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
-
If I am getting links on competitor websites, is it safe to assume those competitors are doing this to hurt our SEO?
We have received a few notification from Google Webmaster Tools and Moz that our competitors have "mentioned" our page on their website. This is incredibly odd as you wouldn't think they'd want to do this. Further, when I go to the page that we are supposedly mentioned on, the link to our site is not on the page. What is going on? Thank you in advance for your insights!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brits0 -
Guest post linking only to good content
Hello, We're thinking of doing guest posting of the following type: 1. The only link is in the body of the guest post pointing to our most valuable article. 2. It is not a guest posting site - we approached them to help with content, they don't advertise guest posting. They sometimes use guest posting if it's good content. 3. It is a clean site - clean design, clean anchor text profile, etc. We have 70 linking root domains. We want to use the above tactics to add 30 more links. Is this going to help us on into the future of Google (We're only interested in long term)? Is 30 too many? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is Inter-linking websites together good or bad for SEO?
I know of a website that inter-links a handful of websites together (ex- coloring.ws interlinks to a handful of other sites, including dltk-kids.com, and others). Is this negative for SEO? I was thinking about creating a few related sites and inter-linking all of them together, since they will all be relevant to each other. Any thoughts would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Bad links showing up in opensiteexplorer
Hello Everybody,I've been working as an inhouse SEO for nearly a year and a half now and i've gotten some pretty great results. Two years ago our site was on the second page for the most important keywords in our niche and with a lot of work we've managed to get top 5 rankings for most keywords and even the number 1 spot for the most important keywords. I've been using opensite explorer to track backlinks and today i noticed that a lot of links we're discovered in the last week from websites that i did not recognize. Most url's won't even load properly because each "blogpost" has over a thousand comments. It took me a couple of tries to even find one that loaded properly and find the link to our website, and it was really there. There haven't been any drops in our rankings but i'm worried about a possible spam penalty. I know that i can use the disavow tool to at least disavow the links from these domains, but is that really the only thing i can do? Furthermore these are just the links that opensiteexplorer picked up, who knows how many more are out there.For any of you questioning wether or not i did this to myself, I'm no saint, but I'm definitely not stupid enough to buy these kinds of links. any help would be highly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Laurensvda0 -
Best way to handle SEO error, linking from one site to another same IP
We committed an SEO sin and created a site with links back to our primary website. Although it does not matter, the site was not created for that purpose, it is actually "directory" with categorized links to thousands of culinary sites, and ours are some of the links. This occurred back in May 2010. Starting April 2011 we started seeing a large drop in page views. It dropped again in October 2011. At this point our traffic is down over 40% Although we don't know for sure if this has anything to do with it, we know it is best to remove the links. The question is, given its a bad practice what is the best fix? Should we redirect the 2nd domain to the main or just take it down? The 2nd domain does not have much page rank and I really don't think many if any back-links to it. Will it hurt us more to lose the 1600 or so back links? I would think keeping the links is a bad idea. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foodsleuth0 -
How to Remove Unwanted Links
I dropped like a rock in Google rankings on the 24<sup>th</sup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rdominey
of April. After having to become familiar with Google webmaster tools and doing
allot of investigating I discovered that there is a website www.siteloki.com that has 6,742 links to my website. I have
tried to contact siteloki with no response. I tracked them on Whois to an
office suite in LA called the building to find that the suite listed is the
building management suite. I have had
the following sent to them via email, their contact page and posted on their website
forum and still no reply: Please take action to remove all links to this website
immediately! I have been notified by my client that your website has a
malicious attack using links from www.siteloki.com
against www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com. My client did not solicit these links, pay for these links or authorize any
third party to build links for them. They just appeared. The links are even
pointing to my client’s old website (same url). This is a big problem and I
don’t understand why these links exist. There are currently 6,471 links from
your domain. Please remove these links immediately or we will consider legal
action against your company. We have contacted Google on the behalf of our
client and informed them of this malicious act. I expect to see these links
removed immediately! Regards, I have submitted the site in the malware reporting section
of webmasters tools. I have searched but cannot find any documentation on how
to block this type of attack. It seems that Google failed to provide any means
for an honest website owner following the rules to block this type of attack and
as a result we have been unjustly penalized by Google with a drop to the bottom
in our page ranking. I would appreciate ANY HELP in removing these links and getting the Siteloki website blocked from linking to my website? Any Ideas?0 -
Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!
Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Townpages0 -
Opinions Wanted: Links Can Get Your Site Penalized?
I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal. When I initially read this article, I was happy. It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again. The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz. Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue. There seems to be a few different opinions: The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued. The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility. The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor. Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about. I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point. It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that. What do you guys think? Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other? Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another? Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept? I'm curious to hear your responses.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnthonyMangia0