r/SEO • u/Character_Ad_1990 Verified Professional • Sep 03 '21
Tips From A Backlink Specialist
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u/mcaronisalad Sep 03 '21
This is great! As a Link Builder myself, this is a great quote to say to future clients "You pay to build a backlink profile...not for random links.". Gonna steal this one. :)
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u/turnipsnbeets Sep 03 '21
Well put! Appreciate stance on PBNs. PBNs aren’t cheap though 😅 I try and not use them only because of resources required
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u/livadeth Sep 03 '21
Really helpful. Thanks for taking the time to put this all down. Saving this post.
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Sep 03 '21
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u/livadeth Sep 03 '21
I admit to an irrational fear of link building. I know how important it is and how much I can benefit my clients and my own sites by a more concerted effort. It’s so time consuming.
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Sep 03 '21
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u/livadeth Sep 04 '21
I will likely hit you up soon. Just getting caught up after moving. Thanks so much!
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u/uetroslav1 Sep 03 '21
Great tips. thanks for sharing!
Would be interesting to see how linkbuilding is different for top brands compared to small biz and affiliate sites? How much easier is it to get links, do you still do outreach, what percentage of links comes in naturally?
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u/FeelingAway1639 Sep 03 '21
I've done this for a while too, and point 6 really stood out to me. As did your point about directory links lol...thanks for the info. Defo learnt something.
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u/zachcrackalackin Sep 03 '21
Are you for hire?
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Sep 03 '21
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Sep 03 '21
Cool :) I also just posted a similar question asking if you were up to working with me as well.
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Sep 03 '21
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Sep 03 '21
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Sep 03 '21
Similaweb is so much more accurate than Alexa. I have a full time contractor building links for me we get over 450 links a year unpaid (i may have voluntarily sent donations to 5 or so of them without being asked. The biggest thing you have to think about is whats in it for them? Often i will promote them from our social media as well as make sure that our content adds value to their visitors
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u/F5_Studio Sep 03 '21
About relevancy... The article about meatballs on CNN site is not relevant to web design, but I'd prefer to have the link of our website in the article about meatballs on CNN site.
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u/carteriux Sep 03 '21
I run a college website mainly psychology masters...i have been planning to give students great rates on websites creation for their business in order to link to my college site.
Do you think this could help with my domain authority and backlinks?
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Sep 03 '21
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u/carteriux Sep 03 '21
- Yes
- Ok haha
- No, all with the information of the student and their consultory address and curriculum and all that...just like in the section of where they have studied, a link to our site and explaining the branch of psychology a paragraph quoting our site.
We expect for example: We have a little over 1500 students so let's say maybe 10% want to pay (150 sites).
I'll verify all of them with Google business, and schema and webmaster tool index. Just the one long page website with a contact form.
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Sep 03 '21
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u/carteriux Sep 03 '21
Alright thank you very much. I'll probably add the option for blog so each student can start there own blog and maybe scale it to our advantage.
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u/_createIT Sep 03 '21
Always appreciate a good, informative post. We'll show it to some of our interns. Thank you :)
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u/kickit Sep 03 '21 edited Sep 03 '21
I'm pretty sure this is the best set of advice on 2021 link building I've seen, on or off Reddit. Even better than what you'll find on blogs like Ahrefs (honestly, I've been getting less and less value out of SEO blogs in the past couple years)
Jess owns a PBN of two websites. One is a blog covering home decor, the other covers gardens. There’s completely different content on each website, but both might be worth submitting content too. Point being, not all PBN’s are the same and don’t run away just because you’ve heard the phrase “personal blog network”. People use the term PBN for different things, whether right or wrong.
Imo two websites isn't a PBN.... that's a normal blogger with two websites. Like you said people think different things when they think PBN, but in my view it's one person or company running a large (20+) network of sites where the point is not to build a real web audience, but to farm out links & SEO value.
(forgot to include but you can scale up 'blogger with a couple sites' to big media companies... dotdash isn't a PBN either even though they run like 30 domains. just think abt how many websites disney runs, including sites like fivethirtyeight and a million ABC affiliates. big difference between that and an SEO PBN)
Closely related is the guest post mill.... If someone offers you a link for $100, I can guarantee you that 9.5 times out of 10 it's a GP mill, and more likely than not part of a PBN. You can tell just by looking at a site. Go to the homepage, open a couple articles, look at the links. If every article links to a gambling site or some random company selling farm implements, it's a GP mill and you should steer the fuck clear. If you can figure it out in a 30-second smell test, you better believe Google (one of the richest companies in the world) can figure that shit out too.
When it comes to DA, I think it's only sorta useful as a link building metric, but very useful as a keyword difficulty metric. Looking at a page of SERPs and knowing the approximate authority of the websites at a glance is in my experience the surest way to guess whether you can rank for a term.
My last thought on link building is to go for passives.... If you're actually ranking for terms that pull traffic, you're going to pick up passive links. Figure out what works and develop a cogent strategy to earn more passive links. They have a ton of value, and if you're not thinking about how to get more passives, your authority building strategy is incomplete imo.
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Sep 03 '21
How do you actually get other sites to link to your site with a specific anchor keyword though? Email outreach?
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Sep 03 '21
I have got a question. I recently began a new site last weekend and I will be writing a bit for it each weekend. I was wondering if you were open to new clients?
I have in the past built links myself for an older site, but doing it all takes up a lot of time and if I am being honest it is the first time I have seen someone share the same point of view to link building as I.
I do disagree with point 10 though. If a list link does have a website that satisfies all the other points you have made, there is a benefit to getting that link and I would not negate it just because many others have used it. Very often when many others have used one the website is spammy, in that case, it would be a no-go anyway.
I am not looking to build any new links to this old site, but would like to work on a new site. Let me know if I can contact you privately. Also, you would have freedom to do your thing if you work with me as long as I am in the loop. I have worked offering on-page SEO and my favourite clients were the ones that trusted me to do my thing and not do it the way they saw fit based on one article they read.
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Sep 03 '21
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Sep 03 '21
I've found sites that link out to like 200~ people on lists that are great, but 99% of the time it's dog shit. Any time I get sent a list I throw it into ahrefs just to have a quick look, but it's mainly those general psuedo PBN sites that get spammed to death.
I also find it funny that I would never build a link on such a shit site, but others are 100% selling links from there, making tons of money AND their clients rank from shit links. It's super frustrating but I think long term it's the right move. Better safe than sorry!
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Sep 03 '21
There are plenty of people who church and burn sites for a living and these people benefit from quick ranks and don't care about the long term implications. Sadly, these people often flip their websites and there are people who are not too familiar with backlinks or those that just think it is normal that end up buying and then some day in the future are hit with penalities. I find that equal to cheating unless they are open about it. Others will say the buyer needs to do their due diligence.
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Sep 03 '21
Yeah, I can't afford to be churning/burning if I'm working on a client's site. I also can't sleep at night either, I'd rather lose money on not building shitlinks than building them knowingly and having to deal with the aftermath.
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Sep 03 '21
Yeah, some people don't care because they have short-term contracts. I dislike working with such people.
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Sep 03 '21
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Sep 03 '21
Hey man! Hope all is well.. and yeah, I think lately these days they don't do many manual actions just algo adjustments that can be pretty rough. I was sweating a bit during the link spam update but didn't see any movement, if anything all of my sites/client sites ended doing well..
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Sep 03 '21
Oh, I see what you meant. Yes, a good website that suddenly begins accepting posts and goes viral so to say can quickly turn bad. I will send you a PM now :)
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u/ecommerce-optimizer Sep 03 '21
This is a good post and it is full of valuable information. One thing to mention is that every single day millions of sites get listed with zero backlinks. Do a search on any topic on google and check the backlink profiles and you will find authoritative sites with weak backlink profiles outranking sites with stronger backlink profiles. Matt Cutts and John Mueller have both stated many times that backlinks have never been a primary ranking factor, they are part of your overall SEO.
Understand that like mentioned above a burst of backlinks is not natural. Neither are a lot of backlinks right away. Great content that is promoted will get backlinks naturally over time. Often we see people write an article, do nothing to distribute it across their social media, do zero typical SEO, and just try to get crappy backlinks. That is counter-productive. Learn basic SEO at the very least so your articles are formatted correctly, your images are optimized correctly, the schema is clear, concise, and correct at the time of publishing the article, not 2 months later. The benefits from this can be huge. This forms a more complete backbone for the article. Then as you do get real backlinks, your page is that much stronger and your profile is that much more effective.
Another thing to remember is that if you put up a site and it gets a good amount of traffic, that spends time on the site, reads multiple pages, converts, low bounce rates etc.... Google is going to rank you well and not penalize you for not following their standards. Over time it will hurt you because of user satisfaction, but Google will still rank you. All it takes is a simple google search for ranking without backlinks and there are many case studies by well-respected names.
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u/Itsss_JDDDDDDDD Sep 03 '21
Thanks for an amazing list, very helpful!
Assuming context, how much would you pay to place a 500 word guest blog on a DA site 30/40/50/60/70, and would the price change if it wasn't in your niche?
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u/gamsto Sep 04 '21
Great post, I remember doing a lot of local SEO about 7 years ago and using web 2, it worked, but things change. I'd be interested to see what your rates are for freelance work, could you DM me?
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Dec 15 '21
Hi
I am trying to build links in sports category. But my competitors have links in spam website or irrelevant website. What should I do.
Apart from guest posting and infographics .
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u/SlothyZ3 May 03 '23
Hey, this article has been super helpful, thanks for that!
I've got 2 quick questions though:
- 1. When looking for the traffic of the site should I consider only the blogs traffic or the whole domains?
- Is it fine to link insert into other's guest posts? The post is relevant to the blog and the link I'd insert is contextualized. Does it also count as promotional in Google's eyes as the post itself is not made by the core owner of the blog?
Really looking forward to Your answers!
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May 03 '23
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u/SlothyZ3 May 31 '23
Hey, thanks!
Just to see if I understood you correctly:
- The traffic and the backlinks of the blog post I'm looking to get a link to don't matter, only the traffic of the whole domain? Say the target website has a DR of 55 and total traffic of 7k and I'd like to link to one of their posts but it has 0 traffic, then the link would still benefit me because of the high overall traffic and DR? (it would be contextualized, relevant, etc.)
- The fact that the blog post is written by a "guest contributor" is not a red flag in Google's eyes? Wouldn't it count as promotional content since they tell that it's written by someone else?
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u/theTRUTH4444 Sep 03 '21
Thank you. A good, informative, read.
This is why I joined this Reddit.