If you are building links (hopefully naturally rather than black hat style), how long does it take to start to see some positive results? A day? A week? A month? 3 months? What have you guys been seeing on average? And what kind of results can you expect to see from one link? 2 links? 5 links? etc?
Is a earned in content link better or a good blog comment that is well written and not spammy? What are the best links and the worst to get? The reason I am posting this is so that we can get these questions which are constatntly being asked here all answered in one thread.
It depends on the link building method.If you link get approved fast and if the site is having good PR you can get fast result.
It depends also I think on what kind of result you're looking for. Are you looking for a boost in pagerank? Are you looking to have the page spidered from the link? Are you looking for increased traffic? I know that I've seen QUICK spidering results from the recent post "thingy" in the digital point forum profile blurb. Digital point is regularly spidered and I have seen posts indexed within a few hours of posting due to that. (Probably thanks to the high rank that these forums have.) On the other hand, typical link building: I've spent some time the last couple weeks with several link building strategies for one site in particular and after 5 days I noticed a distinct uptick in traffic. There didn't seem to be a single source, but it appears as though some of the new links are having an effect. (I seem to be getting more "long tail" style search results.) Last spring I went through a serious stretch to get one site up in the top few of the google results. It had consistently been on page 2-3 or so for a given search term. I asked for links, posted in forums with the site in my signature, submitted to directories and within 1-2 weeks had made a pretty big move up. For about 2-3 weeks it seemed to dance around number 3 some days, 10 other days. Finally, from the fourth week or so of the campaign it's stuck at #3 (and now I'm working on a push to get a bit higher still.) That much said, Thursday I asked for a link to a forum at that site and the link went live Friday in a highlighted area on a similar niche site and I had a big surge in traffic Friday/Saturday/Sunday to the forum. So you'll see some effects sooner than others. (I'm expecting to see a long term increase once the search engines spider THAT link. Not from direct traffic, but improved search results.)
ajparker, you seem pretty knowledgable. What is the best way for a dp forum member to deal with black hat seo spammers that control a niche or the rankings for a specific keyword? Other than the typical G spam report.
once google recaches the site that the link is on it should take effect than. If you have anchor text you will see improvements in your serps
Best way to deal with those in a niche that are spamming links? The google spam report is worth a try, unfortunately I think the real answer to do that and have a healthy dose of patience. Aim for the LONG term, sooner or later the sites that have spammy links will get slapped. I mean the details of what the search engines do is more or less a part of their "secret sauce", but what generally seems to be true is that inbound backlinks are tremendously important. I suspect that if ALL of your backlinks are directories, they probably won't give you good LONG term results in the search engines. I suspect that the search engines are constantly trying to balance quantity/quality/variety of links and types of links in their formulas.... i.e. ALL forum posts probably won't look good, try for a nice "balanced repertoire". (Just like they used to say about managing your money diversify.) Given that the search engines really WANT to provide relevant results it makes sense that the spammers eventually get slapped back. It's because of THEM that you really want to diversify and not have all your links of one type. Because THEY'RE the ones forcing the hands of the search engines to change/modify/improve the way they value links and the way they try to discern organic links from spammy crap.... If you're just looking for a flash in the pan quick good time, the black hat techniques would probably give you a good quick burst, but after you get slapped, if it's a site you really want to keep working with I think you'll have a hard time climbing back out of the search engines penalty boxes. Competing against black hat techniques with a long term legit site.... keep your head down and do the things you're "supposed" to do to have a good site, build a variety of inbound links and wait for 1)the blackhats to make a mistake or 2)the search engines to change the rules. 1) is probably going to happen and from what we've seen 2) IS going to happen.
If google visit the page where your links placed then the effect starts. So its all depends on google visit to that page where your link added.
Normally within 1-2 weeks after the cache date of the page your link is on. If it's not a powerful link, you may not see much movement at all.
From what I can see, links start to show effects on SERP positions about a week after have been found by Google (nothing to do with the date being placed). They usually show another "push" after about two weeks and a third one after about three months. I've got the impression from the third month onwards there is still a small but constant improve in their value (aging factor) but hard to track as other factors (further link building, domain aging, ongoing SEO efforts) hide the effects.