Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Traditionally, links were never sought actively for these sites (other than directory submissions) and internal linking was structured on the basis of useability. However, since the sites are mature (2 - 5 years old) and large (over 1500 original pages between them) they are well linked externally and all carry a PR5 (the largest just dropped from a PR6).
I realise that to stay abreast of our competitors we need to build more external backlinks and review the internal linking within the sites and crosslinking between domains. There is scope to do more of the latter in a way that would be relevant, meaningful and useful to the user, which is what I believe links should be.
I decided to research what our more successful competitors were doing.
For our main key phrase, one site has been climbing steadily in Google since the end of last year, occupying the top slot for the last two updates. The search in question returns over 350,000 results. The site in question has over 1,500 backlinks. These backlinks fall into three categories:
a) legitimate on-topic links from pages of value to a surfer
b) links from link-exchange type pages. Not link farms as such but well designed pages on legitimate sites containing hundreds of links (the first backlink listed has over 230 links). Personally I don't believe these pages have any value to the surfer.
c) links from other sites run by the same company. Interlinked sites on blue widgets, red widgets, etc. are common, indeed de rigueur in this industry, but this site does it with a long list of
<a href="http://www.blue-widgets.com"><img src="/images/widgets/blue-widgets.gif" border=0></a>
on every page, where blue-widgets.gif is a one pixel transparency.
My question is: How should we combat this? To me some of the methods used smack of spam worthy of the good old Altavista days. I really don't want to stuff my pages with tiny gifs and keyword-ridden urls that have no structural or navigational value. I would like links to and from our sites to be relevant, visible and traffic-generating in their own right. Yet I too would like to grab that number one spot and 1500 backlinks within five months.
I'm not inclined to submit a spam report to Google. The site in question IS on-topic and relevant to the search query, and I'm sure users find it just as useful as they might mine. I can hardly blame them for developing their pages according to Google's algorithm. However, I have problems with letting Google, rather than my users, design my site - the red-widget/blue-widget multiple domains is a case in point on which we've already conceded; it's impossible to decide you just want to specialise in red widgets online. Should I follow our competitor's example and take the 40 pieces of silver (well it IS Holy Thursday ;))?
Can any of you who have faced this problem tell me how you dealt with it?
I would say that if you have the resources, you can "try" the tactics, knowing that your success might be short lived. So maybe try it on something else if you know what i mean.
Best of luck!
cheers,
Hagen
