How to compete with spammers

[VisualSense]

I have a few sites that are outranked by competitors having hundreds of directory links and links from unrelated sites. Obviously I'am doing everything I can; on page optimization is superb, building good links as much as I can, but not huge amounts, taking care of fresh content whcih is of better quality than the competitors, ect. etc. But for one specific site I just can't get higher than #3 while my competitor ranks #1 and #2. I have been fairly succesful making sites rank well in somewhat competitive niches, but this is one of the things that keep bugging me. Sometimes I even feel like buying these type of links myself... But I keep telling myself that Google will catch up one day. Any advice is kore than welcome. Thanks

[smstv]

In all honestly it sounds like your doing all the right things. And I sympathize with your situation, and I deal with the same thing. I plan on following your questions thread. Because like you said your competitors in hundreds of paid directories. And we must also assume your competitor is #1, and #2, are the big dogs in your industry. But if your directly under them, with the similar keywords, and search results, it sounds like your on the right path. Because Google has been watching for the re-sellers, and affiliates, spammy sites, that really don't offer human help, goods, and services.

Hope this helps

[THB]

I wouldn't worry (easy to say, hard to do), because if their content and such is as garbage as you say, it will catch up with them.

Google (and other search engines) track bounce rates on SERP click-through's.  Meaning, if a user clicks one of your shady competitors in the SERP's, quickly realizes that the site is no good (ie. scraped, useless content; littered with ads, etc), then they will quickly come back to the SERP's and continue trying other sites.  Google tracks this with cookies and uses it to determine whether a site is useful or not, and deserves the spot in the SERP's that they currently have.  I believe there's a 10 or 30 second 'bounce back' window where if the user clicks back to the SERP's within one of those 2 timeframes (if someone can confirm 10 or 30 seconds), then it's promising for you (assuming your bounce rate is low compared to theirs).  However, these things take time to iron out, especially if these sites have a ton of backlinks.

"on page optimization is superb"

Care to share your site and let others help be the judge of that?  Second and third opinions can never hurt (usually

Only if you want.

• Marc

[Thos003]

Time. You will need to have time under your belt in order for google to really establish a winner. If the other sites beat you to the punch then you will have to prove to Google that you deserve to be above them. I've seen sites that simply gained "authority" first and no amount of SEO would debunk them.

[johnshearer]

Marc,. great feedback about the SERP to site bounce rate..can you point to an article or source I want to learn more. Looking at my own analytics I can pour resources on those high traffic pages with higher bounce rates/times.

John

[EGOL]

Hang in there!  Keep working!

If your site has better content than theirs by a obvious margin I think that you will be gaining on them every day.

When other sites rank above you do your best to use kickass prices, free shipping, great deals, value propositions, provocative messages and free beer in your title tag to pull traffic into your site instead of into theirs.

[JamesNorquay]

Hi Mate, I would advise to keep building links and quality content.

I would also do complete profiles of what the competitors have and work out what you need.

I have seen SERP results with dodgy results which have not changed in say 4 years, which is crazy! But some of these sites have 1000s of root domain links, 1000s of pages of content, it is really an on going battle.

You can also test titles and descriptions to work on CTR as said above the competitors sites may be junk so work around that.

But taking a look at your profile I see you are in the Poker niche, I mean it is one of those niches were spam and illegal tactics are second to none, I work with a few guys who use to head up SEO for huge Poker sites so I know a lot of the tactics that go down, you really need to find out every thing they are doing.

[VisualSense]

Thanks for the feedback. It's more or less what I was thinking myself. At this moment I do rather not undisclose the site's URL as I don't want to risk my competitor knowing that I am actively after his rankings.

[KeriMorgret]

You can always use a private question credit to ask your question of SEOmoz Staff and Associates and include your URL. Those questions are not indexed or visible to anyone who is not a staff or associate, and we're all under NDA regarding the content of those questions.