Anyone who has a 101 level of understanding SEO knows that ye be judged by the company ye keep!
Meaning, your “link neighborhood” and your rankings in Google are directly tied.
This is the cause of the phenomenon where you go to Google, find your competitors in the top 10 for your best keywords, and then find that one or more of them are beating the snot out of you, yet have far less incoming links than you.
Hey man, not cool.
Actually, it IS cool once you figure out what’s going on and fix it.
You may have tons of incoming links. Some of them suck. Some of them need to be made up for by getting the best links you can get from your neighbors who have more to give you.
If you get links from your neighbors who live in the trailer park down the street, you are going to get results that will end up forcing you to move into a double-wide yourself someday.
But, if you attract links from the “Rothchilds” up the street from you, you’ll “be movin’ on up to the eastside” in no time flat.
If you have a site on dog training you need to be linked by the top sites in dog training relevant information, products or services.
Good luck finding out which sites in your niche Google thinks thinks that highly of. (Hint: it isn’t as easy as looking at the top 10 for some random or even the best keyword in your niche!)
Checking on your neighborhood was a hit or miss proposition for a long time until tools came out which analyze and report back all the juicy link partners a group of sites have in common.
Kind of like a neighborhood watch program. A “keep out the hooligans and protect each other from the unwashed masses” kind of thing.
So…
…want to be more like the #1 site in your niche? Find out way more about them by using the common backlinks tool from “We Build Pages” than doing the amateur link:website move that all the newbies use.
Don’t freak out. The tool is free. And if you stare at it long enough there is a slight feeling of elation coming your way once you see what the tool is doing.
Yep, I’m giving away elation today.
That’s how I roll…