Searching for Quality "Follow" Back Links

[lwnickens]

I'm in a highly competitive national market where the top sites have links from between 325 and 1300 unique linking root domains, therefore, you have to have an aggressive approach just to get on the map. (I'm at 317) If we were talking about needing 50 good links, I could take the time to cultivate relationships, get to know people, and get 1 or 2 great links from each webmaster, but the scale of the challenge is out  of control. My competitors, and myself, seem to all be getting links in the following ways:

1. Hoards of directory links. Some high quality paid links from industry sites ($2,400 per each link per year) and hundreds from 9-$49 per year.

2. At the bottom of the list of most all my competitors, there appears to be some links from their early beginnings that were reciprocal linking arrangements.

3. Blogs where they submitted articles and have good links back to their sites.

4. Paid ads on sites all over the internet that link back with their specific key words. Some from relevant sites, but mostly from sites that would give them a good deal and have high enough traffic and/or page rank.

5. Blog comments with a link back to their site; sometimes with good anchor text and sometimes you're forced to have to use your web site address as the anchor text or even your name. (Does that even do any good?)

My dilema is where to find 1,000 good places to get links and I don't do black hat? I can write good quality comments on blogs from a wide variety of industries, but most are now eliminating the possibility of using my anchor text other than my web site and my name. As I scour the playing field, it almost appears that it has become a "pay to play" proposition as far as getting links everywhere other than writing good blog articles, but then what good does it do to have 500 blog articles coming from a handful of linking root domains? You're just stuffing the ballot box!

As for me, I'm in the teens with all the high value phrases I need and must come up with a better strategy for the home stretch. In all the other varied statistical measurements that I see on SEO Moz, I'm no lower than #5 out of the top 10 competitors in any of them except Alexa rank. So, I'm close but it seems so far away! Would appreciative and be grateful for some wisdom from the community!    Lowell

[lwnickens]

Thanks Matthew for the well thought out response. That's the kind of direction that I need and is greatly appreciated. You're correct, I'm at that awkward experience level where I'm forced to do too much copying of others rather than original creative thought. Just going through this painful exercise is opening my mind to a number of new possibilities.

[johnshearer]

Yes Remarkable Content is the key...hard to do and often hard to even pay someone to do if your niche is technical..and SEO is headed in this direction.

[SparkplugDigital]

Hi Lowell,

If your competitors are getting a lot of low quality links then you might be closer than you think to beating them in the rankings. A link from a high quality site like the New York Times is worth more than tons of low quality links.

Most blog comments are no-follow and pass zero link value (according to Google). Even the do-follow blog comments pass little value (although Matt Cutts has said that they do pass some PageRank).

One idea that could help you catch up fast is to create some remarkable content that gets a lot of links. An example of this is an infographic that goes viral. Publishing guest posts on high quality blogs is a great way to get relevant links on a regular basis. MyBlogGuest.com is a great resource for getting guest posts published.

[MatthewEgan]

Remember that Open Site Explorer assigns authority based on links, not based on any algorithm like Google's where the content, the relevance, the known link profile, etc are all factored in.  So just because you're seeing a competitor having a lot of spammy links doesn't mean that spam is what you want to be replicating.

The 5 types of links you reference, #3 is article marketing and #4 is Black Hat, considered Exact Match Anchor Text link buying.  Violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines, not that you'll always get caught, but it is not white hat SEO.

You're trying to replicate what the competition has done, and that's a common stance of SEO's at a certain experience level, who aren't quite at that stage to build link bait, spin viral content, etc, the things that generate the valuable top level links that supports your more spammy directory links and blog commenting, but you need that 25% or so quality diferentiating links that cause your site to stand apart, true links, links that show that you deserve that ranking, and didn't just spin some SEO tools to spam your way to the mid-teens.

SEOmoz has some great articles if you search for them on the more advanced Link Building tactics and I recommend you check out LinkLove videos that Distilled put out, that is if you can't make it to the event itself.