40,000 High Value Links - Sold?
-
I'm a developer spending ever more time on SEO for SMBs. I've never had cause to buy links. Not one bit. I've done ok. Until now that is. Now I am getting my arse kicked into last year. By, I think, a top SEO company. Really, you know these guys and they are whiter than white. But what they have achieved seems an impossibilty to me using white hat techniques. Maybe they are from another planet than me. Or maybe something else is going on.
In six months they have built 40,000+ links. These are unbelievably high quality links in their thousands. Really top notch. Keyword rich anchors slap bang in relevant content on great, great sites such as newspapers, univertsities, government, corporate, charity etc. Nothing spammy at all. Amazing. I was skimming but I found nothing to question at all until link 800 which was a cloaked link on a well known review site's product page. But generally the high quality sustained. Gradually, some began to feel somewhat worked into the content, although worked very well. 2000 links in and there are still magazine and review sites, still page authority 40+. There are still local government sites at 10,000 links when the export file ends. I go dizzy at the thought of the remaining 30,000. How far down could this quality have gone?
Gulp. I am in awe, intimdated...and a little suspicious. How on earth do you do that with a pure white hat on? Actually, whatever colour your hat - how on earth do you do that?
Rand's position is clear. He doesn't do it. Other's are less unambiguous. Comments like "I do it, you do it, we all do it" go unchallenged. Even on a recent link buying question here on SEOMoz most comments say don't do it but one advocates "Paid, targeted, individually prospected links".
Am I too suspicious - a fool trying to rationalise my relatively pathetic link building? Honestly, you should just see these links. Of course, maybe some of you have.
Come on, please don't tell these guys simply worked hard. But maybe that's the harsh truth I cannot face. I have to say I cannot see the site generating an income to pay for the man hours needed for 40,000 high-value, white-hat links but then what do I know.
Tell me, what do you think: Is it possible to build 40,000 very high value links in six months using pure white hat techniques - or is there another way?
Phil
-
Ok here's the thing... QUALITY content building, and I mean really high quality, will generate buzz on its own. The trick is to get content (including videos, images, etc.) to go viral, with links included. Naturally people will share it, retweet it and links will build naturally. They obviously have a large team and a large budget, and likely have people working on quality, shareable, viral content. News sites can easily get that many links, as people are always linking to their stories. So no its not impossible, it's just a matter of working smart and not hard.
Can you give us the link so we can take a look at the site?
-
and then Google says that links only become a factor once they are gained naturally and not like 40,000 links in 6 months.. that is not natural. This should result in: What was it all for if Google ignores it? Well, personally, i think google does not ignore such a fact. In fact: In one of the many projects we've run we bought about 1000 links in 1 month and we got a number one position within 1 month after that.
Buying links still works (unfortunally) but 40,000 high quality links in 6 months is about sick..
-
Could I ask how many linking root domains out of the 40k 'high value' links?
-
One of 3 options really:
-
they have good contacts who will publish links for them (who you know goes a long way)
-
they bought the links (not that uncommon and really isn't paying someone to linkbuild essentially the same as buying links?)
-they lied to get the links
-they have the most amazing and linkable content ever, they are the new lol cats (unlikely though because of the anchor text)
-the company may have hired an offline pr firm to stir up controversy and get editorial articles. I have heard of people creating fake news stories etc just to create a buzz and get attention which converts into links
-maybe you misread the links and they are just from scrapebox or xrumer?
-
-
DM me and lets talk privately - dont want to out anyone in a public forum, which I am glad you didnt. But let me give you a few insights - seems like the co you are talking about is a UK one by the way...
-
Thanks for the reponses. Really fascinating stuff.
How does one aquire a "uniquely prospected, targeted link"? I mean how do you influence, say, the Guardian editorial? Along with the Independant and many, many other powerful sites. Is it a simple matter of building a 'relationship' (ie bribing) with journalists and site editors - and that the big agencies have years of relationship building under their belts? Really, is that what goes on?
I am concluding that link buying is more practised than discussed. I have read a lot about white hat link building and feel I know nothing. But these tutorials are not meant to inform are they? More often than not they are a rehash of the same old same old that really exist to get a few moz points and, more to the point, some juicy links to client sites which the post is ineviatably built around. I know how to get links the hard way and how to buy rubbish links but where is the post "how we buy high value links".
@russvirante
Thanks, yes that's the conclusion I am beginning to understand. I am not so much afraid of buying links I just don't know how to. How to buy valuable links that is.@Gerry Francis
How could an SEO company be in a position to urge, for eaxmple, the Guardians editorial to use keyword rich anchor text? How do they get that influence?@saibose
Well they have some ok tools attracting some links but that's not a lot of their inbound. They have all the social media links but I do not know how to research this thoroughly. I didn't see any social media links in my manual browse through the links. But maybe social media might start explaining the 30,000 I didn't even glance at.@Ian Auld
Well if my suspisions are correct the link builders may well read this. I also would love to hear how they did it - any chance? No chance! But maybe you could write a post explaining how you might do it with a multipronged approach. I'm sure it would contain gold for me.@joelhit
I can barely imagine 400 such quality links in six months. The site has Moz DA of 83, homepage PA of 86.@Barry Smith
Very enlightening those figures. Or is it Professor Smith yet?@Dejan SEO
Mmmm, your comment chimes. The site almost 'misrepresents' it's commercial interests. Perhaps we are talking about the same team.
-
Genius!
That's my weekend sorted getting internet PHDs and becoming a doctor in useless stuff to get links on edus.
I may or may not be joking <- poker face
-
Yes you can get links like that - and you know what works really well? Lies and misrepresentation. I know because I have seen it. Basically getting the link "Google legit" way (e.g. not buying links) but totally unethical in every other way. For example I know of a team who says they are a doctor of physics at some university and bull their way into gov/edu listings on the basis of false identity. Once their client found out they were fired immediately.
-
Almost definitely agency work, medium sized team, probably with a paid link strategy and some degree of automation.
For the sort of sites you're saying they have, it'd probably run you about £80-90k for the 6 months, at a conservative guess (probably top end it at £150k depending on what industry you're in).
There would have been a lot of hard work put into it, but almost certainly some paid stuff in there. Hard to compete as a solitary in house SEO.
Sounds like the guys know what they're doing, would be good to find out who they are
-
Sounds fishy to me. Its not possible to get links the white hat way. There are some possibilities that I can think of. Paying for inclusions, getting majority of links based on press release product announcements or some viral element on the website which has been covered by reputable media sources.
It would be interesting to explore the full set of links.
-
Of course it is possible, although it seems somewhat unlikely. Depends on the size of the site, the type of the site, their social media profile, how good their PR team are, what relationships they have with said review sites, magazines, newspapers etc.
I too would be a little suspicious if the links are very keyword rich, this suggests some engineering on the part of the site. Not to say they have used black hat techniques but maybe they have urged the comapnies to use certain anchor texts etc.
Without knowing what site you're talking about it would be difficult to guess efforts they may have made to accomplish this.
-
No. The truth is this - if your niche is profitable, people will buy links. If you are afraid of buying links because they may damage your site, create another site, and buy links to it. It is that simple.
However, you should be smart about it. Hire an SEO firm that does uniquely prospected, targeted links. It will be expensive, but that is what your competitors are doing, and it appears to be paying off.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it OK to Leave Links in Comments ?
It may sound silly ... Just wondering to see your opinion about leaving link on blogs; keyword as name with site link or link in the comment text as long as its relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mustansar0 -
Should I disavow links to a dead sub domain?
I'm analyzing a client's website today and I found that they have over 300 spammy sites linking to a subdomain of their main site. So for example, say their site is clientsite.com, well they have hundreds of links pointing to deadsite.clientsite.com. That subdomain was used at one time as a staging site, and is no longer active. Are those hundreds of spammy sites hurting or potentially hurting my client's SEO? Or is it a non-issue because the links point to a dead subdomain? We believe that that staging sub domain site was hacked at one time, and thats where all those spammy links came from. Should I disavow them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rubennunez0 -
Value / Risk of links in comments (nofollow)
Recently I noticed a couple of comments on our blog that seemed nice and relevant so I approved them. The site is wordpress and comments are configured nofollow. We don't get many comments so I thought "why not?". Today I got one and noticed they are all coming from the same IP. They all include urls to sites in the same industry as us, relevant sites and all different. Looks like an SEO is doing it for various clients. My question is what is the value of these nofollow links for the poster? Are these seen as "mentions" and add value to Google? And am I better off trashing them so my site is not associated? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chris6610 -
Help with a Link Building Audit
A customer wants to have a better position with a keyword (he has already a great position, but he wants more...). So he need a bit of extra link building to have better position in serp(this niche is very competitive so on page is not sufficient).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Maximilian21
He asked me to do a Link Building Analysis to find good link opportunities.
How can i structure a good report? I need something like a Seo Audit for link building. That's my idea:
Identify what are the business objectives
Identify the brand strenghts and weakness
Find the strongest competitors and understand their tactics
See what are the top links that they have
Copy their best strategies
Find new strategies not used by the competitors
What else i can do for my link building audit?0 -
Do I lose link juice if I have a https site and someone links to me using http instead?
We have recently launched a https site which is getting some organic links some of which are using https and some are using http. Am I losing link juice on the ones linked using http even though I am redirecting or does Google view them the same way? As most people still use http naturally will it look strange to google if I contact anyone who has given us a link and ask them to change to https?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lisa-Devins0 -
Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community 😉
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adamlcasey
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you? We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd. So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab. There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings) Their links are made up of: Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc) Profile page links Low quality Press Release sites Classified ad sites Bookmarking sites Article Marketing sites Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include: t-shirts sports news online marketing anti aging law christian guitars computers juke boxes Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places. So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them. As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them! So what steps would you take next?0 -
What do you say in your emails to horrible sites to remove your links?
Morning guys, I've the unenviable task of having to rectify poor link building (a previous company's work, not mine) which inevitably means emailing tons and tons of horrible directories with links to the client from as far back as 5/6 years ago. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat so it begs the question: What have you said to these types of sites that is effective in getting them to remove the links? This could even be a two/three-parter: If you've had little joy in requesting removals, have you dis-avowed the links, and what (if any) effect did it have? Thanks, M.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Somebody hacked many sites and put links to my sites in hidden div
I had 300 good natural links to my site from different sites and site ranked great for my keywords. Somebody (I suppose my competitor) has hacked other sites 2 days ago (checked Google cache) and now Yahoo Site Explorer shows 600 backlinks. I've checked new links - they all are in the same hidden div block - top:-100px; position:absolute;. I'm afraid that Google may penalize my site for these links. I'm contacting webmasters of these sites and their hosting so they remove these links. Is it possible to give Google a notice that these links are not mine so it could just skip them not penalizing me? Is it safe to make "Spam report" regarding links to my own site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zarades0