20.000 (phrase match) competing pages - How hard is to dominate?

[Psnack]

How much time and how many backlinks do I need in order to rank first for a keyword that has 20.000 competing pages (phrase match)?

Competitor pages include lycos.com, cnet.com and ezinearticles.com

My backlinks are mostly profile backlinks, then blog comments and then articles hosted on article directories and Web 2.0 sites. Few social bookmarks as well.

[Joseph Then]

Looks like an easy rank keyword phrase...

There is no definite number of backlinks but the key advise is just keep on backlinking. Not in blast, but naturally and you will see your site ranked.

As a gauge, perhaps you can submit 5-10 unique articles per week to all article directories till you see your site rank in top 10.

[marketguy]

i don't even think it will take that much (depending on how quickly you wanna get there, of course).
i have one site that took 2 months to beat a PR5 (niche related) and wikipedia, by simply putting 6 posts on my site and 5 or 6 articles on ezine.

btw. ezine is easy to beat, since there rankings are short-lived.

[deloriagod]

With that few competitors it shouldn't be very hard at all. Go through the top 10 and look them over well. That will truly tell you how hard it is going to be to get a top spot. 10 amazing sites ruling the first page could leave you high and dry on page 2.

[theseoguys]

Originally Posted by Simon Cruz

It looks like a VERY EASY keyword to rank for. But always make sure that the keyword is one of commercial intent...otherwise you might end up spending time and money trying to rank a keyword that yields zero conversions

Anyway, I always use the following guideline in determining the relative difficulty in ranking for keywords.

• 0-50,000 competing pages; 0-20,000 (intitle) – VERY EASY
• 50,001- 250,000 competing pages; 20,001-50,000 (intitle) – EASY
• 250,001-500,000 competing pages; 50,001-75,000 (intitle) – MEDIUM
• >500,000 competing pages; >75,000(intitle) - HARD

Hope this helps!

You guys set your sites too low. Half a million competing pages is not hard to compete against. It's got nothing to do with the competing pages, it has to do with the efforts of the people behind those pages.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Outranking has NOTHING to do with quantity, and everything to do with quality. I've seen Google results with millions of pages and the top 10 were easy to outrank, and I've seen Google results with 100,000 and a top 10 that were incredibly daunting to try and outrank.

Quality or competitors, not quantity, is the important factor. Anyone who tells you that ranking is easier or harder depending on the quantity of results is simply misinformed and giving out bad information.

Remember: Google only returns 1,000 pages for any search term. That means if you're listed in the SERPs at all for your keywords, your maximum number of competing pages is 999 anyhow.