail categories covered.

[ponyboy96]

Did you 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones? If not, you may want to do that. I try to avoid URL changes if at all possible, unless the new URL is much cleaner than the old and the old does not rank well. Otherwise, you shoot yourself in the foot for a little while until the new URLs get new links and PR.

[sirkevon]

Great info in this thread so far! Like wheel, I'm also big on finding specific popular and relevant sites for links. They may be time-consuming but I've seen my rankings jump considerably after obtaining just a few of these types of links.

Speaking of the Better Business Bureau, I just wanted to throw this out there that when our company's BBB Online Program expired (I think it was last month), it would've cost us about $400 to renew it. Because of our shrinking spending budget at the moment, I was just going to do without it. But the contact of my local BBB informed me that they were offering a similar program called Click-to-Check. The contact told me it was the same as the BBBOnline program and free of charge for one year. After that it is $100 to renew it, and you get the blue Accredited Business logo linked to your BBB profile. Pretty good deal if you're a business that wants a link to the BBB for cheap.