With stories emerging every day of Google’s attempts to hunt down spammers and websites who engage in black hat tactics such as paid links, a new story has emerged about Google breaking it’s own guidelines.
They might have to ban their own Google Chrome browser download page, like they’ve had to do with their Google Japan webpage, whom had been caught flouting the rules with regards to sponsored links.
So this begs the question, does Google not care about the rules in all circumstances until someone points it out? The algorithm is not infallible. Things will slip by. It wasn’t Google who came in and broke the news that they were penalizing the mega brand JCPenney conglomerate, for using dodgy sponsored link building practices after all.
It wasn’t Google who declared the red card. They acted upon info from journalists. It sure has been a crazy 12 months for Google, their co founder Larry Page stepped down, fights with Bing, intense rivalry and failed bids with Face Book, and now they have an interest in acquiring the rights to stream the Premiership football matches live.
Back to the matter at hand, link building. Everybody is obsessed with getting new links, buying links, link exchanges and generally anything to do with links. If you’ve ever noticed the sites in the top 10 of Google for competitive terms. They rarely seem to shift much over a 12 month period. More on that later.
Sites below clamber wildly up and down the rankings, and then eventually a site that was on page 3 or 4 suddenly makes it onto page 1 or 2. So everyone thinks buying new links or acquiring links blindly is the answer.
For you to understand what it takes to make it onto the first page on Google and stay there you need to analyze your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. One reason why the sites don’t change much in the top 10 of serious industries is that all the websites build regular links that stick around.
If an affiliate or lone seo wise individual goes on an aggressive link building push their site can get a nice ranking shift. But over the next 12 months if the site doesn’t maintain that push, or if a lot of the links they have built start to get deleted, this is a clear sign that most of these links are paid.
One of the reasons why a lot of these links can be deleted is that the web owners couldn’t maintain these links. If you’ve ever analyzed the percentage of traffic that websites get in the top 1o of Google you’ll notice it declines massively with each descending position.
So if a new website that came from page 3 or 4 finally gets into the top 10 for one keyword, and spent a lot of time and money getting there, they might not have the resources to maintain it. Especially if they only have rankings for one big kewyword and don’t rank especially high for lots of other keywords. All that time and money poured into link building for nothing.
You can get a better idea of what’s needed in order to outflank your competition by using tools to analyze their back links. But you need to constantly monitor this each week and month in order to find out what they are doing, and even what you are doing.
You can analyze links with majestic seo. Here’s an example graph.
With this you can analyse how many links your competitors have built each month and compare it over 12 months to yours. You can even find out how many new unique c class domains they are getting which is also extremely important.
Getting a million links from 1000 ip’s is not the same as getting 20,000 links from 5000 individual c class ip’s.
