It looks to me like crap still wins

[vansy]

Wherever you look, you see experts advising people not to use automated tools. To do things the right way. That a website with good content will win over a site with tons of junky links. So I came to seomoz for some enlightenment.

I have a website that I created, it gets an A here on the website auditor. I have written over fifty completely original articles. I am barely making spot 10 in and out. The sites that are ranking are terrible. Some have one post, have completely wrong information, have pasted the product page as their own. Have no privacy page, contact  page etc. Many of them are in broken English and full of misspellings.

So I go the Open Site Explorer here and what do i find? Seomoz has it right on the nose. The site authority,linking domains etc are highest for the #1 site, #2 etc. So I examine the links and what do I find? Quality backlinks? Authority backlinks? Hardly.

I find completely junk links, that were made with xrumer or scrapebox . Russian bride sites, completely unrelated to the niche. Backlinks that were purchased on Fiverr. These are the types of backlinks Ive avoided. The kind the experts say to stay away from. Yet these people are making serious money with lousy websites and lousy backlinks.

Ive looked at others and its the same thing. Content is king? I dont think so. It looks to me like I SHOULD be making tons of these lousy links. Im not sure what direction to go in at this point. So Id like to hear some suggestions.

[vansy]

You are indeed an optimist. Thanks

[BlueprintMarketing]

Justin it seems to me like you just need a little bit more time learning the fundamentals. For instance I have a domain that's I believe roughly 8 years old however I can post a blog article today August 27, 2012 and the blog article will show up as 2012. It is about Google trusting the domain. Imagine I go and Google register.com or  Go Daddy I will get an offer for anywhere from $2-$4 a domain if I was a a black hat I could exploit that measly four dollar expenditure and What do I really have to lose except for four bucks. So now us  so we get sandbox to for times of up to 6 months

So long story short the good guys. Punished because there is no better way of figuring out whether or not we or the bad guys have purchased a $4 domain. And are going to go on a malware campaign or do something good with it. That's why in the future you can Google this the longer the domain has been registered in good standing and the longer it has left before it expires the better rank Google will give you. It makes sense if you're going to put all that time in to just some domain and turn away after a year that's crazy I just reregistered my domain for 5 years it is showing up on some search engine optimization tools as excellent. I suggest you find a good host and do the same.

I think this link should give you sufficient information along with what I've told you below to believe me. If you honestly think that you're going to make any money doing black hat the as Rand says if you believe that you can be the smartest people in the industry go ahead give it a whirl

http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-you-a-with-matt-cutts-at-smx-advanced-123513

http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20120608MattCuttsonPenguinUpdateNegativeSEORejectingLinks.html

I would strongly suggest enrolling in this program by distilled.net they are an affiliate the strongest affiliate to SEOmoz out there and they have done a fantastic job getting the basics into where I could learn them very easily here is the link http://www.distilled.net/u/

http://distilled.net/u?r=blueprint

you said that you had been hit by the economy man you said that you had been hit by the economy man I believe everyone here can relate to that in some way shape or form either they know somebody or they have witnessed or gone through it themselves

[vansy]

I dont think they can figure out quality at all. IMO they are not interested in finding quality, cleaning up the internet or any of those notions they like to promote. It would be very easy to find the best quality websites. They can start by forgetting about older sites being better. In many cases they are not.  This is so much so that many people are putting "2012" in their searches just to get a current answer. You can check Google keyword tool for that. A whole other keyword based on trying to get a current answer. Search engine results are abysmal in my opinion. You shouldnt have to buy advertising on page 1 if your content is better than the rest.

[MoosaHemani]

I am not sure if it is optimism or not but history teach me to respect this BIG G because it evolves and get better with time... I understand as a business it’s a pain and make one frustrates but this is how the world is!

If you have a plan to move with the links then I would prefer to go with links the ethical way that are related to your subject and niche.

[vansy]

Moosa,

Thanks for writing. Im glad that doing the right thing paid off for you. I must confess I dont have the respect for G that you people seem to have.

I will use Open Site Explorer later today and look at about ten Clickbank products. I will look for any quality sites that are ranking. If all ten are there because of an abundance of links then I will have to come to the conclusion that most of the time, links win.

And speaking of quality links, how do you suggest one make quality links? Can you lead me to a resource on that? And then, how do you index them?  I have quite a few high PR links that are related to my niche and when I use a program like Open Site Explorer, they never show up.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Moosa,

I have to agree 100% hit the nail on the head. I can suggest that you may be want to try out some new ways of getting ranked. I like the way time lines are described here

http://www.seosudo.com/seo-process.html one thing you can do right now that will drastically

one way you can get a excellent placement in the SERPS is to simply purchase a domain that is already key worded for your website or has an extremely high page rank.

I want you to know the link here is a partner link so I would get a small percentage if you did use it http://www.sedo.com/

however you may use www.sedo.com if you do not feel like doing that.

The choice of using a company like namejet.com gives you less choice but better prices.

For instance as noted above this may be a good thing or bad thing depending on where you stand I am neutral on it however buying a quality old domain with maybe some links if you're lucky is a huge step in the right direction in my opinion. If I wanted to rank for "table saws" and I was able to buy www.tablesaws.com I would be in a very good place off the bat. For things like that you may want to look at Sudio.com

you will fare well if you write unique content that is interesting and gets people's attention. Post everything on Facebook, twitter, linked and Pinterest and whatever else you can.

Respectfully,

Thomas

[Zoolander]

Sorry to hear that. I guess search engines can only figure out quality to a certain extent? One thing I intent to do in the future is enquire about advertising on sites found on page 1 results for high competition keywords and other keywords that I am not SEOing.

[MoosaHemani]

Justin, to be honest i am not here with te solution but some tips to you with my personal story...

I have been through this before and to be honest Google does contain the crap on the top for some of the extremely high competitive and business generation keywords.

Let me tell you my story! I was working hard to get the first page rankings for one of the most competitive keywords in my industry and guess what i was there on the 2^nd page and then stuck, and was not moving forward and the most surprising thing is that on the first page there were around 4 to 5 websites that have nothing to do with that keyword but just because they have some advantages like exact match domain and lot of links from Chinese forums they were out ranking me and enjoying the traffic.

The only good deed I did was not to build junk link at that time and this was the only thing that later save us from penguin.

I agree that junk links on some areas are still winning but killing evil by getting evil is no point... i think you should focus on building quality link and you will beat them with the time... Google is constantly getting better so with the time you will out rank them and win the SERP ranking for desired keyphrases...

[BlueprintMarketing]

Justin I would be happy to go over all of these questions with you. If you would like please feel free to e-mail

tzickell@blueprintmarketing.com

I will be more than happy to discuss this on the phone with you as well. I would much prefer not give my phone number out on the boards however you may private message me or use the e-mail address above. I think we can get these things sorted out very quickly. I must say this as this is a board designed for people to learn from anything we speak about of course anything private home not be discussed but the gist of what we speak about will be posted on SEOmoz after you agree to allow it to be posted.

That way we help other people that are trying to deal with this same issue.

You should create back links but you should do it in an inbound marketing manner. Looking at sites like http://hubspot.com will give you a lot of insight to the basics of how to get links. If you keep writing quality articles and posting them on twitter Facebook LinkedIn everything you will find that people do look for well-written high-quality knowledgeable information on the web. And it will happen I promise you I know it sounds bad man to ask you to wait. I have two been hit by the economy and honestly SEO has help me beyond belief.

Please send me a private message or an e-mail message and I would be more than happy to discuss this with you on the phone if you have the time to talk?

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Justin,

I hope you don't mind me asking for some help I did not know what you are going to do. Unfortunately links still carry a lot of weight and Google has the entire Internet to clean up so it may take time. If I may ask you what is your link profile look like?

I can assure you that if I wish to I could get a site with nothing but links to rank extremely hot I would never do it because Google will penalize me so badly it would be a complete waste of time and knock on my reputation. I agree with you content is King. However you may want to look into link bait here is a great bit of info on link bait from a wonderful company not to kock my own http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/linkbait.html

another powerful thing you can do is include video with site maps. favorite is http://wistia.com/ however if you are planning on posting many videos and you should as Google ranks them extremely high. I would then choose accompany that does an excellent job as well gives you an easy site map and is extremely inexpensive http://www.oculu.com/

If you would like I would be more than happy to go over your sites with you look at the competitors and give you my best analysis of what is happening.

Respectfully,

Thomas

[vansy]

Im so confused at this point I dont know what is black hat and what isnt. If i use a tool to post to many bookmarking sites is that blackhat?

So I dont need to create backlinks ? Or just one or two slow authority backlinks on occasion?

By the way this site is just for a product. The product could be gone by the time I rank. I tried and succeeded giving more info about this product than anyone. I wrote articles about why someone would want this product, what will it be like using it, what is the benefit etc etc.

Seriously, If i just keep writing quality articles and doing a few manual links and social site things, Im pretty sure my site will start sinking fast.

Ive been doing this pretty heavy for two years. I have owned my own business for the last 26 years, but the economy has ruined that. So I needed this to work. But in my opinion, quality is not at the top.

Thanks Thomas

[vansy]

Thanks Thomas,

The website is over 6 months old. The websites that are ranking have been ranking since I started the site. They are ranking not from content or on page seo, but from an abundance of terrible links.  If I saw a few cases of a site at number one because of content with little backlinks, I might think there is a chance. But I have not seen this, all I see is the opposite.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Trust me man I know you're frustrated and I wanted to just touch on the last point you said. Do not go into the spam/black hat direction for your own sake. I have over 100 spam links that have attempted to be added to my blog in the last week. That's not even very much however I use tools to prevent this and 99% of all blogs have no follow so you will not be getting the same amount of link juice you wish you would buy during black hat SEO.

I would be happy to show you the growth of websites I have worked on doing the right thing and how many websites post penguin have really been hit hard. This would I think prove to you that over time of approximately 6 months ( less if your domain is older) you will have no issue getting your site past the junk sites you are trying to beat now. please don't just take my word for it take Google's or any one else here. In fact if I may ask for an admin to explain this better I feel I would be doing you a much greater favor. Please make sure your robot text as well as your sitemaps are in place. And remember I would be happy to show you what the ability to wait and see give you in the long run. As I'm sure anyone here at SEOmoz will agree with me there's no way to completely  a  rid the web of spam based websites however I do feel their days are numbered and if you want to pick a side now you have made the right choices so far please do not become part of the problem it honestly will not benefit you or anyone else.

If anybody from SEOmoz is available to lend their advice to this person who is asking what I feel is a valid and fair question if you can please shed your extremely experienced light on what we have just been speaking about I would greatly appreciate it.

Respectfully,

Thomas Zickell

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Justin,

I can understand why you are frustrated. However I would like to ask you how long as your site been up? What is the age of the domain? All of your links that you've checked our relevant and have high authority? Content is King however sometimes even kings must wait. I would make sure you have your website indexed by Google. Then if you have purchased a new domain I would wait approximately 3 to 5 months to get out of what Google calls the sandbox. It is unfortunate thing but with all the malware and Russian bride mumbo-jumbo out there people can buy a domain for very little money and Google frankly does not trust them until they've proven themselves. You have done a fine job that seems by following the basics creating unique content perfect don't ever stray from it. You also have to understand links are important to your website the fact that a spam link might give more link juice that nothing is not surprising. However believe me when I say this Google will figure out the people cutting corners and using any links that are not relevant to their content. For instance if this is a marriage site about Russian brides or overseas brides that link is fine. I think you completely understand where I am coming from unfortunately it seems you might just have to wait it out. If you would like to private message me your domain or if you feel comfortable posting it here I would be happy to look into some of the reasons as to why you feel you are not getting the recognition on Google you deserve.

PS

Good job doing the right thing really another good website for the web think of what your users want that's how Google thinks.

Sincerely,

Thomas Zickell