SEO NOT FREE - How Competitors Are Buying Their Way Ahead

Jan. 16, 2009 - PRLog -- There is a dirty secret among many individuals and companies dealing with SEO online, one that they want to keep from any new competitors trying to jump into the market.  It's easy to find out what the most effective search engine optimisation techniques are for online articles, but on page optimisation isn't nearly as important as the off page optimisation.

When speaking about off page search engine optimisation, experienced marketers and successful online businesses know that this basically amounts to backlinks.  Meta tags still have some effect, especially with search engines other than Google, but the single most important aspect of a web page ranking high for a search term are the anchored backlinks that point back to that page, and the quality of those backlinks.

Getting quality backlinks is hard, so many companies are buying them.  Let's be clear on this: officially Google hates the practice of link buying.  The problem is that of this time, websites found to be selling backlinks are penalised, often getting de-indexed and therefore losing their value, but unless it can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt (which is very hard to do), the site that bought the backlinks, and thus received a huge boost in search engines, often isn't penalised at all.

Only extremely blatant and obvious cases are penalised, otherwise the people that bought the links get all the advantages, and usually don't get caught or penalised for the practice.  In the ideal world, these sites would be punished and the people who built quality sites without these backlinks would take the top spots, but this is the real world and the truth is that while sites selling backlinks have to be careful not to get caught, as long as the site buying backlinks doesn't do something stupid (like buy 50 high quality links in one day for a brand new website), then they're not going to get caught.

Google isn't going to risk alienating everyone by penalising every suspected website that gets linked into.  After all, some of these sites might be legitimate and have been discovered.  Because of this, experienced Internet marketers who know how to buy a few quality links over time can get a huge boost and jump over all their competition, even over sites with hundreds of pages more of original content.

The truth is if you are competing against people using these strategies, then unless you have dozens or even hundreds of quality websites of your own to link to new websites, you will be at a severe disadvantage by not using the same resources.  Obviously since backlinks are so valuable, they all come at a price.

If you want to master SEO over your competition, then there is one hidden truth you need to understand up front: SEO is not free.

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