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Great website with unique interactive content BUT...It's not competitive enough

by MovingAround
3 replies
Hi,

For the last year, I've been dedicating myself to a new site I've created. I've been creating great unique content, not regularly, but I have about 80 articles (500+ words each) and I've picked the rhythm as for the last month. My new site, as of one year, barely scratches 200 visitors per day, which is peanuts compared to the competition. My competition is made up of spammy sites with articles written by poor guys who get paid 5 dollars to write each article. The articles are bad quality and full of amazon affiliate links, chiquita ads and CPA.

My competitors are pulling in over 1000 unique visitors per day, and their sites were created in a 6-month span (lots of sniper sites too, it's crazy). The difference between them and I? The backlink profile. My competitors all have blackhatted links, all of them. Me, I only have a few links from my other 2 sites and a couple of links from people who enjoyed my content and linked it. I also have some good social media traction but twitter links serve very little purpose for ranking.

My dilemna is what to do with my backlinking profile, as I know that's where I'm tanking. It's a shame because I actually poured a lot of effort into my articles and the content is highly relevant, unlike my competitors which essentially rewrite my articles and spam it with links LOL I actually had one of the guys who was outsourced telling me what he's doing and telling me he will rewrite articles for me for 6 dollars

I've looked into the darkside but I'm not convinced. I wanted to have this site as whitehat as possible, but it is just not keeping up with the competition and I may have to kill this site as it is failing to provide enough income to even cover the site's costs.

Should I grab a BH tool and spam my site with shady backlinks (regardless of what G says, this still works to an extent)? Should I buy high PR links from private netwoks? What can I do to remain competitive?

Thanks.
#butit #competitive #content #great #interactive #unique #website
  • Profile picture of the author icemonkey9
    Stay the path of the light and do not be tempted by the darkside. Once you go down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny

    Have you tried looking into getting listed with Google News? It can literally boost your traffic by 10x if you get in. I'd also suggest cranking out more content and doing more whitehat backlinking strategies.

    At the end of the day you need to decide if this is a sprint (if so blachhat away) or if this is a marathon (whitehat).
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  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by MovingAround View Post

    What can I do to remain competitive?
    Avoid SEO traffic (which sounds like all your competitors have, and may be worth very little to them).

    If you have decent articles, compared with your competition, why not perhaps try to have them published in other places, in front of the targeted traffic you want to attract? (All that your articles can ever bring you, sitting on your own site, is SEO traffic, which may not get you very far?).

    Personally, I'd advise you not to put too much of your time and effort into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use to build my business) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living just from that traffic, and I wouldn't even be cursing too much if Google de-indexed all my sites this afternoon.
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    • Profile picture of the author MovingAround
      Originally Posted by icemonkey9 View Post

      Stay the path of the light and do not be tempted by the darkside. Once you go down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny

      Have you tried looking into getting listed with Google News? It can literally boost your traffic by 10x if you get in. I'd also suggest cranking out more content and doing more whitehat backlinking strategies.

      At the end of the day you need to decide if this is a sprint (if so blachhat away) or if this is a marathon (whitehat).
      Uhm, I wasn't aware that you could get listed there. Problem is that this site is for something that is vanity-related (think muscle building stuff, other than it is not about muscles), so I'm not sure if they'd want to pick me up. I will have a look though.

      I agree with doing more whitehat, I'm actually asking sites to interview me and I've gained some good backlinks from there. However, I don't like the guest blogging option as one of my posts was, after a month, made nofollow (the link) LOL I emailed the guy and told him I noticed that and he gave some crap excuse. My other guest blog post was mysteriously erased from the site despite it was probably the best post of that site.


      Originally Posted by Alexa Smith View Post

      Avoid SEO traffic (which sounds like all your competitors have, and may be worth very little to them).

      If you have decent articles, compared with your competition, why not perhaps try to have them published in other places, in front of the targeted traffic you want to attract? (All that your articles can ever bring you, sitting on your own site, is SEO traffic, which may not get you very far?).

      Personally, I'd advise you not to put too much of your time and effort into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use to build my business) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living just from that traffic, and I wouldn't even be cursing too much if Google de-indexed all my sites this afternoon.
      Thanks. The only problem is that G for some reason is still not seeing me as authoritative enough to put me up. I agree with SEO traffic being very fluctuating, but I need to have a decent base, which I know I don't have. I'm sure if I had some stronger/more whitehat backlinks, I'd destroy the spammy competition. I'm trying to get creative with the whitehat backlinks but it is very time consuming.

      I sell a couple of Amazon stuff on the site, so I'm not really interested in sending paid traffic. I'm building the site as more of a build an authority, which is why I'm so dedicate with my writings and really don't want to tint my reputation. However, it boils my blood to see a literally thin article with utter garbage being above mine.

      The good news is that many of the spammers got slapped big time a year ago and my other sites outranked them! It's just this site is really slow to take off and I cannot emulate the sort of backlinking strategy for my other sites as they are different in concept. I'm aware of all the blackhat stuff and I've ranked dummy sites with my BH knowledge, but I see this as more of a hobby and enriching my knowledge more than a practical thing. But I'm sooooo tempted...
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