Seriously How do you compete against paid links?
-
Hi everyone,
I would call myself a mid weight web marketer, I'm pretty savvy about knowing what you should do but how do your compete with someone who has clearly bought a massive amounts of links?
Do I suck it up, put my head down and do what I can.
Thanks
-
Thanks Matthew, the long tail stuff was not on my mind. But will definitely look at it, a little closer.
-
Put your head down and get some links in the good way. product reviews, service reviews, run some contests etc.
Then look over your site and your competitors. There always is some way to battle it. For example, if you are on page 1 and they are higher, are either of you using schema markup? Start thinking outside the box and thinking about CTR. You don't have to be #1 to start taking the bulk of the traffic. Make your result more attractive. Offer free shipping? Append it to the end of your title tag
-
I'm grappling with the same issue, and I just have to keep telling myself that with all the spam-attacking algorithm changes Google has been coming out with lately that those sites will be penalized soon.
You could always help Google along with it.
-
Sadly, I think that is part of what you have to do unless you want to risk the paid link route.
Usually in these situations, I've tried to find alternative ways to rank in areas that the competitor with paid links is ignoring. For example, targeting the long tail searches is usually a good option as many paid link setups narrow targeting only a few keywords. Another route is to build up up social proof (including reviews on local sites if it is a local business).
While there is still a lot of work to do in those areas, that work can at least see returns as compared to competing against somebody with thousands of paid links.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal linking
Hi, I currently have built my website with internal links to boost my category pages (the ones that are the most important with the most traffic). Is the way to go or nowadays or doesn't it matter what pages you boost. I beleive what I did is some sort of "page rank sculpting" but is it still useful ? or I should I link natural across my website even though some pages will get a boost and some won't ? The link that I have are at the bottom of my content (not in the footer) but at the bottom of the page next to each other ? does they count or is it really bad to have them that way ? I have a blog and I was wondering if when I link from my blog page for example about "Barolo" to my page about "Piedmont" if I should also link from my page about "Piedmont" to my Barolo page or if the link only has to go one way from my blog / Barolo page to my piedmont page to boost Piedmont. Thank you,
Link Building | | seoanalytics0 -
Refferal links
I have a site where I can pick up where my hits came from. So if somebody clicks from another website link to visit my website, I will then pick up from which website they came from and also which page they landed on. Will google penalize me for this and see this as paid advertising?
Link Building | | Heinwest0 -
Subdomain links vs root domain links? Are the less valuable?
I am determining the value of links we get. Is a link on a subdomain less valuable vs one on the root domain? How less valuable would you consider a subdomain link? For example blog.site.com vs site.com/blog What other metrics would you take into consideration for the value of a subdomain link?
Link Building | | calf0 -
Networking sites / paid links
A national networking company charges its members, say, a few of hundred pounds to become part of their network, which involves offline networking events and online in forums and a directory. All the links of the directory and forum sigs etc are all do-follow. While it's not just a directory, how beneficial a link is this likely to be? The site itself has a DA of 60 and a PR rank of 4. 1k likes on their cnnected FB page and 21 likes on the G+. At the networking meetings they tell new recruits that being a member gives them a very valuable backlink and everytime they participate in the forums they get another do follow backlink. Ive checked and they are dofollow. Is this likely to be a great value link?
Link Building | | littlesthobo0 -
Buy links
I know that many of you are against the whole thing with buying links. Your feelings put aside. Will it be better for my site to buy links or even do link exchange? Haven´t the crawlers been thought by now how to find these untrue links? I have read somewhere that the stop after 100 links, aren´t they smarter than that?
Link Building | | mato0 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
Is it a reciprocal Link ?
Hi, I found a great website and tought its content would be extremely interesting for our clients. I wrote about it on my blog (which has an URL with our website URL in it) , Facebook Page and even in Twitter. Meanwhile, I contacted them and offered to write an article about an interesting subject for them. They accepted and liked it so much that they decided to put 2 links for us on two of their pages. My questions are : Will this be a reciprocal link for Google? Did I make a mistake talking about them on my blog ? Did I «devaluate» the links they gave us?
Link Building | | Caru0