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Hi there

Just had a quick question about links on Reference.com or Ask.com.

I have been looking at my competitors link profiles to get ideas of who and where I should/could be linking from. One of my main competitors seems to have links on Reference.com and Ask.com which are being listed in there profile. Reference.com are dofollow. Our site is also appearing on these sites, but the links are being listed under our profile. We have been up and running for more that 3 years now. The obviously have high DR and I think must be a contributing factor to their rank, having looked at other links in their profile.

It seems strange because I thought these sites are effectively search engines and therefore wouldn't count towards your backlink profile?

Can anyone explain? Would be most grateful if someone can.

Many thanks in advance.

Clojo

Thanks for your response. Yes, you don’t see this often. Most traffic from organic is driven to the product pages. Obviously we are a young site and competing with people who have been in it longer and ranking well. Having said that, the niche is relatively uncompetitive. With regard to content, do you mean that you should write about your product or to you target audience in extensive blog posts. 3k plus words. With good structure and answering the questions that the user wants answered. With a table of contents etc.

I guess the main issue I am having with these pages is choosing the keywords to target as ultimately I will be competing with my product/product category pages.

Does that make sense?

Yes. This is exactly what we have done.  We have great products and put huge efforts into researching everything about them.  We have reviewed them. Fixed them. And most of all enjoyed them. Every product we have we tested and know inside out. Naturally we have then written reviews on the products and other articles relating to the subject, but possibly the issue here is that it’s not enough? Maybe the structure is not right, which I what I am really wanting get to.

You say don’t focus on blogs or articles (content), or length, but naturally this is one thing google loves. The key content on your site. The cornerstone or x10 content. I guess what you mean is that by doing all of the above and being at one with the product the content will flow naturally. But surely there has to be some kind of keyword strategy which then leads to a content strategy or, vice versa. This surely is the basis of on page SEO?

Hi there

I am trying to optimise my site to the best that it can be. Since the most recent Google updates, everything that I reading is saying cornerstone content with lots of valuable content is a really good strategy as it tells Google what is the most important content on your site. Writing articles that are well structured and have give the user a detailed overview of that subject. Lots of top SEO's are saying 3000 words plus on these pages.

My question is, how do I go about this with and eCommerce site? Obviously that majority of the keywords that I want to target are product related and these are the pages that I want to come up in the search. How do I go about creating cornerstone content for these pages? I am thinking that one of my cornerstone pieces of content would be "The Ultimate Guide to [my main product category]". But that product has numerous products related to it, all of which have their own keywords, so how would this help the products to rank?

The site had two main product categories, with numerous products under each of those categories. The two main categories are targeting my best performing keywords, but currently the landing page for these is the main product category pages.

I am really struggling to work out the best strategy here. The content that I have on my actual products pages is comprehensive and covers a lot of detail about that particular product and has started to rank for product keywords, but I am guessing Google wouldn't consider that to be cornerstone content.

I hope this make sense.

Any advice anyone can give would be really useful.

Many thanks in advance

The issue is getting the customers in the first place. The only thing we can rely on is producing great content as at the moment we don’t have the customer base or the traffic, which is why I think producing the killer content is what we need to do.