BackLinks dilemma

Hi Guys,
I'm so green, I have a dilemma, maybe it's because I'm new at this,
I want to promote my site http://www.shaislighting.com and I know that in order to do so, I have to get links to rank higher.
The thing is that if I'm looking to link to related lighting sites, then I'm in a big problem, cause I don't think that any lighting site owner will let me link to him? More then that I don't want to link to any of my competitors.
Please help
Jack

 

if you consider every related site as competition and you dont want to link to competitive sites, forget about reciprocal link exchange because with such an attitude, way out of my definition of link partnership, noone wont link to you too.

you can always get/send links to non-related sites, get listed in dmoz & all the other directories, put your url in forums sig and get inbound links like that.

cheers,

 

Try not to think of related sites as just other lighting sites. Try other construction sites, home renovation sites and similar. Ones that don't necessarily sell the same products or advice, but could benefit from the reciprocal linking.

 

The paranoia about linking to competitors is over blown.

First of all if you want links from relevant pages what can be more revelant than you competitors. Think of it this way. If you were going to open a gas bar or a car dealership where would you locate it. If it was a gas station or gas bar you'd locate it on a corner with two other gas stations. If it was a car dealership you'd locate on the same strip as all the other dealerships.

I always take the position that if I can't hold visitors on my site they are going to leave anyway, so I might as well give them a link to something they might be interested in. Then if you open the link in a new windows (target="_blank") you don't really lose them anyway.

If you get into the reciprocal link building business I think you'll be surprised at how many of your competitors will be happy to link to you. In the online pharmacy business and online gambling business everybody links to everybody else in the business.

Then the second issue is that there is no proof that a link from a relevant page is worth any more than link from a non related page. That conventional wisdom has been around for a long time but nobody has ever been able to prove it to my satisfaction. So get any backlink you can as long as they use your prime keyword phrase as the anchor text.

 

Guys,
Thank you very much for taking the time to help me, you've been very helpful.
I hope that I'll be able to contribute some knowledge back to this forum in the future.
You are the greatest.
Jack
http://www.shaislighting.com

 

Oh one more thing, It's interesting, but when I looked for Shais Lighting (that's the name of the business) I fount some links to this forum...
Jack
http://www.shaislighting.com

 

I'm glad to see that. Oft in the stilly night (as Groucho once put it) have I pondered exactly how Google would decide how relevant Page A is to Page B.

It seems enough of a trick--and they often don't do it well--to decide how Page A is relevant to some one exact search phrase. The popular belief would involve a sort of "reverse engineering": they would have to decide, for each page they index, what to them its one keyword phrase is, then see how close Page B comes to being relevant for that phrase (or vice-versa).

That just sounds like more complexity than I can envision, even with their computational firepower.

 

That's part two of the conventional wisdom. That they would find a link on page A and then compare the topic or theme of page A to the theme or topic of page B -- the page to which the link points.

Having read most of the papers on this subject I don't believe that was ever what they wanted to do or were thinking of trying to do. At best all they would do is look at the anchor text of the link and determine if it was thematically or topically related to the page on which it was placed -- page A.

I think that Google figures, and it is pretty logical, that nobody is going to use anchor text that is not relevant to their own page -- the target or page B. What people are doing however is putting links on pages that have no thematic relevance to the target site. So Google legitimately could be concerned that these links are "artifical" and should not really be counted as a vote toward the relevance of the target site.

In either case whether Google is doing the relevance checking as I describe or not, you can see the importance of having your prime keyword or search term as anchor text. If you don't use the right anchor text your link will have no relevance value.

Now Google has the techology and in some cases the patents for all this semantic/thematic/topical relevance checking, but I have seen no evidence to date that they have successfully applied them.

So today any link is a good link as long as you have the right anchor text.

 

Here is a couple of tricks:

1) Do a web search on your desired keywords.
2) Find the sites that come up top (and didn't pay for the top listing).
3) Use this tool: http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop to see where your competitors

(It will show how many links in different search engines. Click on the number and see where they are listed.)

Most sites have emails to the administrator. Ask them to link to you.

Many may ignore you, but not all. At least you know who is willing to do this type of thing. Your biggest competitors may have hundreds of backlinks. It is a good place to start.

Robert Fuess
Spiderweb Logic

 

Compar: I second the motion. You're an invaluable contributor to this forum.
But, but (and there always is one, isn't there?) ...
I'm inclined to disagree with your advice about reciprocal linking to competitors. This seems to be of little service to your visitors. Rather, wouldn't links to "additional information about my products/services" make more sense?
For example, I have a links page for my (real estate agent) website that includes "The ABC's of real estate," "The XYZ's of real estate investment," "House designs and floor plans," and "Tips for home buyers."
I'm constantly getting invitations to rec-link with agents in say California, New Jersey, Alberta, wherever, but I don't see any point in accepting them. I can't for the life of me see someone who's reached me because of an interest in "Real estate Niagara Peninsula" benefiting from a redirection to a totally different neck of the woods. I also have some suspicion that Google et al won't view the link as being at all relevant.

 

Linking to direct competitors is one of those things where, at first glance, I can see good arguments both for and against. I tend here to agree with compar that if your site (and whatever it is you're dealing on your site) can't hold your visitors, or stand up to comparison with your competitors, well, so be it.

But either way on that, I see no harm whatever and much good from linking with people in the same line who are not direct competitors. To take your exact comparison, sure, were I a realtor in, say, San Francisco, I'd be overjoyed to link and be linked to by realtors in other cities, owing to a basic proposition of nature: lines have two ends. When someone is moving to somewhere, they're also moving from somewhere. Those looking to buy real property are almost always also looking to sell real property, often in a different region.

If I look at your site on Niagara Peninsula Real Estate because I'm moving there, and find on it a referral to an agent in my current locale, even if I'm already listed I may file that in the back of my head as a fallback if the current lister can't move the property fast enough.

Other industries will have somewhat different considerations, but to my mind it always makes good business sense as well as good SEO sense to link to "colleagues" not in direct competition.

As I sit here staring at my screen, I'm trying to decide if, for the one real "business" site I run--my bread-and-cheese business, as Sherlock Holmes might put it--whether I would include links to my competitors. Y'know, by gum, I just might. I think, I really do, that we are so much better than our competition that it would actually behoove us to have visitors look at their sites and compare our respective modes of operation. I have to get to work on that one. . . .

 

I agree that analyzing the backlinks of your major competitors will be a good starting point, and will give you a good list of sites to contact either for an incoming link only or for a link-exchange.

There are many free tools that will help you look up backlinks for any website, my personal favorite is:
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ (if anyone knows of a better one, feel free to give me a new favorite )

Linking to a competitor may drive away potential sales, but if the competitor links to you as well, those effects should about even out. Also, there is no need to put the link in a spot where all of your visitors will see it right away

You might also consider how the possibility of finding links to all (or most) related sites from your site might make in an information hub of sorts, and both increase number of search engine visitors and return visitors.

Geir

 

Well I think you are dead wrong. First of all you don't know when someone that visits or uses you page might in fact be considering moving to one of these locations and in fact find the link useful.

But where you are really wrong is on how Google would judge these. One of the things that Google talks about in papers like Hilltop and Local Rank is "authority sites" and "hubs". These are either sites with a lot of information that many people link to or sites with links to many sites of common interest. By linking to many out of region or out of country real estate sites you are setting your site up as a "hub" at least. I think these links are very valuable.

I'm currently doing SEO work for a local real estate site in Kitchener Waterloo. I am actively courting links for that site from International real estate sites. So if you don't want to link to all those sites you talk about just pass the requests on to me.

 

Hi
I agree, before I read this thread I thought that linking to my competitors would be a good idea.

We only sell to the UK because P&P makes our products too expensive to ship to the US where most of the searches are coming from. If someone enters our site through the searches and instead of returning to the search page they click through to a US based competitor, would we get a boost because people are not clicking back to the search page for that search?

 

Bit off topic, but, have you thought of finding some-one in the US who will dropship the products for you? Not sure of your product or whether it's relevant but just a thought if you are getting traffic from the US.

 

No I can't see how that would give you a boost. Google doesn't care how people leave your site. However, the fact that you have the link on your site at all may make you look like a "hub" or "authority" page and that is potentially a good thing.

 

I know exactly where you're coming from; I'm working on a furniture site. Our main competitor advertises on goguides, so they have 600 backlinks from them. Every home decoration or slightly related web site doesn't want to do text links, they want to do CPC and banner ads. I really think the home & garden industry is woefully behind the curve here...

-Greg