The Art of SEO

Determining Top Competitors

Understanding the competition should be a key component of planning your SEO. The first step is to understand who your competitors in the search results really are. It can often be small players who give you a run for your money. For example, consider the previously mentioned credit card search in Google; Visa, Master Card, American Express, and Discover Card all fail to reach the #1 position in the Google results.

Instead, you will find these results dominated by affiliate players. Affiliates tend to be the most adept at search engine optimization and can be the most lax in abiding by the search engines’ terms and conditions.

Two Spam Examples

Affiliates that cheat tend to come and go out of the top search results, as only sites that implement ethical tactics are likely to maintain their positions over time. You can help expedite the cheaters’ fall from grace by reporting them to Google at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html, or better yet, via the dashboard in your Google Webmaster Tools account (where it will carry more weight).

How do you know whether a top-ranking site is playing by the rules? Look for dubious links to the site using a backlink analysis tool such as Linkscape. Since the number of links is one factor search engines use to determine search position, less ethical websites will obtain links from a multitude of irrelevant and low-quality sites.

This sort of sleuthing can reveal some surprises. For instance, here are examples of two ...