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This is probably going to look bad, but Im  going to do it anyway.

Ive owned my own business for over twenty five years. Due to the economy and a health crisis, my business has come to an end.  Im left pretty much with nothing except my family, which is on shakey grounds as well.

anyway.

Ive been working on the IM, SEO thing for about two years. Ive made some money, but nothing that would make a difference to my situation.

I now have a site in a competitive niche. The site is rated A by the app here on seomoz. But my site is lacking in authority backlinks. I write my own posts, about two a day, and honestly, it is of much better quality than those ranking . My site stays right around #11. Every other day, the site goes to #7 or 8. When that happens, I make between 300-400 a day. Then it falls back to 11.

So the on site is good, rated A here.

My site is speedy

Not enough backlinks

The content is good

I was foolish enough to believe the G story about backlinks not being important. Concentrate on the content. All of that crapola. The sites that are ranking well have all the typical xrumer links. Totally not related links. Junk. And from what Ive seen, I believe the sites ranking 1-3 are making about $1000. a day.

So you can imagine what being this close, after losing so much is doing to me.

So....

Right now I am just writing content, pinging, social bookmarking and submitting rss feeds  daily.

Does anyone have any real information on how to bump my site up in rankings. Please, no stories about guest blogging, or attempts to sell me your SEO service

I know I would do it for someone else and I have many times in the past.

If you can help me, please reread, and contact me.  I wish you all the best. Sorry for the melodrama.

Changed to Yoast. I ticked no follow on archives, categories, and tags. One hour later, website went from #7 to page four.

Thanks for the reply. Would this affect ranking or can it be left alone ?

The crawl shows a lot of duplicate content on my site. Most of the urls its showing are categories and tags (wordpress).

so what does this mean exactly? categories is too much like other categories? And how do i go about fixing this the best way.

thanks

I am using a anonymous browser to check this, or different computers. Each day it changes from #7 on page one, to #18 on page two. This has been going on daily for two weeks. Anyone know why would this happen?

thanks

You are indeed an optimist. Thanks

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.

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.

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

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.

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