How I beat a competitor with High PR backlinks

[retsek]

[this is more of a guide/suggestions for newbies]

So i joined a niche that gets 125,000 exact searches for the main keyword and several thousand for additional keywords.

When I started the current #1 was Wikipedia and #2 was a competitor who started 1 year before. I looked at his backlinks and I concluded that he did at least 3 full SENUKE runs and he bought into one of those High PR link networks (1 PR6, 3 PR5, 6PR4, etc).

So here's how I was able to take the #2, #3 and #4 positions for the main keyword without paying monthly fees for high PR links:

- I created and bought lots of quality content. Over 200 posts. It's important to not post it all at once. Use the Wordpress Schedule feature.

- I removed the wordpress loop from the homepage and built the home page using a Page Template with sections under the topic. Learn wordpress code and CSS and display your home page in a way that is helpful to the user. Having a long list posts on a topic with the full content on the homepage is not helpful to the user, and there's duplicate content issues with the SEs.

- In addition to the Main keyword, I identified 20 other keywords that had a fair number searches and were closely related. I categorized those 20 keywords into 5 Wordpress Categories. (No Post Tags are used).

- For content:

The homepage had about 1000 words discussing the topic, introducing the 5 sections, linking to important posts etc.

For each of 20 additional keywords, there was a 500-750 word post that I wanted to rank for the keyword. Each of these posts link to the Homepage with our main keyword as the anchor text. These 20 posts were also made stickies, so they appear at the top of their category listings.

For the other ~180 posts, these were 300-500 words and they went deeper into topics discussed in the 20 post set. Each of them link to one or more of the 20 posts using anchor from the additional keywords. Some of the 180 also link to the homepage for the main keyword.

Each of the ~200 posts has an image with alt text containing the target keyword, not necessarily exact match for the keyword. I use 123rf.com for many of the images, obviously not free. But we'll make our money back right? right.

- For other on Page.

• Use Breadcrumbs!!!
• Set your Permalinks to /%category%/%postname%/
• Use a XML Sitemap, no need to link to it on your page. The good ones will notify Google.
• Use a Related Posts Plugin (YARPP is good)
• Target Keyword appears in Title and Description of each post and Home Page. Meta Tags are optional. Remember to setup appropriate titles and descriptions for your categories as well.
• REMOVE the word "category" from your wordpress base URL. (yoast wordpress seo plugin)
• Each of my 5 categories have about 100-150 words describing the category before listing the posts.
• Ensure your theme, uses H1 for the Post Title. Only 1 H1 per page. Use H1 once on the homepage, and make sure your Site Title or Logo is not using it.
• Use multiple H2, H3 in each post where appropriate but don't overdo it.
• Don't pay so much attention to (or obsess over) keyword density. Just write or produce content that is easy to read, has headings separating sections, uses bullet point lists to get the point across, and has proper grammar and spelling.
• Use Wordpress SEO by Yoast. Great plugin, free!, and will take care your breadcrums, xml sitemap, pages titles and descriptions.

There's other seo plugins that will assist you with these on page factors, I'd recommend Clickbump SEO, but you can google for free options.

DO NOT touch SEOpressor - it completely kills performance on high traffic sites even with caching. OR if you have several hundred sites on one shared hosting, it will make it impossible. Also I think it's pretty sleazy to try to score a free backlink from someone who paid you $100.


- For Offpage:

Remember the competitor has high PR links. There was no way I was going to be paying monthly for those kinds of links. So I started off slow.

1. First I did a press release as a way to introduce the site. I outsourced this in the Warriors for Hire section, and got some nice authority links from about.com and other news sites.
2. A week later, I outsourced submissions to the top 10 article directories targeting the home page, the 20 posts, and the 5 categories (remember to make your categories index-able in whatever SEO plugin you use, and use the_excerpt instead of the_content in the template). For all link building to follow, its important to vary your anchor text.
3. Repeat #2 three times with 30 days in between.
4. Fourth Week, I outsourced a Link Wheel that was built over 21 days that included high PR Web2 sites and also .EDU / .GOV blogs linking to the Homepage of the site and randomly to each other. The second layer, larger of lower PR Web2 sites, linked to the top layer. In addition, all the pages in the wheel also randomly linked to authority sites like wikipedia, about.com ...youtube videos, forums, etc. The posts of these properties were spread out over a couple of days.
5. Fourth Week, I added the site to BuildMyRank.com. I've outsourced about 300 posts. And queued them up to publish at about 5-7 per day. 50% of links went to the homepage, 25% to the 5 categories, 25% to the 20 posts.
6. Sixth Week, I also blasted the ~180 posts with about 20,000 forum profiles, blog comments and social bookmarks. It's important here to vary the anchor text as much as possible and then some. also use text like click here, visit this site, etc. In fact, I also do blog comments & profiles to the Homepage, Categories, and the 20 posts just to variate the anchor text of backlinks pointing to the pages.
7. Tenth Week. I blast the backlinks created at #2,#3,#4, & #5 with another 20,000 forum profiles, blog comments and social bookmarks.
8. 12th Week. Profit. Homepage is ranked #2 for the main keyword. A category page and a single post are also behind it in the #3 & #4 positions. I'll continue building to take down Wikipedia and no doubt keep the competitor at bay since I'm sure he's not happy to now be ranked #6.

So that's it, I'm sure I missed something but I think the most important advice you can get is not over optimize and do not build links with 1 or 2 anchor text alone. For the main keyword, I only used it 50% of the time on the homepage. The rest were variations of the 20 other keywords, naked backlinks (backlinks without anchor text), click here, read more, visit this site, etc.

I could have stretched this out to a couple of pages and have my PDF in the WSO section, but here it is. Free for you to take action, incorporate into your own existing methods and use for free.

Edit: Also I hope this post doesn't come across as saying High PR Links are not needed. In fact, it will probably be required if I want to overtake Wikipedia. This post just points out ways to setup your on page structure and vary your backlink profile with powerful sources, rather than wasting time using weak Senuke campaigns and blog comments.

[JSProjects]

Thought I'd give this a little bump & hit the thanks button. Not sure why it's getting buried below the other threads. Great overview.

[patrich]

Absolutely incredible post! This is very similar to what I do in my day to day and I can verify that it works. The real benefit here is how big you have built out the site, if people are going after high traffic, more competitive terms in most cases a little sniper site just isn't going to cut it anymore.

I would be more inclined to suggest a newbie follow your tutorial here than purchase any of the ebooks available, because you listed everything that they should know. Great post!

[retsek]

Thanks.

I forgot to mention that the competitor still has MORE backlinks than me, mostly weak profiles, social bookmarks, blog comments and web2 pages. Quality Over Quantity.

[SEOThomas]

So you built a huge site full of unique content with tons of backlinks. This has been known for years.

But I would be weary about building thousands of backlinks per week.....

[Crystal Love]

Absolutely spot on! Times have changed, it's all about Quality over Quanity. Some have caught on; unfortunately, many still have not.

[retsek]

Originally Posted by SEOThomas

So you built a huge site full of unique content with tons of backlinks. This has been known for years.

But I would be weary about building thousands of backlinks per week.....

Yes, but unfortunately some of the newbs still dont get it - who are what this post is for.

As for the backlinks, only about 5% of profile links are ever found if you leave them alone. Even with pinging, the indexing and crawling rate is still relatively low.

So I build them, schedule them into RSS feeds and have them feed to the Google crawler via Linklicious.

Three months from now I will blast those 40,000 links with backlinks of their own.

[blend]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing

[RevSEO]

That's a solid blueprint that many users should follow! Thanks to you, I'm sharing this post with a friend of mine that just asked me about SEO today!

Question - how much was the 300 posts that you outsourced on BMR?

[retsek]

Originally Posted by RevSEO

That's a solid blueprint that many users should follow! Thanks to you, I'm sharing this post with a friend of mine that just asked me about SEO today!

Question - how much was the 300 posts that you outsourced on BMR?

BMR Outsourcing cost me $150 for the 300 posts. I have a great guy from the Philippines, when I first got him he wanted just $30 per 100 posts. After the first job with 100% approval rate, I raised his pay to $50 per 100 posts without being asked.

That's a another tip.

Once you find a great outsourcer, keep them happy! Compliment their work! Give them clear instructions and Keep them working for you. $30 was far too low considering the work he does, and that's not even taking into consideration that sellers here on WF woud have charged about $450 to $600 just for 300 posts.

[promhut729]

Analysis of your opponent's back, and then use them

[Luke McCormack]

Great post, very solid approach. Are you finding a slight slip in ranking when BMR posts fall off front blog pages?

Regards

Nigel

[canhdong90]

It's great! Nice plan

[retsek]

Originally Posted by nigelwhittaker

Great post, very solid approach. Are you finding a slight slip in ranking when BMR posts fall off front blog pages?

Regards

Nigel

No.

With this project only 3/4 of the BMR posts have gone live. So there is a steady stream of new links being created.

So yes the BMR posts will fall off home pages and page 2s in about a week or two after they are posted, but I re-enforce them with profile links, blog comments and social bookmarks.

[StoneWilson]

Subscribed. Really helpful, sometimes I just can't remember those details, good reminder. Thanks.

[ok123]

I hope more newbies read this post and realise that there is only one thing which works online..

Consistent Hard Work with a plan..

Kudos to OP for sharing..

[alina albert]

Don't go for quantity work with quality if you have less but quality back links you can get better results than the other sites.

[kurtmacc008]

Thank you for sharing. Very nice ideas. I've learned a lot.

[markowe]

Google loves content, but every time I say that here someone says, ha, I'll beat your content with backlinks any time. Well, I am not sure if that is even necessarily true, but it is a strategy that works for me, especially as I like writing and dislike backlinking. Big investment though, all that content for the site? You are at a point where you have pennies to invest in outsourcing, but then newbies can do this for themselves, it will just take longer.

[BlakeM]

Wow. Great work and thanks for the post!

It's a bit overwhelming, but so worth it. I think I'm going to get a 7 day free trial to BMR or maybe Linkvana. I'm trying a couple SEO services out, but none as extensive as this (my competition is not as high)

[Jonathan Dunsky]

Awesome post. Thank you very much. Where did you outsource your linkwheels?

[Lulu Chil]

Originally Posted by markowe

Google loves content, but every time I say that here someone says, ha, I'll beat your content with backlinks any time. Well, I am not sure if that is even necessarily true, but it is a strategy that works for me, especially as I like writing and dislike backlinking. Big investment though, all that content for the site? You are at a point where you have pennies to invest in outsourcing, but then newbies can do this for themselves, it will just take longer.

Are you saying that you do very little backlinking? Please explain in detail when you say Google loves content. Thanks

Thanks to the OP for a very useful post.

[MediaLexus]

A very solid plan. I follow a method that is relatively similar to yours. Creating lots of inbound links all around your site with keywords pointing to strategic pages is an excellent strategy.

I worry though about the massive link blasting you do toward the end. This can come off as highly unnatural to Google considering I know very few people that can pump out 10,000 forum posts a day. It might provide a temporary boost but if Google catches a whiff of it they could penalize you.

IMHO, I don't really view forum links as a great way to improve SERP rankings. I find that they are better at promoting your brand and sending traffic to your site. I feel that it could hurt your brand and your reputation if your prospective customers see spammy forum posts or blog posts. Just my two cents.

But all together a great plan and I applaud you for taking over your competitors so quickly. Keep up the good work.

[HostingBee]

Excellent post. Thanks for that

[glennforum]

Wow these are great inputs! thanks for sharing these strategies, rarely do we see people share their strategies in a comprehensive manner.

[Spastabetic]

I totally agree with the quality over quantity.

Does anyone else think that very soon google will totally change their algorithm and backlinks will be almost a waste of time?

Good content that is right on the money will be the deciding factor.

Consider this ...

A human can go to two sites and see that site A is full of crap, but is ranking very high due to backlink numbers.

He goes to site B which has 20 pages of pretty decent content but isn't ranking as high due to less backlinks.

The human can see this in a heartbeat, but at the moment googles' algorithm can't, so counts backlinks as a vote as it has little else to go buy.

But how long before googles' algorithm evolves enough to see a site just as a human does? I don't reckon that far into the future.

If you can give google the best of both worlds now, content and some backlinks then I'm willing to wager that some time very soon you will see an overnight jump up the rankings.

All my opinions of course.

Ron

[Apollo-Articles]

Wow that's a lot of backlinks dude! How long did it take you to implement this from start to finish?

Did you find the 20,000 blast useful?

Also would you mind sharing which Warrior your outsourced your press release too?

Finally could you tell us if you recouped your investment?

Sam

[Jwil1025]

Great read thanks for sharing.
J

[Oranges]

At last No BS and somebody posted the real truth.
This is exactly what i do and it works perfectly.

[Ibcontact]

Nice sharing dude, i like your post ...

[SimpleSEOTips]

Really interesting post and congratulations. It looks like a really well thought out approach which is quite easy (I mean no disrespect to the work you put in) to replicate.

I wanted to find out what you meant by "Use Breadcrumbs!!"
What benefits did you find that offered?

[retsek]

Originally Posted by Apollo-Articles

Wow that's a lot of backlinks dude! How long did it take you to implement this from start to finish?

Did you find the 20,000 blast useful?

Also would you mind sharing which Warrior your outsourced your press release too?

Finally could you tell us if you recouped your investment?

Sam

From when the home page and the first 20 posts were done, it took about 100 days to get to #2.

Yes the 20k blasts are useful. Some of you may worry about that amount of the links at one time, but Profile links aren't discovered very easily. A very lower percentage gets crawled if you leave it without pinging. So what I do a build a large number, wait two weeks as they initially some will be found right away, then I schedule them in Linklicious to be drip feed.

Also I don't use the profile links directly to money pages, or pages I want to rank for keywords. If you noticed, I only pointed them to other backlinks and the 180+ support posts on the site.

I outsourced the Press Release here:
http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...-all-work.html

I had spent a total of $500 for the content and about 1100 outsourcing all the link building to different people. The niche does very well with Adsense and is on track to make 1,500 per month with just one ad unit.

It would probably do better with one or two clickbank products but clickbank wont allow affiliate signups from my country for some reason. In the meantime, I'm also building a list until I figure out other money making ideas.

[retsek]

Originally Posted by SimpleSEOTips

Really interesting post and congratulations. It looks like a really well thought out approach which is quite easy (I mean no disrespect to the work you put in) to replicate.

I wanted to find out what you meant by "Use Breadcrumbs!!"
What benefits did you find that offered?

Breadcrumbs - Webmaster Tools Help

It's also the hallmark of almost every authority site on the Web. Essentially it gives you more links on the Search Page. And it helps with navigation on your site. It is optional but I wouldn't put up a large site without it.

[malayalamonline]

Hi !

Its very informative sharing ! Nice Post regarding to beating a competitor.

[J3thro M]

Very nice post. Can you tell us where did you outsource the article writing? How bout the quality of the content, where you happy? I am in search of a content/article writing that wouldn't cost too much but still giving a good quality article. thanks

[Apollo-Articles]

Thanks for your answers, I must admit I've used a few of your strategies myself and had great success, I'm just still not sure about the 20,000 links.

You seem to have everything covered though (backlinking them to the second tier links and altering anchor text) and best of all it works!

Thanks for putting this up

Sam

[retsek]

Originally Posted by J3thro M

Very nice post. Can you tell us where did you outsource the article writing? How bout the quality of the content, where you happy? I am in search of a content/article writing that wouldn't cost too much but still giving a good quality article. thanks

Cheap writers don't often provide quality. But I pay $10 usually for a 500 word article, and as much as $25 depending on the topic.

[clickbump]

Originally Posted by retsek

There's other seo plugins that will assist you with these on page factors, I'd recommend Clickbump SEO...

DO NOT touch SEOpressor - it completely kills performance on high traffic sites even with caching.

Hi there, thanks for the mention of my product. just thought I'd let you and others here know that the LSI engine has been rebuilt from scratch in the upcoming update which will ship next week.

It will scrape Google's top 10 search results for any given keyword and return the most relevant keywords shared across those sites. No one has anything close to this.

And while it lasts, you can still get it for $17 via the Warrior Special (see link in my sig)

[pjman]

Nice share. It will totally help me on my new sites.

[ashishbhatnagar]

We need to high PR backlinks to beat the competitor. We all know that high PR backlinks plays a important role in the promotion of website. Google always gives the priority to the quality backlinks mans high PR backlinks. So If we make some good mquality backlinks then it will really help us in web promotion.

[epathj]

thx for your share
but for now ,PR is useless. Exchange outboard links makes its easy to up your pr

[JoeLawrence]

This is a great step by step roadmap. Thanks for sharing. I'm also going to bookmark to come back to it later. Maybe even make a mindmap combining some of these techniques with my own resources.

It's great to see a 1,2 approach (content and backlinks). Very inspiring!

[CeeCee123]

I have just copied and pasted this post to my desktop and I will study it slowly and try to implement those tips you just shared. Thanks..

[boxoun]

Originally Posted by ok123

I hope more newbies read this post and realise that there is only one thing which works online..

Consistent Hard Work with a plan..

Kudos to OP for sharing..

Sounds like the only one doing hard work is the filipino writing 300 articles for $50.

So let me get this straight op.

You got 200 pages of content. Paid a Filipino literally peanuts.
Built a bunch of backlinks. Then you come here telling everybody its all about quality?

Congrats to your achievement. Just wanted to make sure I read that correctly.

[J3thro M]

Originally Posted by boxoun

Sounds like the only one doing hard work is the filipino writing 300 articles for $50.

So let me get this straight op.

You got 200 pages of content. Paid a Filipino literally peanuts.
Built a bunch of backlinks. Then you come here telling everybody its all about quality?

Congrats to your achievement. Just wanted to make sure I read that correctly.

Waaaaaaa Filipino writing 300 articles for $50???? Where did you get that, tell me....

[drw]

Thanks for your post.

Didn't you use tag at all?

[katied772]

For the 20 posts that you made sticky: Did you do these as excerpts or full posts? Are all the other shorter posts full or excerpts?
The description of each category you said you place before the posts: This is also made sticky?
You say you used a homepage template: This is something available or did you just design the page that way?
Thanks, this post was so helpful. Most I'm familiar with but it helps to have it laid out.

[dagaul101]

Nice tip, the onus is on quality and naturally progression, the search engines will always reward you well for this

[retsek]

Originally Posted by boxoun

Sounds like the only one doing hard work is the filipino writing 300 articles for $50.

So let me get this straight op.

You got 200 pages of content. Paid a Filipino literally peanuts.
Built a bunch of backlinks. Then you come here telling everybody its all about quality?

Congrats to your achievement. Just wanted to make sure I read that correctly.

Maybe you should re-read. I paid the guy $150 for the BMR posts. BMR Posts don't need to win any awards, they just need to be unique and they are just for backlinks.

The posts for my website I paid $10 per 500words to a professional English writing team. That was over $1500.

[retsek]

Originally Posted by katied772

For the 20 posts that you made sticky: Did you do these as excerpts or full posts? Are all the other shorter posts full or excerpts?
The description of each category you said you place before the posts: This is also made sticky?
You say you used a homepage template: This is something available or did you just design the page that way?
Thanks, this post was so helpful. Most I'm familiar with but it helps to have it laid out.

I use the_excerpt on the category template.

The description for the category was entered under the Category Description section in wordpress itself. (not a post) Most themes dont use this tag though, so alternatively you can just put your content directly into the template surrounded by <p > tags.

Many Magazine style themes could work maybe for the homepage. I find it much better to start off to with a base theme and edit it to my liking.