Incoming Links from mamma.com

[JeanYates]

My main competitor has recently jumped above my site in google's organic listings. After consulting with an SEO guru who spent quite a bit of time looking at his site and mine, he says that in his opinion it turns out that the big difference is the increase in his number of incoming links. He's gone from 5 to over 50 in a month.

There are very few incoming links that relate to what we do, or are from sites that might be expected to link to him. There are a lot of directory links.

He bought a listing in yahoo directory, but the big change is a bunch of links coming in from various sites through mamma.com - it looks like it is part of a company called "affinity" - and they are selling an "extensive network of premium publisher partners". In other words, incoming links from a bunch of search and marketing sites.

If he wasn't succeeding, I wouldn't bother to ask, but since it appears that these links are giving him sufficient juice to get above me our competitive the organic keyword (after over ten years and no improvement to his site's content) I have to explore it a bit.

Has anyone heard of this mamma.com/affinity company? They offer to give you "an expert" to help with your personal campaign, but they also want your credit card and a commitment to $25 before you get to the "good" pages. Somehow they don't seem to be attracting google's attention. Should I be exploring this further and considering signing up?

I know the general rule is to avoid this kind of thing but he's having some real success.

Thanks!

Jean

[aarondicks]

Jean,

Although this does sound tempting to get a quick win, I'd advise not to go ahead with a scheme such as this. Focus more on building strong links such as the one from your SEOmoz profile (after 200 points) - and forums and blog commenting.

Getting keyword rich links are obviously the best, but you can compete with that by a number of links from pages with high domain and page authority with less keyword input.

50 Links isn't that many, so don't be put off! It also seems that now the competitor has these links they might be happy to stop link building. Link building is an ongoing process, and sudden peaks and troughs in link numbers might attract the attention of search engines

Let me know if this helps!