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My feeling is to wait them out if you can, and let the algorithm do its thing. If the competition's link profile is the way you describe it, then how long will the site last at the top of rankings? Not long, I would think. Time and time again, we see ranking spikes from low-quality links followed by monumental crashes. I even remember reading a study about this -- how algorithmic penalties are often preceded by impressive spikes in rankings.

In spite of the fact that we know these legacy forms of link building are dead, people are still doing them with gusto -- particularly offshore SEO practitioners, who are happy to make short-term money on short-term results. My guess is that your competitor knows little about SEO, read something about how important it is to have lots of links, and went out and hired the absolute cheapest SEO'er they could find, without having a clue about the business. I would imagine he has a big smile on his face right now, and he's telling people, "it's so easy to rank #1 on Google! All you have to do is pay someone a little bit of money to build a lot of links!"

I'm highly doubtful, however, that he'll remain in that spot.

Hi there! Adding to what Moosa Hemani said, Google sometimes honeymoons new pages and sites (not sure how old your site is). I can also tell you from experience that page rank and page authority do not always tell the tale in who outranks who. If this were the case, all of the massive websites would completely dominate. Years ago, I had a website called www.iphone5newsblog.com that sates the #1 result for "iPhone 5" for more than a year, and the blog had a page rank of zero. As Googles moves away from links and toward better understanding page content, now more than ever, search engines can discern both authority and relevancy from content alone.

Just to add what some other folks have said here, I think that the look and length of the title tag may have a CTR effect in search result listings. Because the vast majority of people tend to overstuff and over-elongate their title tag, I think that a pithy one stands out on the page -- particularly if it is optimized for the exact keyword phrase that the searcher entered into the search engine. Just as the Google author tag adds in CTR value to the listing vis a vis author photo, name, etc., so too might the concise, short title tag pop a bit more.

(I have no data to back this up, mind you. Totally just a theory.)

Oh, immense thanks, EGOL! The WordPress plug-in is a godsend, as we have tons of very high-quality, authoritative landing pages, and it will make for an efficient means of linking to them. Also, re: persistent navigation. I've been meaning to put a resources area in the menu bar with links to these landing pages -- which will also work well as info/destination pages as well. I guess I've always figured it just seemed too good to be true that having those links in the nab could really have a positive outcome. But we just recently got upgraded to PR5, so I guess we'll get to see what all that juice can do us. Thanks again!

Sounds good, EGOL. So, what do you think about my notion of using news articles with links to landing pages embedded as a means of getting page rank juice flowing and ultimately ranking the landing pages. Viable?

EGOL,

That sounds like an awesome approach! I wonder: we have a substantial amount of tag and category pages that we can carefully used to make sure that all of our content is properly tagged. Could these be shopped for links and RSS'ed out? After all, our site is a WordPress site, and as you know, if you stick a /feed on the end of just about anything, you get a custom RSS of whatever goes on it.

Thanks for your feedback.

Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus.

I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute.

Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords:

http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/

Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort.

However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here:

http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/

Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS.

If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page.

To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page.

Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus.

I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute.

Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords:

http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/

Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort.

However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here:

http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/

Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS.

If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page.

To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page.

Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

Just to add what some other folks have said here, I think that the look and length of the title tag may have a CTR effect in search result listings. Because the vast majority of people tend to overstuff and over-elongate their title tag, I think that a pithy one stands out on the page -- particularly if it is optimized for the exact keyword phrase that the searcher entered into the search engine. Just as the Google author tag adds in CTR value to the listing vis a vis author photo, name, etc., so too might the concise, short title tag pop a bit more.

(I have no data to back this up, mind you. Totally just a theory.)

My feeling is to wait them out if you can, and let the algorithm do its thing. If the competition's link profile is the way you describe it, then how long will the site last at the top of rankings? Not long, I would think. Time and time again, we see ranking spikes from low-quality links followed by monumental crashes. I even remember reading a study about this -- how algorithmic penalties are often preceded by impressive spikes in rankings.

In spite of the fact that we know these legacy forms of link building are dead, people are still doing them with gusto -- particularly offshore SEO practitioners, who are happy to make short-term money on short-term results. My guess is that your competitor knows little about SEO, read something about how important it is to have lots of links, and went out and hired the absolute cheapest SEO'er they could find, without having a clue about the business. I would imagine he has a big smile on his face right now, and he's telling people, "it's so easy to rank #1 on Google! All you have to do is pay someone a little bit of money to build a lot of links!"

I'm highly doubtful, however, that he'll remain in that spot.

Oh, immense thanks, EGOL! The WordPress plug-in is a godsend, as we have tons of very high-quality, authoritative landing pages, and it will make for an efficient means of linking to them. Also, re: persistent navigation. I've been meaning to put a resources area in the menu bar with links to these landing pages -- which will also work well as info/destination pages as well. I guess I've always figured it just seemed too good to be true that having those links in the nab could really have a positive outcome. But we just recently got upgraded to PR5, so I guess we'll get to see what all that juice can do us. Thanks again!