Forget About Backlinks Number >>>> IT'S THE WRONG THING TO LOOK AT ***

[mince001]

I see that so many people stress about how many backlinks their competitors have when doing competition research .If you ask me, it is BS to an extent.

First of all, the most important thing is if the optimise the page that's ranking for that keyword(title, h1 ,descr,etc)

And then the most important thing I do is analysing their backlinks and looking at their anchor text. In my opinion this is the most crucial thing to look at when analysing keyword competition.

I have found a keyword about a week ago, and the first website ranking had a little over 5000 backlinks and a domain age of 7 years. The searches for that term is quite high, so I thought I would do a little more research.And guess what....not even 1 of their backlinks had the anchor text of the keyword I was analysing.

I have quickly bought a emd and done some social bookmarking to index my site fast, and guess what, I am number 1.


I truly beleive that people stress to much about the number of competing pages, intitle search, inurl search and all the rest. All that really matters is emd, domain age, the top 10 ranking page, on-page seo, backlinks quality and the anchor text of the backlinks. The backlinks number is not always relevant. As they can have loads of pr0 backlinks ...just create a few high pr backlinks and you will see results.


Please feel free to add anything!

[Valera]

I agree with you, without going in to it as deep as you have, the quantity of backlinks does not always equate to quality.

At times I can outrank a competitor with 10 strong backlinks over their 500-700 ****ty links.

It all depends on a lot of factors as you said.

But then again, these days onpage seo is slipping standard and I see really poor sites with a few lines of content and super crap onpage SEO rank #1 because they have a lot of solid links and right anchor texts, and some are strong spammers of course.

[timpears]

Well maybe this is why I can't get my pages ranked. I am throwing thousands of links at them and can't get my site any where near the first page of Google except for one keyword that I didn't target but gets almost no searches each month.

Even though my URL is keyword optimized, and my blog uses the Clickbump SEO plugin so I have my posts online optimized. I will be damned if I know what I am doing wrong, Google must just hate me.

[alica2011]

i think now is deep competition for new blog or website because too much blog born everyday.

[Valera]

Its not that, what his issue is, is throwing a lot of low quality links too fast... he needs to focus on less but more quality links and his site will start doing well...

On average, it takes me 1-3 days to land a brand new site on page 1 of google even if the competition is really tough, sometimes if the niche is good I will put 2-3 sites on page 1 just to soak up more traffic. I dont hammer them with 1000's of links.

Probably about 100-200 nice quality links at the start and thats about it and usually my link building efforts stop there, unless it is really tough and I have to continue building links.

I had a site late last year ranking #6 for ejaculation keyword in google, but it slipped as I have stopped link building regularly as I used to.

I am sure if I go back and build more quality links it will regain its position.

So the key is, less links, more quality

[mince001]

Originally Posted by Valera

Its not that, what his issue is, is throwing a lot of low quality links too fast... he needs to focus on less but more quality links and his site will start doing well...

On average, it takes me 1-3 days to land a brand new site on page 1 of google even if the competition is really tough, sometimes if the niche is good I will put 2-3 sites on page 1 just to soak up more traffic. I dont hammer them with 1000's of links.

Probably about 100-200 nice quality links at the start and thats about it and usually my link building efforts stop there, unless it is really tough and I have to continue building links.

I had a site late last year ranking #6 for ejaculation keyword in google, but it slipped as I have stopped link building regularly as I used to.

I am sure if I go back and build more quality links it will regain its position.

So the key is, less links, more quality

I have to agree..quality over quantity ..What sort of link sources do you prefer to use? Do you find that link pushing works very well? This works well for my sites...Along with link baiting...

[InTheMaking]

Originally Posted by mince001

I see that so many people stress about how many backlinks their competitors have when doing competition research .If you ask me, it is BS to an extent.

First of all, the most important thing is if the optimise the page that's ranking for that keyword(title, h1 ,descr,etc)

And then the most important thing I do is analysing their backlinks and looking at their anchor text. In my opinion this is the most crucial thing to look at when analysing keyword competition.

I have found a keyword about a week ago, and the first website ranking had a little over 5000 backlinks and a domain age of 7 years. The searches for that term is quite high, so I thought I would do a little more research.And guess what....not even 1 of their backlinks had the anchor text of the keyword I was analysing.

I have quickly bought a emd and done some social bookmarking to index my site fast, and guess what, I am number 1.


I truly beleive that people stress to much about the number of competing pages, intitle search, inurl search and all the rest. All that really matters is emd, domain age, the top 10 ranking page, on-page seo, backlinks quality and the anchor text of the backlinks. The backlinks number is not always relevant. As they can have loads of pr0 backlinks ...just create a few high pr backlinks and you will see results.


Please feel free to add anything!

Analyzing the competition properly can go a long way... but my guess (and since there was an EMD available) is that none of the top 10 had any proper on-page SEO set up.

Rather than being a page that was ranking, it was probably their homepage which makes sense that the 5,000 backlinks weren't optimized for that term.

[mince001]

Originally Posted by timpears

Well maybe this is why I can't get my pages ranked. I am throwing thousands of links at them and can't get my site any where near the first page of Google except for one keyword that I didn't target but gets almost no searches each month.

Even though my URL is keyword optimized, and my blog uses the Clickbump SEO plugin so I have my posts online optimized. I will be damned if I know what I am doing wrong, Google must just hate me.

Do reverse engineering with seo spyglass(it's free) and i guarantee you will be on page 1 or 2 at least..then build a few more quality links than them and you will see results. social bookmark all your backlinks with socialadr or something similar and they will get indexed quicker as well.

Give it a go and let me know how it goes!

I hope this helps!

[mince001]

Originally Posted by InTheMaking

Analyzing the competition properly can go a long way... but my guess (and since there was an EMD available) is that none of the top 10 had any proper on-page SEO set up.

Rather than being a page that was ranking, it was probably their homepage which makes sense that the 5,000 backlinks weren't optimized for that term.

It wasn't their home page. They only had the keyword in the description and title. But they lacked backlinks for that particular keyword. They used a very close variation of the keyword instead.

[RobertTours]

first Competitor analysis is more helpful in on page SEO, then off page SEO. When ever we check backlinks of our competitors they will confuse us.. Domain Age and relevancy of backlinks are two main factor in ranking. Also anchor text links and links from high PR quality sites do effect in ranking of keywords.

[noobjet]

Is EMD absolutely crucial ? What if you have one hyphen ?

My two options I'm looking at right now are either EMD with .us extension or one hyphen with a .com. Which do you think would be better for SEO ?

[ckrieger]

I would rather have the .com with one hyphen rather than the .us EMD because I find .com a little easier to rank. But you could still probably rank the .us

[JamesGw]

Originally Posted by Valera

I agree with you, without going in to it as deep as you have, the quantity of backlinks does not always equate to quality.

At times I can outrank a competitor with 10 strong backlinks over their 500-700 ****ty links.

It all depends on a lot of factors as you said.

But then again, these days onpage seo is slipping standard and I see really poor sites with a few lines of content and super crap onpage SEO rank #1 because they have a lot of solid links and right anchor texts, and some are strong spammers of course.

I disagree with this. Backlinks matter, but I don't think that onpage SEO is slipping at all. It's actually increasing in importance, IMO. People are still gaming the system with ****ty sites, but that's becoming less and less common, especially with the Panda updates.

If you pump out quality 800+ word posts on your website, you'll rank well for most keywords without much external optimization.

In regard to quality vs quantity, I agree to an extent. I think both are important. The issue that people run into with mass links is that the build them spammy. I think diversification is the most important part - many domains, page ranks, and types of links incl. follow + nofollow.

[mince001]

Originally Posted by noobjet

Is EMD absolutely crucial ? What if you have one hyphen ?

My two options I'm looking at right now are either EMD with .us extension or one hyphen with a .com. Which do you think would be better for SEO ?

EMD is not crucial,but you will have an advantage. Use .com .org .info and .co.uk if you are targeting uk.
I would always go for a emd rather than a hypen domain. for example, if you have a choice between www.your-site.com and yoursite.org - web sites I would go with the second option. I never use .us personally.

[mince001]

Originally Posted by JamesGw

I disagree with this. Backlinks matter, but I don't think that onpage SEO is slipping at all. It's actually increasing in importance, IMO. People are still gaming the system with ****ty sites, but that's becoming less and less common, especially with the Panda updates.

If you pump out quality 800+ word posts on your website, you'll rank well for most keywords without much external optimization.

In regard to quality vs quantity, I agree to an extent. I think both are important. The issue that people run into with mass links is that the build them spammy. I think diversification is the most important part - many domains, page ranks, and types of links incl. follow + nofollow.

on-page factors are very important. Especially ensuring that your posts are above a certain word count and you have a good mixture of low and high word counts on posts.

Keyword density is not all that important right now. Overdoing it could harm your site though.

For keyword where you have very little competition and you are ranking within days, content might not be as important at the begining. But you have to think about the future.... what if more people discover that keyword and optimise their sites for it. What would happen to your site than. It's better to be safe and have a lot of good unique content and quality backlinks. The anchor text should be diversified as well, in order to make it look more natural...

I guess I could go on on this topic for ages....so i'm going to stop.

[gtk29]

This is a great post I have come across. I totally think that backlinks do not tell the quality of the web site. There are so many crap sites with so many back links.