What's the Deal With...

Google is a mysterious creature sometimes. Like a woman, you must learn to ride the emotional currents, and wait for the full moon to disappear.

Seriously though, backlinks from top sites can really raise your ranking tremendously. If you think its bs, take some time and set up those same accounts and do it yourself... see if it works for you... then if it is soo awesome write a WSO.

My article is in the exact same spot on the bottom of page two of serps and his is still in the middle of page one. I copied some of his backlinks, a few of them already are shown when I check my backlinks. I stuck to the more generic sites for creating profiles plus the links, I didn't create a profile at like the GM fan forum or couple of other arbitrary sites... that's just retarded and I can't believe he's still outranking me considering I'm still showing a dozen more links than he is.

He added a couple of new links in the time since I last checked, one from a Susan Boyle site and another from an Ecommerce site.

Is this seriously what passes for link building these days... creating empty profiles at random websites with tag/hyperlinks back to your article in the bio section of your profile?

Those links while unrelated probably come from high PR domains which are dofollow and are passing serious link juice to his article. There were many backlink packets being sold here before the rules got changed which gave huge lists of these profile sites and forums to get links from.

Instead of banging your head against the wall and trying to reinvent the wheel why not make profiles on all those sames sites since its obviously working?

Sometimes its great to be unique in our business, but when it comes to things like SEO where 80% of the results are determined by off page factors link inbound one way links, getting as many backlinks as you can from even unrelated websites helps a lot as you can see.

Part of the backlinking game. You did good for backtracking and if you want to fight the fight, jump into it as you've done. Word of caution though..wait until you run up against a competitor who is using xrumer to spam out their backlinks...good luck fighting that one.

Fair enough.

I've done most of his links and I'm still on page 2 and he on 1, that's fine for now, but what I don't understand AT ALL is I see there is another article from Ezine on page one from a different author (original guy's article is on articlesbase) which is obviously outranking mine but in checking its backlinks all he's got are links for Ezine, NOTHING ELSE and I've got plenty of links from other sites like the articlesbase guy's links in addition to Ezine and he's still on page 1 while I'm one 2. I really don't understand that.

What's his content like?.... Good?

Is this a joke?

Google will not push your article to the top, ahead of your competitors' just because you go out and copy their incoming links and have a few more links than them...

Google's algorithm has decided that your competitor's article is more relevant than yours and there's not much you can do about it.

Instead of putting SO MUCH effort into ONE article... Why not concentrate on getting more volume of articles out there, so that one eventually DOES stick to the top of Google... With a lot less effort.

Best,
Shane

How long has he been there? This could just be the big G dance for all you know...

So as an update, I've been creating about 5 links on average to that article along with a whole bunch of other articles as I do hyperlinks back to my articles on forum sites that'll take them. So basically I sign up, fill out the links in my profile for several articles, ping, then hit another forum. I'm being specific here as I have a couple of questions so wanted to be clear as to what I've been doing.

2 BURNING Questions:

1 - I checked the backlinks with Yahoo for the article of mine in question which I'm following. It appears that it isn't showing a single new link which I've added since I last pinged the original article, do I need to ping the original article EVERY time I add a single new link to it for the changes to take effect? It seemed like last time I had to ping the original article before the changes took place. If I'm doing this with a whole bunch of articles, that's A LOT of constant repinging necessary to see results so if someone could answer me that I'd appreciate it.

2 - In checking the SERPS, MY ARTICLE HAS DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY. I was on Page 2, then page 1 last time I checked a week or so ago. I've gone all the way through page 16 and can't find it. Typing in the URL in google it still comes up, twice actually, once for the article then one that's "feeds.ezinearticles/my article's URL". I can find a VERSION of the article which I edited and resubmitted to other article directories on page 5 and 6, but not the one on Ezine which I've been building links to. This is deeply disturbing considering the work I've put in as that says less that I need more links and more that I've been penalized or something.

YET with a different article which I've been link building to on the same forums, I'm still in about the same location on page one as I was when I last checked it about a week or so ago. So that leads me to believe that I wasn't penalized otherwise both articles would be in the crapper? The only thing I can think of is the competition is stronger for the first article and perhaps someone "reported" me somehow on it... no that doesn't make sense.

I'm really lost on this one.

*Edit*

I've checked the other article, the second one I referred to in question 2, and found that it's links were roughly the same as the first one's, so basically I guess pinging can update search engines but really Google finds them eventually after a few days itself if you give it time since I never pinged that second article to begin with. This has nothing to do with why my original article disappeared, but good to know just the same.