One very effective way of getting your site to "Google page one" is to eliminate the people who are above you. I actively report my competition to Google as SPAM.
Not because I'm a jerk and I don't like competition, but because my competition- a lot of them- are spammers.
There is a mortgage company here in Phoenix that I was competing with for a while- with my domain AZWM.com. The spammers are actually a mortgage bank in Mesa, AZ and when it comes to SEO, this is what they did:
1. Offered to buy domains from everyone that was getting out of the business a couple of years ago (they also offered to buy mine, but I wouldn't sell at the time.)
Now, all of a sudden, this mortgage company had a dozen domains and they littered the front page of Google. If you searched for "AZ FHA loans" they had five of ten positions on page one. (Now they have one.)
"AZ jumbo loans"-- My [old] site was always number one for this and it remains number one. Panda? Pengin? Those updates helped my old site. Those updates helped tremendously.
So why does everyone freak out when there is an algorithm change? Probably because a lot of people cheat. (black hat SEO)
I reported them with Google right here.
2. Built all kinds of bogus links. Taking the lazy way to SEO always works for a while. Paying for links by the thousands is stupid. My old site had about 80 inbound links at the top of it's game. But I was still number one in Google for "Arizona Mortgage" and just about anything else you can think of. Why?
Because Page Rank is not as important as people would have you believe.
I found all of their bogus links and I reported them to Google. Not sure why a mortgage company in Phoenix would have 10,000 links from blogs in the Phillipines, but they did. And I let Google know about them.
I was number one with 80 inbound links and they were taking just about every other position with thousands of links. They built about 50,000 bogus links, following their own Pied Piper to ruin. They have an "SEO guy" but he clearly doesn't read my blog. All they wanted to do was pass me, and they almost did...
3. They keyword-stuffed.
They stuffed pages with keywords, in a desperate attempt to get my positions for jumbo, FHA, and VA.
And for a while, they succeeded!
But between the Pengin update and my SPAM complaints, almost all of their sites have been penalized heavily.
Now, this mortgage company that used to make me lose sleep at night is no longer even relevant.
Bottom line:
If you keyword-stuff; or buy every mortgage URL in town; or if you pay for links-- or if you do anything that violates Google Webmaster guidelines-- either you will get caught by the algorithm or your competition will report you.
As an SEO consultant, the first thing I do is examine the competition for my client. If the competition is cheating, I will fill out SPAM reports every single day until Google takes notice.
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