SEO Ranking For Highly Competitive Keywords CHALLENGE

okay....so here's the deal.

Im SEOing a site for several competitive keywords. For the toughest keyword, Im #8 on G. My competitor is #3. #1 and 2 spots are wiki and about but Im not worried about them for the sake of this thread. My problem is with the competitor at #3 who appears to be doing no SEO at all.

They have 6 pages of content, with hardly any text content at all. We have over 100 with great content. None of our pages are BS either - all legit articles and content. They have 100 links, less than 5 with decent page rank. Our linking is over 300 and appears to smoke theirs in terms of relevance and pagerank (pick your poison). Their site established in 1997. Ours, 1999.

So let's look at the facts: Clearly we kill them on content. Clearly we kill them on links. Both sites are old and established.

There are only 2 discrepancies I can find where they have an advantage.

First, their domain name IS THE KEYWORD (2 word phrase) with no hyphens or anything (let's say the keyword is "keyword one", their domain is keywordone.com) . My domain has one of the words which is "keyword.com". So its not like my domain is completely off base here.

Second, they are listed in Dmoz and its other related sites and we are not.

Ive been building more links, adding more content, continually but it doesnt seem to matter at all. Well, one day here or there it will move up to #6 position but then a few days later it will drop back down. The site is not moving up at all and Im wasting so much of my time.

So - what to do from here. I need an experts advice. Should I stop adding content and just buy some valuable links that set this thing over the top. Should I keep adding content. What should I do???

Keep in mind I am using this particular project so that we have someting to refer to in this discussion. I guess I am asking the broader question - once you are close to the top and youve completed most of the SEO tricks, and you are competing against real companies and not squidoo lenses and web 2.0 sites, what left can you do that will actually "move the needle". I say this because worthless links, such as comments, etc. wont do it.

so what is your keywords?

I think that the exact search phrase in their domain name, and the dmoz listing gives your competition a big advantage. Unfortunatly for you, those factors will likely never change, and getting into dmoz is a Bitch.

I think that you need to keep doing what you're doing, adding high quality content and high quality backlinks (buy them if you need too, but be careful and add them slowly). If your gonna buy backlinks, make sure the sites linking to you have a decent amount of seo done as well.

Beat them to the punch on every single on and off page seo factor that you possibly can, no matter how miniscule it may seem. I don't know to what extent you have allready done this, but those little seo factors will add up.

Im talking about getting crazy over the on-site factors that you have total control over. Keyword density, font size, order, proximity, prominence, alt tags, anchor links etc... File size, proper theming, stemming, semantics, intra-linking etc... on every page you can.

Have less external links then they do...
If they update once a day, you should update twice a day...
Your urls should be shorter then theirs...
If they don't have a xml sitemap, make sure you do...

Just a few examples, I could go on forever, but you get the picture im sure.

Also, dmoz is gay, but you can try to get in other big directories like yahoo, looksmart, about and botw just to name a few.

I hope this helps a little, just don't get discouraged, keep at it and you will overtake them with hard work and skill .

thanks Grizzy

Im totally getting discouraged because i cant believe how much work i have put in since we got to where we are, and havnt climbed since. i mean changing so many alt tags, adjusting hundreds of PDFs, etc. its weird actually, especially since there site is 6 pages and they dont even update it. maybe they are a bad example anomaly and i should look at the next competitor perhaps in #4.

I have no problem buying links, they are paying me well. But to be honest Ive never bought a link in my life. Im used to bookmarking, article spinning and submissions, link exchanging, etc. but ive found that once your site is in the top 3 pages on G, those strategies dont provide any value anymore.

My logic leads me to think that whatever I do now must be of extremely high quality. ie. high quality backlinks, a few site-wide links. Can anyone recommend a worthy place to get them?

I should throw this out there too since I said "CHALLENGE". If anyone wants to help mentor me on this and thinks they can solve the last few pieces of this puzzle, send me a PM, I will compensate.

My company is gaining a lot of SEO clients because we have a very strong sales force. The sales are there. I need help delivering people to the top. So if this is of interest to a guru who isnt as strong on the sales side, we could make a great wholesale partner.

ok here's some new info. I did some very extensive linking research on some of the other competitors and found massive amounts of backlinks from random do-follow blogs. They are not comments, but actual articles on the blogs with links in the article. The blogs arent even related to the subject but are more general. the articles also look like spun articles.

where do you find blog networks like this?

One of my sites has 1-5 rankings for a few terms and top 20 for others. I can honestly say some of the rankings are totally random, or just reflect a lack of competitors. (I'll know more if a new site launches in a few days where I'm going to try to make it a lot more structured.) I'm playing a lot more with SEO these days, and could think of a few tricks. Don't know if they'd work, but you could always try. There was a good article a few days back about knocking out Wikipedia pages. That could bump you up a couple. (Can't remember URL of the article.)

Lakers, can't say for sure, but that "blog network" is probably just an autoblog farm owned by your competition, which serves the purpose to give your comp's main site backlinks and link juice. lol it's probably even be owned by someone here

Griz i was thinking just that when i typed it in. Is there any way i can figure out if its his blog farm or some other network which I can take advantage of.

Or, is there some other network I can take advantage of.

By the way Ive used this hxxp://www.freetrafficsystem.com over the past 30 days and it does deliver something similar. Just not on the scale that this guy has. Is there anything else out there like Free Traffic System that can accomplish this (i.e. blogs that accept articles with links)?

this will require some $$$ but you can contact blog owners and ask them to post a link or create a post with backlink to your site.

If its that tough then you going to have to get High Pr related links to your site

for this you need some "expert" do follow blog digging or pay web masters for homepage link in your niche.

how much older is this site than yours? whats your PR compared to their PR?

Hey Metal,

i just contracted your services yesterday for some do follow linking. im using that for one of my new blogs (30 days old) that i intend to use to support my target site. Ive got 10 of em ready to go with good content.

But obviously this will questionably help my target site. I totally agree with you about home page links, they are massively valuable. Only this niche is so weird (in the science industry) i havnt gotten any bites on the home page link thing. its also time consuming. any ideas here?

the site is 1997, my site is 1999. should i buy some old domains and post some blogs on that? maybe thats an issue, my blogs are keyword rich in the domain but they are BRAND SPANKIN NEW.

Metal you said - "for this you need some "expert" do follow blog digging or pay web masters for homepage link in your niche." do you know a cheap solution on the blog digging/linking. ive got software that digs up the blogs but i dont have the time to do this on my own, i'd rather pay for someone who can do it faster and better than I.

Relevance is relative. Do they have links from other sites that rank well for their terms? I know from my whitehat consulting days that the absolute best links you can get are from pages that rank within the top 20 for what you're targeting.

We had one site that stood to make millions from a top 5 position and they were trying everything. The #4 site was an industry association page that listed white papers. Wrote a white paper, sent it to those guys and we went from #84 to #2 QUICK.

Get creative and go after links on the "competing" pages. Lots of them might not even know they're "competing". Beats any other link you can get.

LakersLakers said:

Is there any way i can figure out if its his blog farm

Click to expand...

You could use something like adsspy if he promotes adsense on his sites.

Or you could see if you have any luck with tools like this which discover domain names hosted at a particular ip.

danny - good advice i will try that. very interesting.

I totally agree, the only links that matter are coming from pages that are actually ranking, and the better they rank the better it will do. Maybe its about making some good offers to them (like $30-50 for a perm link) and see who bites. Add 1-2 per month maybe...? money talks some of these guys like you said will be like "why the hell does this guy want to pay for a link on my site but sure i'll take the money for it"....i dont mind paying this type of mullah for those types of links considering how many hours have been spent trying all the other crap.

Been doing more research today and noticed that some pages off squidoo, ezine, amazines, goarticles, and some others are indexed deep in the results (G's pages 15-30). wondering if i should support my web 2.0 pages with some BH links. but im reluctant to BH like this because from an SEOer standpoint we need these rankings to last because this is what our customers are paying for.

what do you think?

Hey Grizz - funny enough ive got SEO quake installed on my firefox and for one of the blog sites it says "12,122 adsense sites by this GAnalytics Id". when I look at the other blogs i see similar numbers to this on each. Even from my human eye i can tell these things are totally used for backlinks.

does this tell us anything?

BH links probably wouldn't hurt you, but for a client at the firm I was at I wouldn't do it.

But it probably would have a positive effect on your ranking if you got those web 2.0 pages ranked higher, so just explain to the client that it is against the rules but there's a buffer level and risk is minimal but definitely there and see what they think.

As for buying links, I'd definitely see if you can get any bites. When you get into moving up the first page it's very hard to make a big dent without some super links like that.

So you do have all this original content related to the keyword phrase you are referencing and these pages are optimized as well and indexed?

Is all your internal website linking javascript or html? And your sitemap links to all these pages as well?

I can't believe the most relevent pages do not compete as well, besides your home page...? Do you have only one listing in the top 10?

(hmmm, trying to think what else I would be trying...)

Given his site and these blogs have similar numbers like that, and the on the blogs appear to be automated, I think it would be safe to say that he is the owner of those blogs and is using them for backlinks like you say. Are the blogs spread out over different hosting companies? Or on free hosting?

@ Danny - "superlinks" that should be a new term that is used more often. im going to give it a try because something needs to be done.

@ Woodstuck - first of all love your icon picture. all my internal is HTMl, trust me its good. Sitemap is all solid, G webmastered, with anchor text, etc. I feel I need much more than this

@ Griz - they are on different hosting. they are all different domain names. theyve also got a bunch of posts about a bunch of different subjects, far outside my niche (my niche is within science, there are posts about real estate and others). Each posts has links within it, all to different sites. Clearly these are being used for SEO. I guess it doesnt matter if he owns them or not -- clearly he's using these blogs to post articles and get anchor text backlinks. By the way all these blogs have a backlink of N/a or 0.