I’ve spent the last few days enjoying myself far too much and getting on with work far too little. That’s probably not what I should be writing in one of these journals (where everyone else would have created another 21 sites in the same time!) but two family birthdays, including mine, and a couple of job interviews have got in the way.

I got back to the grand task last night and noticed that the meagre traffic from on of my sites had dropped even further and on checking further I found that I’d dropped a slot on Google – still the front page but one slot lower. In my previous position was a site with an non-exact match domain (it had the word “reviews” on the end) so I had a look at it.

There it was, a classic x-factor green and black site with about 5 pages of content, all written by a non-English speaker where mine was all my own work. What was the difference? Well, this site has something like 700 backlinks while mine has crept up to about 65. It’s nearly a month younger than mine, so these links went up really fast.

I had a look at some of them – again, shocking, lazy spins often making no sense, many spread on what looks like a russian backlink farm all with the same look and feel. As you can imagine, I was outraged! Here I am, doing what I thought was the “right” thing, being super-careful to make sure my spintext all comes out looking like English, growing links fairly slowly with UAW and Link Juicer and there’s this nasty spammy site with less content getting away with murder in Google. But at the end of the day, are we so very different? They are just risking more by building faster, but I am doing pretty much the same stuff, just with more care. It’s all in the name of business, right? Nobody said this was going to be without competition.

So, what am I going to do? Spend too long working on a site that wasn’t bringing in that much adsense revenue anyway? Or should I bow to my emotions and destroy the upstart with my righteous mini-site 🙂
I’m going to try to get a few high PR links in place to see what that does. What are your thoughts on it all?