Here’s a concept you might want to consider doing if you’ve already reached top rankings for certain keywords, and want to make it harder/more time-consuming for your current or future competition to compete with you.
The concept behind this is based on widely propagated advice from SEO experts who advise people to analyze their competitors inbound links profile then going out and trying to get as many of the same links as their competitors did.
Makes sense, right?
If your competitor is ranking well for a term, you can analyze their backlinks and sources then get the same amount of links, plus 1, in order to beat them right?
Possibly, yes, but….
If their on page SEO is better if their domains are aged longer then there’s really no way you can duplicate your site to match theirs, but you can come close…
Does this work? Yes, to some degree
However, what if you’re already highly ranked and want to keep your competitors busy building useless links so as to make it harder for them to start really competing with you?
Enter in the concept of link building obfuscation, smoke and mirrors link building…
When a current or future competitor sees your backlinks profile and start to get as many of those same links as you do, then you can increase # of backlinks to try and ward off those who could be intimidated by a site (yours) with 1000s of links already.
So, even if you’re already ranked well you should realize that truly competitive terms require maintenance link building anyways, but also know that to stay on top requires some other tactics too, even if its just to ward off potential competitors.
Someone analyzing your backlinks is relying on tools that never find all your backlinks anyway, but what they ARE presented with, not only is it an incomplete list, but there’s really no way your average backlinks analysis tool is going to tell anyone which links got any site to where it ranks today for certain terms.
Sure, you can do some guesswork and assume that the backlinks with PR and numerous backlinks to THOSE urls provided the value, the juice, the kick that propelled the sites to high SERPs-land but its really just a guessing game based on assumptions.
That’s why I recommend that you continue building links to a high ranked site of yours even if competition looks weak, or even non-existent.
The more links you build, the more challenging it seems to your competitors and the more directions you can send them in whilst trying to emulate your inbound links profile. This obfuscation buys you some time, and you’ll be giving yourself some advance notice because I’m sure you’re watching your top ranked site to see if anyone’s trying to “step to you”.
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What we do with our clients, is once we hit the ground running, we don’t slow down we get to the fastest we can run and we never stop at that speed.
If your ranked #1 for a keyword term from your SEO work/link building (this means you should be able to monetize your site for that keyword term), don’t slow the pace down on what has gotten you ranked #1, rather you should keep up your SEO/link building pace that has gotten you #1, and then from time to time when new SEO/link building strategies arise, add those to what your already doing!
There are always other keywords to build links for as well that you can work while increasing the general number of links for your site. No one ranks #1 for all their keywords and all the billions of related keywords there are out there.
Thanks for the good advice.
I have always found the subject of competion anylsis to be placed out of context especially when I did not know much. Two ways to read competition data
1) to try an copy the link building stratedy
2)to check if its feasible to go after the keyword
1)Trying to copy the stratedy is a hit or miss. Say eventually you figure out that certain links come from a certain blog or site and you try and post on that same location. What will still remain is the work to be done to post on that location i.e lets say the location is a Linx Boss platform or BMR platform, then the spy still has to register to those services(might be closed/full) and spend $2.5 of content and then have his content rejected(in short go through the same pain/time/money). For this motive i found competiion syping with the intent of copying the link building stratedy a waste of time.
2) However, studying competition to check for feasibility is a good idea. i.e are the number of sites in the 10′s of millions or the top 10 sites weak seo wise(would it be possible to rank against suppliers/seo firms) etc. This is where i find value with competion analysis
Totally agree with Jose. I see so often people saying “copy your top SEO competitors” if you want to be #1, but in reality it’s a proper pain in the a$$ to do. You can’t always get the links from the same places, where your competitor got them from due to many reasons, including not being a member, site closed, paid links, etc.
Spying on competition and “copying” them is overrated, and it’s an excellent way for the gurus to make cash on those, who barely know anything about SEO.
Steven the advice is “OK” just not realistic. But the higher-ranked competition is ranking mostly due to the inbound link factors so emulating that, if possible would yield similar results.
But like we all know, it’s just not realistic
Dan,
Duncan Carver has come out with a link building book based on his 10 years in the industry, called, “The Ultimate Link Building Dossier” at LinkBuildingDossier.com. Just wondering if you have checked it out. I have seen Duncan Carver’s name around for years and am presuming you have too since you both are very much into testing link building strategies and services.
Ted, thanks for the info. I don’t buy any ebooks because none have really done me much good, nor I them
I guess it’s good to get sneak peeks into other’s traffic generation methods via paid for ebooks and what-not, but by the time they’re published they’re pretty much obsolete, due to the very nature of SEO.
For example, there’s lots of chatter now that higher PR and easier rankings come from having Facebook LIKES and Twitter integration on site, and while that’s been a pending thing for a while now (last 3 months or so) it’s finally rearing its head and might be something worth pursuing. My long-winded point is….the only SEO methods that are timeless and evergreen and pretty much unchanging and basic to most people, so buying ebooks is not for me since it either espouses a new method not industry standard or stone age/basic seo.
Apologies for what might sound like a rant here, but I just test, test, test and read good blogs and the search engines as my guide ot what worked before and now, hope this makes sense
hello Dan, i have been reading your blog for several months, and thanks a lot for everything, you provide such such an amazing value to your readers. I have some questions in mind i hope u dont mind to answer them.
1. Do extract links to rss and then submit them to rss aggregators effective to get backlink indexed?how many links should i extract to one rss?
2. Do you have some SEO advices for Yahoo and Bing Optimization?
3.Do tom’s backlinkbooster really work for you?