Over the last few years I've come to believe that backlinks are the number one factor in getting good SERP's. Yes, content is highly important, but you can have great content, no backlinks and you are out of luck. Further I've come to the conclusion that in order for search engines to really appreciate your backlinks they need to be from a variety of TYPES of sources. In other words JUST having comments in blogs that are dofollow won't make a big impact, nor will JUST having directory listings. So, I've been pursuing a strategy of link building for my sites that follows the following pattern: 1)forum posts/profiles with signature linking to sites (on a variety of forums of varying relevance) (some of which are obviously below), 2)dofollow blog commenting (again - variety of blogs) 3)free link directory submissions (variety of directories) 4)begging for links/reciprocal links from related sites (some are really fantastic links - variety of sites) 5)article writing and distribution via places like qassia/ezinearticles/squidoo (and at least one other article place) (With manually edited articles to avoid duplicate content penalties.) 6)other opportunistic links whether they may be social bookmarking/guestbook style pages/etc. (again looking for a variety of sites.) I've tried to develop some balance in this and frankly it is tedious... so I'm not creating a zillion links a day. Many of these I'm discovering haven't been found by google yet ([site:sourcedomain.com "my link text"] - is one way I've checked. Yes - I'm heading to a question here... bear with me. Of the site that I've spent the most time on this method I had managed to get around 2nd or 3rd place for my primary search term and I have seen lot's of improvements for the "long tail" terms as well. Which makes sense. however this morning I woke up and have seen a drop to page two - number 12. So, the real question here.... Has anyone out there pursued a LONG and sustained link building campaign with a VARIETY of types of inbound links and seen NO tangible SERP improvement from it? Please - don't respond if you did a blackhat method and got slapped - or if you did an automated tool to submit hundreds of links a day, but only if you did more of a manual/balanced/reasonable approach to link building and saw NO results from it. I really think long term this method makes sense that it would work. I think hundreds of links a day looks spammy and would probably have the search engines doubting the authenticity of the sudden burst of links, but I am only about a month into my most recent link building campaign and with the drop in my SERP's I'm having a few doubts. So... Has anyone out there pursued a LONG and sustained link building campaign with a VARIETY of types of inbound links and seen NO tangible SERP improvement from it? (Or even a penalty?)
Great artcle. I think it is really important to have links from all over the place. Social networks, directories, comments, and anywhere else you can find.
Yes, Definitely helping articles, go through my Signature for the Avatar there you can avail all the service.
It might be just Google Dance. Same thing happened to me a few days ago. Suddenly organic traffic dropped to 0 (zero). Two days later the site is ranking well again and everything is just like it used to be. Moral of the story - wait for a while
You are absolutly wrong! What you observed are side effects. Content - unique and well defined content always has been king and it always will be (that's the search engine business). If you seriously think about SE and what makes them successful, there is only one way, fresh unique content that interests and attracts users.
Told you in an other thread - don't know how you achieved your reputation (fake???) but you are telling crap!
I think you may misunderstand my premise... I'm NOT claiming that unique and well defined content is irrelevant to a sites standing. If you have a blank page and a billion quality links it won't do you any good. Of course in the ideal world you will just GET links to a high quality site without asking for them or trying. But part of the point of link development is to put your site in front of those people so they have a chance to see what content you've developed. But if you have a wonderful content rich site and you tell no one and NO one links to it, it appears as though you won't maintain your standing in Google (or even get it to begin with.) What I'm asking is if ANYONE has pursued a good balanced link building effort over the long term and seen NO results from it.
Has anyone out there found success from posting backlinks in free directories? If so, any specific ones that you could mention would be of great assistance. Thanks!
Personally, I think you need more than just directory listings. I believe you need a variety of types of backlinks from a variety of types of sites. If you're just relying on forum posts, or JUST on directory listings I don't expect you're going to see great benefit.
It's been almost a month since my original post... For starters I was probably frustrated at the time I started this thread because I saw one of my primary sites had plummeted in the search results.... not just for my primary search phrase, but a lot of other search terms. But, my question was along the lines of whether or not ANYONE had commited to long term link building and NOT seen results in better search rankings. I haven't had anyone claim that link building has FAILED to bring them better search results. Obviously you HAVE to have solid content, but if you have content without inbound links you will not rank well for your search terms if you have competitors that ALSO have solid content but many backlinks. I certainly don't think that backlinks are a substitute for having content.... Over the last month I have continued my backlink work. I haven't been overly ambitious but probably average 5 or so backlinks a day. Some days I'll get 10-20 other days I'll just be working on content. My backlink building has not been even across all my sites. I have several sites and have at times favored one site or another in my link building campaign. I have made use of a WIDE variety of ways to build backlinks. Blog Comments, Forum signatures, website profiles that allow description and homepage, offsite blogs, various article and article style sites, sites that allow RSS feeds, social bookmarking style sites, directories (more limited...), there are a few ideas that I have on the table that I haven't even tried yet... I've noticed MUCH increased traffic over where I was this time last month. After my first post in this thread - the one site that had dropped, fluctuated back up and settled in the top three again for the main search phrase (number one for a time.) and the secondary pages have done better for long tail searches. A second site that I've been working on went from 3-10 visits a day to now... 345 a day in the span of 3 weeks. A third site went from consistent 20 visits up to now... 150-200 a day. Another that has been stuck at ~35-50 in google for it's main search phrase after a penalty 3 years or so ago... is now #10 for it's main search phrase (and the secondary pages have done really well too.) It's up over 100 each day - some days up to 150 right now. I've got another site that now has climbed from 20 visits a day to 100+ each day. The site that was my primary site and getting 100-120 a day at the time I posted is now getting 250 or so a day. All of the progress above is over the course of the last month. My strategy has been pretty much two prongs 1) content and 2) inbound links. I've been biased towards more links for the sites that already have a decent amount of content and more content for those that have fewer than 30 pages of information. I know I have a lot of work to do... 100-300 visits a day for these sites is not much in the big scheme of things and I have one site that in the pre - Big Daddy days was pulling 1000 visits a day easily. I also have a TON of content there. Pretty much, what I've seen is that the increased backlinks not only increase the search results for the main page, but can make a more dramatic difference with the secondary pages. ("Long tail" searches.) Given my sites better visibility I'm noticing that I'm starting to get more natural inbound links from other people "just linking" to my sites content. I've found a couple forum posts that refer to a page on one of my sites and a couple of sites that link to a page on yet another site because it's related to something they're doing. It seems I just needed to seed with my own inbound backlinks at various places to help "kickstart" the process by getting the site to rank higher so it could be found to begin with. So... I've seen fluctuations, but... I still haven't heard of anyone that has spent a long time building inbound backlinks and found that it didn't work to increase their sites traffic or search rankings. Anyone?
Ive been using a similar link building strategy for the last 4 months, i have aquired over 3000 links but the last month it seems my links are not moving, google loves me one week and then drops me out of the serps the next, i can't keep up but continue with link building because if you stop so will your google traffic.
I agree with some of what is said here. It still surprises me, however, how you guys miss the importance of proper internal linking also. You need a good balance of backlinks and internal links. i love internal links because I get to control the links everyday. I wrote this article 45 minutes ago and should be around the number 4 spot right now http://www.google.com/search?q=Esta...avclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGFB_enUS264&aq=t blog.areawebsolutions.com Not a super competitive keyword, but in a few hours I will have the number one spot. Here is one that has taken 7 hours to get to the number 10 spot http://www.google.com/search?q=Yell...avclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGFB_enUS264&aq=t blog.areawebsolutions.com it's a little more competetive but by morning here, I should have number 1, 2 or 3 spot and in 2 days it will be number 1. How? Just internal linking.
No, that's impossible as long as you're not completely screwing your onpage SEO with keyword stuffing, frames, or something like that. As long as you're getting a continuous flow of links you will see results (especially if you're begging for links and getting one ways like that from relevant sites, those are GOLDEN).