Competition link strategies

[asamuel]

Having researched my competition I notice that the big sites link to many sites that are of no relevance the site topic. Surely this will harm their rankings. They also have many dodgy gambling and viagra sites pointing to them!

My questions are:

Do you think because they are big they have enough good links to outway the bad??

Is it better to focus on "on topic" sites that add value to your site.

I guess I am overwhelmed by the fact that I think my practices are good SEO and I am not getting as high as sites who seem to have black hat practices at work...

Any theories would be appreciated!

[pcarlow]

I'm not sure linking to an off topic site can be considered black hat. Although that term like many others are loosely used in the SEO industry and will mean different things to different people.

My recommendation, although not necessary, is that if you are going to link to off topic sites, use a directory structure and keep similar themed links together.

(I believe) No amount of bad links pointing to your site can harm you. Only linking to banned sites MAY hurt your rankings. Yes, I think enough good incoming links can out weigh a bad outgoing link.

Relevancy is in the eye of the beholder. Not a computer. Example, I have a page about football. In one paragraph I discuss tail gate parties where I link to my favorite grill. Is that an off topic link? Yes. Is it relevant? Yes. Can a computer figure that out? No, not at this time, and probably not for a long time to come.

If your competitors are beating you, find out what they are doing to win and do it better. In other words, get more incoming back links with the anchor text you want to rank highly for.

[Papadoc]

Finally pcarlow, someone that makes some sense on the value of linking. I've grown weary of those who refer to arbitrary rules of linking. As far as I am concerned, there are only two methods of linking that would be defined as black-hat:

- Making invisible links - single pixels or same color text links that are not meant for the consumer.
- Linking to linkfarms or "bad neighborhoods". Even here, I think there is a lot of gray area as to what constitutes a linkfarm. Sites that are there for nothing but are obvious. Others that maintain a lot of links are not necessarily so, just because they have a lot of links. They might just have a very dedicated staff of PR moguls working on building awareness of their site and extensively use reciprocals as a way to do this.

Having this said, you are quite correct in that off-topic links should be grouped. Off-topic linking can be a complete waste of effort if you have links to the bridal shop, the local car mechanic, and a restaurant supply place on the same page. This is not arbitrary speculation. Search engines are context sensitive and it is easily determined what pages have what kind of content. A site may or may not be entirely about one subject such as about.com. Therefore, it makes no sense to pidgeon-hole an entire site. The same is not true with regard to a page. Pages that have a wide variety of content will never place well in a search and so it makes sense that the search engines will not be able to determine the value of any page that has a wide variety of links either.

All one has to do is look at the directories themselves to determine this. It's not just an accident that directories such as Blue Find and Yahoo have clout. Both directories and search engines have one thing in mind... the consumer. If a directory had multiple topics in one category, it would be worthless to both.

Therefore, if you are interested in finding reciprocals from people who know what they are doing, keep them grouped, use your title and H tags to define the content of the page, and limit the number of links on the page. This page will then have value. People who are searching for reciprocal opportunities and understand this will be attracted to your site, and this gives you the best links from the pages with the highest relevance in return. People who do not understand this will jumble all their links on one page, and links from these pages won't be worth as much.

It should also be emphasized that you need to limit the number of links on any given page. Google says 50, but even at this number, little of any page rank that you have will be given to another site. I limit my off site links at 20 per page and most don't get that far. I'd sooner create another page that carries equal PR and make it effective for whoever I link to. Doing so is recognized by SEOs who understand that the PR of any page is split amongst those pages that it links to. As such, you are much more likely to receive a reciprocal than you are if you have 100 links on the page that will do them no good whatsoever.

[randfish]

pcarlow has a great point, but I'd take it one step further. Rather than considering arbitrary rules like "no more than 20 links", etc. I would think about the value to your users. Even if search engines are using very specific pieces to try to devalue sites for certain practices, in the long run, relevancy is the goal.

So, any tactic you use, just imagine if it would be useful for your users. Some pages with 200 external links ARE valuable and some with 20 are crap. Rather than trying to figure out and obey archaic SE "rules" just follow usability and user-friendly guidelines...

[asamuel]

cheers guys; the information you have given is concise and is backed up by many of the threads that have been written in the past on this topic.

I think I may be falling down on the number of links to a page as I see that over 50 is not in the clients interest!

But I shall continue to link in a directory structure and use only what I feel will be useful links to my clients!!

I dont see that you can go wrong with that....

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by randfish

pcarlow has a great point, but I'd take it one step further. Rather than considering arbitrary rules like "no more than 20 links", etc. Some pages with 200 external links ARE valuable and some with 20 are crap. Rather than trying to figure out and obey archaic SE "rules" just follow usability and user-friendly guidelines...

I never said it was a rule... just what I did and for the purpose of maintaining PR value to those that I link to. Even Google does not make it a rule. It's a recommendation and a very reasonable one at that.

It depends on what you are looking for. A page with 200 links is worth nothing for PR and it had be darn well organized. And only a statistical average of 0.1 clickrate for those that WOULD click through (all else being equal) means it had better have substantial traffic to make it worth it for obtaining visitors.

On the other hand, a page with a great PR and 20 links will pass along some PR, but if it's not ever visited, it's lousy for traffic. You have to define your goals.

[ferret77]

just curious but do you think its possible that it doesn't matter at all who you links too and from you

do you think its possible that google doesn't care one bit if a link is from a viagra site or grandmas apple pie site?

would it totally be out of the relm of possibilty that link farms don't really exist, at least in terms that they are often spoken of?

Just curious but has anyone here ever met anyone who who was hit with a penalty for linking to a bad neighborhood, it would seem some of those people would show up on forums pretty regularly.

Ecspecially with all the crazy linking going out there on the interweb

Maybe they are so ashamed of their bad linking that they don't tell anyone about it?

[Papadoc]

Nope... it does matter. Google says it, I've seen it first hand... then seen it come back when the link to the farms are gone. Google tells you very little about SEO. Why would one question what few tips they do give you?

It's real and I have seen some people on boards who will also testify to it. Most people however, do not have the first clue about SEO and just think they are doing a great job... yet they cannot figure out why the SE traffic dies.

There's still an awful lot of really bad SEO advice out there that people are following with one dipswitch (supposed SEO) on a Ryze board here the other day advising people to hide same-color stuffed keywords at the bottom of their page and gave out a bunch of links to reciprocal link farms.

[ferret77]

Originally Posted by Papadoc

Google tells you very little about SEO. Why would one question what few tips they do give you?

umm, I don't know ... good point

[awall19]

Originally Posted by Papadoc

Google tells you very little about SEO. Why would one question what few tips they do give you?

what they tell you may be provided to mislead you? if I were them I would mislead people.

[mjm1905]

A Placebo? That would be interesting.

[Buskerdoo]

Originally Posted by awall19

what they tell you may be provided to mislead you? if I were them I would mislead people.

There is definitly lots of misleading advise floating around.

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by awall19

what they tell you may be provided to mislead you? if I were them I would mislead people.

LOL...

So since about the only thing they tell you is that you shouldn't link to bad neighborhoods... Are you saying Aaron that you now recommend that people link up to spam sites, FFA's, and every hokey site there is? Is that the final chapter in your updated book?

After you Aaron!!!

[awall19]

Originally Posted by Papadoc

LOL...

So since about the only thing they tell you is that you shouldn't link to bad neighborhoods... Are you saying Aaron that you now recommend that people link up to spam sites, FFA's, and every hokey site there is? Is that the final chapter in your updated book?

After you Aaron!!!

they drop other tips here and there...(example from my understanding of statements from some on the Senior Circuit of the SEO feild / old timers ) when they told lots of people to use the nocache option for certain reasons then they accidentally dropped no cache pages out of the index.

after you Papadoc!!!

[G10]

All this politeness is bringing a tear to my eye and making me think why don't we just have one big group hug.

After you Aaron >>>>>

After you Papadoc >>>>>

After you (whoever decides to post next)

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by awall19

they drop other tips here and there...(example from my understanding of statements from some on the Senior Circuit of the SEO feild / old timers ) when they told lots of people to use the nocache option for certain reasons then they accidentally dropped no cache pages out of the index.

So you heard something from someone sometime somewhere about something that "they" told someone to do on some website, and then an accident happened and then someone assumed that this was the result and told you. Therefore, people should give reciprocals to FFA sites because G is misleading everyone? I certainly don't have the ammo to argue with that logic.

You missed your calling Aaron. I hear juries in California acquit criminals on similar theoretical evidence.

You just fun'in us now Aaron.

[ferret77]

I think Awall's point is you should take everything with a grain of salt

[James Trotta]

In addition to getting other sites to link to you, don't forget that every content page you have will also link to you (with your keywords in the anchor text if you're smart). Having lots of pages indexed by Google is a big advantage.