Are You Fighting A 900lb Gorilla?

Plain and simple a 900lb Gorilla is a term used for a website or sites for a specific search term that will close to impossible to unseat in the SERPS. Notice I did not say impossible, but I like to choose my battles wisely and if you are new to SEO and Build A Niche Stores, there is no reason to battle the 900lb Gorilla.

Some good free tools to see if you are against a 900lb Gorilla starts with a simple search of Goggle, Yahoo and Live for a keyword phrase you are competing for. Lets go with the post yesterday and "collectible cameras". Do a search on all 3 engines and take note of the top 3 sites in each.

Google:

www.collectiblecameras.com
www.manfredschmidt.com
www.photolinks.com/Vintage_Cameras_Photography_Equipment.html

Yahoo:

www.collectiblecameras.com
www.collectiblecameras.com/catalog/index.php?category_id=230
www.manfredschmidt.com

Live:

www.collectiblecameras.com
www.greencamera.com
stores.ebay.com/Cupog-Collectible-Cameras

as you can see...

www.collectiblecameras.com & www.manfredschmidt.com have pretty good showings. Now lets see how good. We can use this free link popularity tool to research collectiblecameras.com for starters against 3 of the other sites.

Here is what I filled in below:












Here is the result page:
















As you can see www.collectiblecameras.com has 90 Google links and 1833 Yahoo links. While this is not a 900lb Gorilla it certainly is a 400lb one and will be quite tough to overtake as #1. However www.manfredschmidt.com and www.greencamera.com are definitely in reach according to that data. You can drill down each top 10 from each search engine this way as well. In addition you can use this free tool to see most of the anchor text used as well and the backlinks pointing to these sites as well.

Remember that sometimes it is not the quantity of inbound links sometimes as much as it is quality of the sites linking to said page as well. Further analysis of www.manfredschmidt.com reveals that they have some great yahoo directory links as well as a dmoz listing which really fortifies it's stronghold. You can run a test on the top 20 overall to get a better look at the entire competition. If there are more than a few 900lb Gorillas in a search phrase you would be better off going after a longer phrase or an entirely different phrase all together. Pick your battles wisely and until you are much better at SEO and are making some good money with your Niche Stores, I would wait to battle the 900lb Gorilla. He will likely still be there waiting for you when you are ready.

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