Anytime I approach a middle to heavy weight niche I try to look at the current SERPS sensibly and take the idealism they present with a grain of salt. The intent is that they rank your sites upon a mixture of their quality and relevancy. When the reality is they rank the sites upon their authoritativeness and subject coverage.
Tamato, tomato right? Well….no. That’s like saying a “person with good qualities” is a “good quality person.” Regardless of how many people it fools, it’s still false. It’s these subtle differences that gives those of us without a registered 1998 domain a chance. With that right and the lack of proof that even an algorithm can count to infinity everything becomes part of a nice little scale. I don’t have to be big, I just have to be larger than the rest.
With that new perspective I stand a smaller chance of running uphill in the mud with my work. Sometimes people rush into a niche too eagerly. I’ve done it so many times. I just create a site based on some keywords and keep building and building on it while getting nowhere. The other sites just seem to have too large of a head start and have already had time to build up momentum faster than I can catch up. It seems like an endless cycle which often times has a much easier and quicker path; I am just too bull headed and committed to see it. So now that we got the right mental approach let’s review what we’re up against.
For this fictitious example we’re faced with a top 15 consisting of four or five very large old community sites on the subject. Also, a few informational sites with lots of pages and inbound links(a range of 7k-45k). There also seems to be a couple shithead subpages. By shithead subpages I’m of course affectionately referring to major authoritative sites that have a page on the matter, such as Wikipedia, About.com, and Amazon. Within these results the average domain age is 6 years. The domain age range is 5-10 years. Alright, so I got quite the project ahead of me. Let’s analyze what I’ll need. The presence of subpages in the results tells me that “subject coverage” factors aren’t highly required because in this case Google luckily believes that a single page written by a punk editor is more relevant than an entire site dedicated to the subject due to domain authority. However, I’ll keep the subject coverage factors in my back pocket because they’ll help me deliver the final kill once we catch up. Catching up? Hmm. there’s an interesting dilemma. I got some serious age and authoritative competition to deal with. Even if I create an absolutely huge site and get tons of inbound links quickly I could still get stuck treading water with the sharks for the next 3-4 years. In the interest of getting paid I have to figure out a better way of generating huge amounts of authority.
There’s more than one way to get a job done. Sometimes you got to ask yourself a rhetorical question. Whats the fastest way to move a bunch of dirt, one giant bulldozer or a half dozen or so small bulldozers? A logical person would realize the flaw in the question. The answer doesn’t depend on the bulldozers. It depends on the dirt. In this instance I obviously can’t use one giant site with lots of power, I’d just be fighting muscle with muscle and get nowhere. I need to beat them in sheer numbers. Like a bunch of midgets on a bear. So I got this awesome ideal website in my head that I would love to build for this niche. It would cover just about every aspect of the niche and absolutely rock. Unfortunately after looking at the competition I realize and accept the fact that it’s a bad business model. So I have to break it up and remodel.
Let the destruction begin. First thing I do is break apart the entire site into primary sections. For instance if the site has a forum, that becomes a new site. If the site has a blog, boom another separate site. If I got an articles and informational section or even a shop, same thing. I tear the entire site apart into separate and focused sites and bundle them together as part of a mid-sized network of sites. So for this example I ended up with between 15-20 separate mid to large sites that are all interlinked and cross promoting as part of a tight network within the niche. I build up each site with a different template and fluff it with some extra pages and content. If some of the sites are really lacking I’ll take one section and break up all the content and divide it amongst the sites. I think we’re just about ready to create some authority.
Lets review the dynamics of what we now got. Each site has X amount of authority. So if we have 20 sites we have Xx20 total authority. If we give Site #1 an inbound link it gains a little authority. So Site #1 is X+1 authority. Since Site #1 now has some authority it can call out other sites and as part of it’s recommendation can help them gain authority themselves. So since we gave Site #1 some authority, by proxy, sites 2-19 also gained slight amounts of authority themselves. This creates a nice little leech and donate relationship amongst the network. When one site raises in the SERPS it’ll naturally try to help pull the others up with it. Hey! Bring my buddies to! Each site is working in synergy to raise the other sites within the network’s authority faster and more efficiently. If you are under the initial impression that authority points are strictly an average amongst all the sites on the net than that would mean the total sum of all the pages would equal a relative 0. Therefore there would be sites with negative authority of equal part to sites with positive authority. Naturally that is untrue, sites can and do help build each other’s authority rating. If you’re with me so far you can see where this is headed, and that is straight through the Relevant Link Wall.
You got to love the supposedly nonexistent brick wall of relevant links. Dipshits on newbie forums love telling people, “don’t worry about the rankings, just build some relevant links and they’ll come.” So you do just that, after all they have over 4,000 posts on that forum, it can’t all be complete garbage advice. At first it’s totally working, your gaining a good 50-200 very relevant links a day. You submit to directories and score a bunch of links from your competitors. After a couple weeks you even manage to score some big authority links within your niche. Suddenly it all starts to slow down. The sites that are willing to link already have, and the rest are holding firm. You’ve just hit the Relevant Link Wall. Don’t bother going back for further advice. They don’t have any, and if they did they are too busy trying to rank for Kitty Litter Paw Prints to help. On the plus side with the power of my network I just pushed my proverbial wall back quite a ways. Where it was previously at around 1,700-3,000 links its now around 40k in total. Giving me some huge authority. So now my network is scattered around the 20-50 position range in the SERPS. With the pansy sites out of the way I just need a bit more of an authoritative push to go play with the big boys. So I’ll need to create a second much larger network to make the final shove.
Volume is my key strategy here. I don’t care about building up these other sites or even getting links to them. I just want them indexed and get their links to count. So I create a nice little blog network using free blog hosts on authority domains. I may even do some clean parasite hosting and push for some authoritative small links. Any relevant links I can find to make that last push up the hill and into the top 30 positions. Unfortunately this will be a struggle and take some time I don’t feel like wasting. I got to work double time and get some link power from some preexisting non-relevant sites within my arsenal.
For this I’ll use the rule of three and link to my network from a few other sites of mine that already rank high in the targeted engines. This will help the links on the individual sites within my network have more outbound link weight, so they can give more authority to other sites within the network. By policy I never allow these other sites to join the network, so they only link to one of the sites within the network and never get a link back. Otherwise the other sites within the network would gain less overall authority. It’s better to push all it’s weight to one single site and let that site boost the other sites within the network. So now our network is sitting between the 7-30 positions. They may be a bit scattered and thats okay as long as we break into that top 10 with at least a site or two. If at this point I’m coming close but still can’t quite break through I may have to resort to sabotage. Nothing says successful sabotage like slowly removing the outbound links on that ranking Wikipedia page and labeling them as Spammy links in the edit history. I know it’s a bitch move and the link may just go back up but nothing is greater than when the webmaster notices the traffic loss and checks to see why their Wikilink was gone and is like, “Fuck you Wiki, you think my site is spammy? Fine, there goes your backlink.
Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you got to do, and if that means doing sneaky underhanded stuff like convincing About.com authors that the page is in the wrong category and should relocate the article to a more suitable one, than so be it. Just don't take it too far and pretend to be the owners of those sites and harass directory editors because you feel like your site should be listed above the competitions', then call them morons when they try to explain alphabetization. Just get that booty into the top 10.
So now, like a girlfriend's hair dryer, I'm in and under the radar. Time to prove that my sites are the most relevant by expanding the content on the 2-5 sites that made it into the top 15. Now is the perfect time to shake up the industry by releasing a new feature on your site that the others don't have. The other webmasters and the 3-4 community forums that are already in have taken notice of my sites by now so I need to give them something to talk about. I'll focus on these primarily top sites and leave the others to push authority of those sites up. Perhaps by organizing my NOFOLLOW tags more efficiently? This is also usually when I'll steal little portions of content from the few sites that fell through the cracks in the rankings and put them up on my top 5-10 sites. Suddenly my number one site will need a featured blog and the blog site will quit updating so often. I may even spend a little time focusing on some Market Bait. Once I got 4-7 of my sites within my network into the top 10 I’m in like Flint, grab my cash, and move on to the next niche.
All I got to do from here is watch for other Pros attempting to do the same thing to me. They are usually pretty easy to spot when they email you from several different email accounts begging for links in a similar way. If these strategic thoughts are starting to sound familiar, but you’re not sure from where; I can explain. Have you ever had one of those sites that have always ranked well for their keywords? Then suddenly over the course of a week or so your site just deranks like crazy. All these new sites pop in to the top 10 and your left like WTF? First you glance around and wonder if something is wrong with your site. Nothing out of the usual, in fact it’s quite odd for such a consistently ranking site to drop like that. So you assume it must be some engine update. You do some research, but no one reporting anything too strange other than the few usual paranoid one hit wonder eccentrics screaming Damn Big Daddy! So you chalk it up to a possible algorithm change. Sure that must be it.
