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sterlingbuild.co.uk has a poor quality backlink profile with anchor text heavily weighted towards [velux windows]. But links are still the most important factor for ranking well. Despite Penguin, crackdowns on link networks, etc., old school link building still works and this is just one of many examples of it. It's definitely not a good long-term idea, but if you need sales quick it works.

Depending on the CMS you are using, you may be able to add a dynamic element to the URL when more than one filter is being used, for example noidx=true. Then utilize your robots.txt file to disallow all URLs with noidx=true. This should allow pages with one filter to get indexed and crawled, but when a user (or Googlebot) enables another filter, that page would not be entered into the index.

Hello Luke, I will have to agree with you since I manage a site with no content section which makes it very difficult to earn links. What I am doing is to find creative link strategies to earn links. As you mentioned, competing with big names is not easy especially when your budget is limited. The resource that Tom mentioned are great and I use them a lot, also I would suggest this article that is very interesting and might give you some ideas http://pointblankseo.com/creative-link-building Hope it helps

Hi Luke, It really depends quite a lot on which exact keywords/phrases you are talking about. From a quick look at the two sites in open site explorer it is true that you have more linking domains than the other site. But... If you look at the homepage metrics, they are ahead of you in the moztrust and mozrank metrics. This 'might' be partly due to a better internal linking strategy on their part. The external links from both sites look a bit unnatural in that they have a number of non branded exact match links which are obviously pretty much there to try to influence rankings. Yours however are going the 'buliding materials' route and theirs are going the 'windows' route. They also have a lot less exact match and a lot less in percentage terms than your site which could be a factor if google is (likely) discounting a good chunk of those links. Again though, it really depends what keywords you are talking about. Hope that helps.... a bit!