Group items tagged

Link building and social media PDF  | Print |  E-mail Wednesday, 29 April 2009 10:10 It’s all about the secondary links silly Time and time again I see folks in the SEO world talking about getting links from social media websites. Many times this advice will include finding ‘followed’ links and even lists of ‘dofollow’ social media sites. This is quite strange and bewildering to me as the holy grail of link building in SM isn’t getting a link from the actual site…. but getting the secondary links that follow viral content. You see, one shouldn’t be using the state of the links on the site as the measure… and such approaches are often even frowned upon by many in the biz as noted in this recent Sphinn thread. Regardless of the emotional reaction, the whole concept is flawed. I could give a rat’s ass if the links on a given site (including social and blogs) are followed because that was never the consideration in the first place. Secondary links are the goal The main thing, from a link building perspective, is not really about direct links but the secondary links one garners from having a viral story on said site. If one gets a hot story on places such as Digg or Twitter, how many links are being generated? This is where the story begins for link builders. Having a viral story make the rounds can often result in a great number of back links that can often be of far more value than those single authority links social spammers seem bent on getting. This is the greater value to be had from SM sites for the adventurous link builder. Now, we can discuss brand development and authority building as an important aspect of content distribution, (and social media) but let’s stick to the potential of them for link building. When we look to target a given social site what do we want to know? Is the site targeted? Meaning does it have active categories relating to our market. What’s the demographic? Is there a viable number or market related peeps? What’s the reach? Is it syndicated heavily, (RSS, Twitter, Blogs, Scrapers..etc..) What links are top stories getting? (is the demo a linking group) You get the idea… we want the best possible opportunity for generating secondary links from the primary exposure. That is the goal at the end of the day (from a link building perspective).   Don’t be short sighted This is actually true of a lot of content distribution/placement channels. You shouldn’t be as concerned about the type of link as the ability to generate links from the situation. What would you rather have? Scenario 1 – a followed link from a marginally popular location such as http://www.under-link.com/ Scenario 2 – a nofollowed link from a popular site (or maybe dropped by a top Twitterer). Scenario 3 – a followed link buried on a popular site (poor exposure) If you said anything but Scenario 2 then please move to the front of the class, because you are failing sadly. Ultimately the actual status of the link is not going to be nearly as important as the ability to get the content in front of as many folks as possible. If you and the content team have done your job, and chosen the right locales, then you should end up with some great secondary links.

There is no penalty for buying links! There, I said it. That’s what I believe is true; there is no such thing as a ‘you have been buying links so you should suffer’ penalty. At least, not if you do it correctly. I’ll make some statements about buying links that probably not everybody will agree on, but this is what I consider to be the truth. If you don’t publish your link buying tactics yourself and if your website’s link profile doesn’t contain >90% paid links, then: Buying links cannot get you penalized;Buying links from obvious link networks only results in backlinks with little to no search engine value;Buying links ninja style will continue to get you killer rankings;Selling links can only disable your ability to pass link juice or PR (but you might want to read this);Google will never be able to detect all paid links Just about every time the topic finally seems to be left alone, someone out there heats up the good old paid link debate again. This time, Rand Fishkin (unintentionally) causes the discussion to emerge once again. By showing the buying and selling link tactics of several websites on SEOmoz’ blog (this info has been removed now), he made it very easy for the Paid Link Police to add some more websites to the list of websites to check out while building the Paid Link Neglecting Algorithm. Several people got all wound up because of this, including (at first) me, because these sites would more than likely receive a penalty (just checked, none of them has been penalized yet). However, it is almost impossible for Google to penalize you for buying links for your website. At least, not if you didn’t scream “Hey, I’m artificially inflating my link popularity!” on your OWN website. David Airey penalized? Jim Boykin analyzed his penalty earlier and the same thing happened here. In some cases, it may seem that certain websites have been penalized for buying links. What in fact happened, is that the link juice tap of some obvious paid links has been closed, what resulted in less link juice, followed by lower rankings. In most other cases, you can buy all the links you want and not get penalized. You could buy the same links for your competition, right? And if Google states that Spammy Backlinks can’t Hurt You, paid backlinks probably can’t hurt you either. This basically is the same thing. The worst thing that can happen is that you buy hundreds of text links that only provide traffic. And, if you managed to buy the right ones, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Jarrod u seem pretty convincing here. I sent a mail to Brigette (ur account manager) last month and asked some few simple questions regarding the services. Not a single answer was convincing enough to buy your services and that's when i decided not to purchase links through u. Here are the excerpts: Quote: 1. What if we decide to discontinue your service in the future? Do we lose all the purchased back links in that case? TLB: If you rent links, they would come down. However, if you purchase products that are permanently placed, we do not take them down. But you don't place text links permanently. Even your permanent package gives only 6 months guarantee. Quote: 2. How we can secure the ownership of our purchased links? What if the webmaster removed the link we have purchased after some time or what if he moved the link to some other location or some other web page or changed the anchor text of the link or added large number of other external links (may be from our competitors) and thus reducing our link weight or what if he made our link no follow or what if he deleted the web page or shut down the website? Can we claim any compensation or refund in that case? TLB: Each of our products has different minimums and guarantees. Our permanent links that are included in the “Booster Package” have a 3 month guarantee. During this time we have a script that ensures your link stays live. If, for some reason, it were to come down we would replace it free of charge. Beyond that, you would have no recourse. However, if you purchase a permanent link package, they have a 6 month guarantee that works the same way. Do you call this a convincing reply? Quote: 3. How you can ensure us that you will not get our website penalized or banned by Google through your back links? What if our website gets penalized or banned by Google because of the link you have purchased for us? What is your policy in that case? TLB: We take every step possible to ensure that does not happen. We do things very differently than most link building companies. We do not use software, feeds or auto generated code of any kind. Each of our links are manually placed on 100% SEO friendly sites. Everyone who is accepted into our inventory goes through an extensive approval process. We deny applications daily for not meeting the large number of criteria our Quality Assurance team looks at. Once they are accepted into inventory, their information is not posted on the web site. They are not allowed to post anything on their site that says they are affiliated with us in any way. They are not asked to and not allowed to backlink to us under any circumstances. We take the protection of our Inventory Partners and our clients very seriously. If a potential client goes to our website to view inventory, they will only see general information such as a description, page rank, site age, number of outbound links, etc. The only way to view the actual url is to sign a non-disclosure agreement. That is only done after speaking with a Customer Service Representative or Account Manager who would create the list for you. So, as you can see, for years we have done everything we can do to protect our inventory partners as well as our clients. Our goals is to make you successful so that we can continue with a long term business relationship. If we do not protect our partners and they get penalized, your links will not pass SEO value. Therefore, we take that very seriously. Your so called forbidden inventory is just one report away from Google web spam team. Once identified, everyone associated with it will bust like a bubble. IMO that's the risk rand was talking about.

Himanshu160, I only wish that I could replicate myself, wouldn't that be great. I would be happy to discuss other options with you outside of the forums or get you to one of our senior account reps. I do not handle very many sales and this isn't the place for it. As for our perm links, most of those are placed on sites that we do not control thus it becomes too costly to guarantee them forever. We have found that if they have stayed up for 6 months the churn rate is fairly low after that.. The 3 month guarantee is being offered at a cheaper rate and usually only used in our bundles. Again if it has stayed live for 3 months the churn rate isn't going to be very high after that. There are advantages to being on our controlled inventory but also some disadvantages. With our controlled inventory we can make sure every link we place stays up, those tend to be the links we charge monthly, although we have done some custom perm links on controlled inventory. The disadvantage is that if someone reports one of our controlled sites to Google it can loose value, of course some sites are at more risk than others because they sell a lot of links or they sell homepage links in the sidebar etc.. We do have inventory that is cleaner than others and we can even do exclusive deals so that you are the only one on the site. It all depends on your budget. For most low competition keywords one of our cheap link bundles is all that is needed. Sure some of the links will go down over time, and yes Google may devalue some. However there are always new links being built to replace the few that go down so the results are a nice increase in rankings over time.

How Google’s Selective Link Priority Impacts SEO (2023 Study)

First Link Priority

only have selected one of the links from a given page.

Why Doesn’t Rand Fishkin say the Words? October 2, 2009 by Roger · 2 CommentsFiled under: SEO General  There’s a very informative video on SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday about link volume verses link quality. At about the 5:00 minute mark you can see Rand Fishkin holding himself back trying not to say the B word … “buy links”. He does say barter. Does that mean exchange links for money? I guess it could. The sad truth is that if you are in a very competitive market like travel, car hire, hotels, and you aren’t a top 200 brand, the only way you are going to get on the front page of Google is to BUY LINKS. Cheap hotels Sydney is an example of the sort of search term you would probably need to buy links for. $1000 to $2000 per month for some quality links should do the trick which is still cheap compared to other forms of mass media, and I do see Google as a form of mass media. Yep, buy links. But that’s Blackhat you say and Google doesn’t like it I can hear some people say. It seems it’s OK to buy links if Google gets the cash via their Adwords money machine, but if you get caught selling or buying links, then watch out. Ever wondered why Google uses a very pale yellow background on their Adwords ads? Why not red or blue, or even a muted grey? You know the answer don’t you?  I suspect over 30% of the market don’t even know the difference between Adwords ads and organic links. What number do you believe? And if you believe the white-hat nonsense about not buying links you will still be spending time and/or money on article marketing, press release submissions, forum signatures, link exchanges, and other link-building methods.

We decided at MHC to stop offering link audits as we did not feel that it was right to offer a service that could be completely unnecessary. However, we found that a few clients were quite insistent and wanted to give disavowing a try. We filed a few disavows and were incredibly pleased to see that some of these sites saw nice gains a few weeks to months later.

Google’s guide on linking.

We’ll hopefully soon be putting out a thorough guide to disavowing. For now though, we would recommend that you only file a disavow if you are confident in understanding what Google considers a natural link to be. Also, if you are having an SEO company audit your links, we would recommend that you only use companies that manually review your links and have good knowledge of Google’s guidelines on linking. If your SEO company is filing disavows based mostly on recommendations from tools, we feel that this work is unlikely to result in improvements in ranking.

How Google Can Discover Paid Links A while back I did a post called 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection. Here is a list of the methods I discussed in that post: Links Labeled as Advertisements Site Wides Links Are Sold By a Link Agency Selling Site Has Information on How to Buy a Text Link Ad Relevance of Your Link Relevance of Nearby Links Advertising Location Type Someone Reports Your Site for Buying Links Someone Reports Your Site for Some Other Reason Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Selling Links Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Some Other Reason Disgruntled Employee Leaves Your Company, and Reports Your Site Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Agency Your Used, and Reports Your Site Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Company of the Site You Bought Links from, and Reports Your Site Internal Human Review There are two major methods I want to emphasize here. These are: 1. Your competitor can report you. It's the grim truth that your paid links can be reported by your competitor. There is a form built right into Google Webmaster Tools. Here is what it looks like:

Up first is Rand Fishkin. Rand says he asked to be kicked off this panel because he doesn’t endorse buying links and he doesn’t do it anymore [Hear that, Google. SEOmoz doesn't buy links. SO KEEP MOVING.]. He offered to go last…but everyone else bullied the moderator into making him go first. Poor Rand. Always the innocent bunny in a pack of wolves. Unfortunately, the projector is broken so we have no screen. Something about a plug that doesn’t work.  So…we’re doing question and answer first while they send someone to try and fix it. I’ll throw the questions at the bottom.  Back to Mr. Fishkin. He tries to be very clear about his shift in position about paid links. He doesn’t think not buying links is right for everyone, it’s just what’s right for his clients and for SEOmoz.   Rand says he falls into the “Operator of Interest’ category. Meaning, he’s profiled for being an SEO. The problem with paid links: Algorithmic detection is getting better than ever before. Penalties are hard to diagnose. Manual link penalties are also a threat Google’s’ Webspam team invests (A LOT of) time and resources in shutting down effective paid links. [Agreed. And almost an unhealthy amount.] Competitors have significant incentive to report link spam. (Don’t be a rat.)

Paid links are always controversial. I found it interesting that "direct link purchases from individual sites/webmasters" was considered by your panel to be the fifth most effective link building tactic yet "link acquisition from known link brokers/sellers" was the second highest negative ranking factor. Any thoughts on this? Does this reflect the fact that even though paid links in general have a bad reputation, they're still widely employed? I think that's correct. Link buying and selling is still a very popular activity in the SEO sphere, and while the engines continue to fight against it, they're unlikely to ever weed out 100% of the sites and pages the employ this methodology. Link acquisition via this methodology is incredibly attractive to businesses and something the engines have also instilled as a behavior - with PPC ads, you spend more money and get more traffic. It's not unnatural that companies would feel they can apply the same principles to SEO. While I think the engines still have a long way to go on this front, I also believe that, at least at SEOmoz, where our risk tolerance is so low, the smartest way to go is to play by the engines' rules. Why spend a few hundred or few thousand dollars renting links when you could invest that in your site's content, user interface, public relations, social media marketing, etc. and have a long-term return that the engines are far less likely to ever discount.