How does Google want people to attain links?

If it does not want people to buy or exchange links

[Automotive site]

I am not one for buying links other than the odd link here and there. I get several thousand daily uniques to my biggest sites without hardly ever engaging in link buying.

But what if you are just starting out in a niche where there are big competitors who have have thousands of links pointing to them, often obtained in the days when they were so easy to come by when people linked freely without giving it a second thought. These days people tend to link mostly to sites that are extremely reputable and large in size and well known on the web. What then? How is one ever to catch up with big competitors if they can't get links?

Yes, I know you should produce content that makes people link to you by either making it something really original or better than competitors. But still its easier said than done. People have tendency to link to the bigger sites even if you have what you might deem better content.

[scooterdude]

About those "go words", seeing as ehow articles come from multiple authors , do they have a system for ensuring the published articles are SE optimised ?

I confess I had given up on onpage optimisation , till recently

[martinibuster]

seeing as ehow articles come from multiple authors , do they have a system for ensuring the published articles are SE optimised ?

Yes. The topics themselves are mined from known search queries and assigned by their algorithm. Demand Media has a style guide their writers are required to follow. Their style guide isn't public although it wouldn't be surprising if it's out there somewhere. Their blog hints at their methodology. Here is a snippet [demandstudios.com]:

Examples:
Bad: How to Make Homemade Cards for the Christmas Holiday
Good: How to Make Christmas Cards

...Successful titles are based on the most search engine-friendly way to phrase the question.

Here is an article by someone who signed up to be a demand media writer [readwriteweb.com].

The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now. They're the kinds of questions I would usually get answered through a phone call to my contractor father, or my brother the car genius, or my mother the seamstress/cook/homemaker/gardener/early computer geek.

You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries...

As I posted earlier, Demand Media is an extreme model of this kind of article writing. My concept is to simply be aware of the Go Words and be sure to have them in there. It is the most basic advice, it must have been on Google's Webmaster Help section years ago. But judging by my competition this is a real weakness for many sites.

Circling back to links, people looking for citations (for links/twitter/facebook/word of mouth) will find it in Google and link to it.

[Agent_Flick]

You know, I understand the "create content that people will love" concept, but I think the linking power of your content depends a lot on your niche. Of course Matt Cutts can write good content and get links to it because basically all his readers are webmasters.

In my niche, on the other hand, people absolutely love my content, some of my articles have more than 1000 comments, accumulated over a little more than 5 years... but they are all computer illiterates that don't have websites, don't have twitter accounts and most of them don't even have a Facebook account. And if I eventually get readers that do have websites, guess what they do? They copy and paste my articles on their websites and I still get no link!

So, all this work I've doing over the past 5 years writing frequent, original and quality content that people do love, have generated me no links at all! The few links I have are links that I posted myself on directories and sites like Yahoo! Answers.

Sometimes I think I should just change my business model and adopt a single sales letter model like many of the sites that figure on the first page of results for most of my keywords... I spend my time writing good content and one page sales letter websites rank better than me. That's very frustrating...

So Google "expects" websites to get links naturally by popularity and that's what I've been trying to do for years, but I guess it only works on certain niches where people have websites and have good "nettiquete" linking to content instead of copying it.

[Planet13]

poster deleted: I didn't see the examples that martinibuster gave previously

[Automotive site]

"In my niche, on the other hand, people absolutely love my content, some of my articles have more than 1000 comments, accumulated over a little more than 5 years... but they are all computer illiterates that don't have websites, don't have twitter accounts and most of them don't even have a Facebook account. And if I eventually get readers that do have websites, guess what they do? They copy and paste my articles on their websites and I still get no link!"

That's a good point.

[Automotive site]

I think Google will do the web a big disservice if they favour only big-name sites when it comes to rankings. There should be an intelligent level-playing field aspect built into their algorithm so small sites can rank well for relatively highly searched terms if the content is top notch. The other day I bumped into a wonderful site about a medical topic which I won't go into (it was like a personal diary but at the same time a mini site) and was written wonderfully, in fact, very compelling with a wonderful human quality to it. I am sure it is miles better than anything eHow or Livestrong would have on the topic and would be much more helpful for people with this condition to read this particular site than the methodical articles eHow churns out. But I will bet my bottom dollar this site is no where to be seen for any even semi major keywords (despite being several years old) while sites like eHow or LiveStrong are raking in big traffic for competitive terms related to this particular medical condition.

[Planet13]

@ agent_flick

I understand that you don't get many natural links so I would suggest that you find sites that might link to you and let them know that your pages do get thousands of comments (thus displaying social proof that your content is good).

When requesting links it is good to demonstrate that others already like the material.

[Planet13]

@ martinibuster

Can you give a more concrete example of the "go words" you are referring to?