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I've made my living in SEO for nearly a decade now, I'm not in a position to risk any brand I represent with possible penalties, (but that is incredibly uncommo

I've made my living in SEO for nearly a decade now, I'm not in a position to risk any brand I represent with possible penalties, (but that is incredibly uncommon,) or in spending time and budget on increases generated through unreliable means that may disappear one day. But that's all that stops me. It's just safer to build slow and natural. Even when these grey networks go down, that often just means those links no longer provide value rather than an actual penalty.That is an important distinction. Since that site enjoyed higher visibility if there was any value to the site while it was in that improved position it likely secures more references,links,sales, income to support more legitimate content creation and traditional marketing. If it was my personal business or side project and I was losing in the rather unreliable and unfair game that is the Google dance because the competitor was "cheating" I would absolutely return that tactic against them. It is surprising that still seems to work but playing fair won't help you catch up unless they are so blatant that they get a manual penalty. But, if you came to me as consultant I couldn't suggest that because it's unreliable, unethical and dirty. I would admit that it still works though. Is there any reason you can't win via "ethical" tactics, are you truly creating content and resources that people might naturally link to and promote? One of the sad oft-repeated stories is that if you create great content and resources ..the links will come ... but that leaves something very important out, only us webmasters,seo's,bloggers can generate links so unless your content appeals to that audience in addition to your consumers.. how are you going to get natural links and what is the carrot to the piblisher audience to do that for you? If you can answer that and do influencer targeting / "blogger outreach" then you can play fair. How many people have seen great backlink generation from getting their article or business here on HN? Can you get on here naturally? Then maybe you have the type of site,business,content to survive in natural SEO, otherwise maybe that shouldn't be your primary channel. I certainly prefer PPC for "boring" topics, as you can eventually learn your all your costs, work off real conversion data and scale and test off of a relative constant.

theartfuldodger 10y ago
quick addition: I'm generally calloused to believing the first theory about why your website performs below a competitor is the correct one. Have you made sure your site loads faster, do you know how engaged your users are and what have you done to increase that engagement.Is your mobile experience better than average, do your meta titles encourage people to click or has your seo battle descended into keyword stuffed titles? Is your on page stronger than them? Who says so? Have you audited your own content and architecture inside and out to make sure that rather than they have a leg up, you actually just have some deficit. Did both your sites start at the same time, have you been preserving your architecture as you rebuilt the site, do you check server logs for malformed Url requests, 404'so? Might want to be sure some of these relatively easy comparisons and factors are in your favor before deciding that the link network you judge as valueless are providing that value that beats you. My apologies if you have truly exhausted all those concerns, but I so rarely see that to be true.

theartfuldodger 10y ago

quick addition: I'm generally calloused to believing the first theory about why your website performs below a competitor is the correct one. Have you made sure your site loads faster, do you know how engaged your users are and what have you done to increase that engagement.Is your mobile experience better than average, do your meta titles encourage people to click or has your seo battle descended into keyword stuffed titles? Is your on page stronger than them? Who says so? Have you audited your own content and architecture inside and out to make sure that rather than they have a leg up, you actually just have some deficit. Did both your sites start at the same time, have you been preserving your architecture as you rebuilt the site, do you check server logs for malformed Url requests, 404'so? Might want to be sure some of these relatively easy comparisons and factors are in your favor before deciding that the link network you judge as valueless are providing that value that beats you. My apologies if you have truly exhausted all those concerns, but I so rarely see that to be true.