• This thread is just the tip of the iceberg.The people ahead of the curve aren't Googling for answers — they're already in here, having the conversations you haven't found yet. DealerRefresh is free.Get the full picture →

Is Your Dealers SEO Strategy Ethical & Long Term?

@xstortionist I believe they spend the money because it still works.

Case in point, the #1 rated used car store in my area buys tons of links. They opened another store that popped up on page 1 for these queries in a matter of about 2 weeks.

They don't buy the links because they expect people to actually find them on those directories/sites. They buy the links because they are still valuable in small niches.

Most auto dealerships don't spend a lot of time building links. Therefore, if you take the time to buy links from some crappy directory, then you have X amount more links than your competitor. Google doesn't have much else to judge the rank since building links isn't too high of a priority, so the site with the most (albeit low quality) links will prevail.

Throw a site with lots of natural, reputable links into the mix though, and I believe you will have a different scenario. That's the hard part thuogh ;)
 
@Kyle Suss I don't know, buying links seems a bit fishy to me, especially considering this is what google says "Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."
 
@Kyle Suss I can show you a site right now that is a competitor of one of my clients, that has no baclinks, and no content and the site ranks #1 and #2 for many keywords. The site has meta data and a HUGE image screenshot of their homepage that clicks through to their main website. Riddle me that please.
 
@Kyle Suss we own saddlebag-inserts dot com to match their domain, but still no luck with out performing, I figure domain registration has authority over our domain name. But these guys had like 50 other domain names doing the same thing, luckily I contacted google made a complaint a large number of those domain names were deindexed.
 
@Kyle Suss Kyle, I'm not an idiot, I know meta keywords are no longer a factor, I have been in this business for a long time now, probably way longer than you. The problem with these types of sites, is that there were 50 other domain names with all the same content, just different domain name, and they were all showing up in page 1 serps, and most of them still do except for the ones that are deindexed. Luckily, with a little hard work, I was able to get our main site (not our landing pages) to show up #1 in about a year. I do not believe in link building after seeing plenty of other sites that get top ranking without having links pointing to their sites. I believe providing rich content will do you better than buying sketchy links that based from Google will hurt you in the long run.