Hi, how many links can someone realistically build in one hour? I am considering outsourcing some link building: - finding highly relevant sites and convincing the webmaster that both sites would benefit from a link - posting to relevant forums and blogs (without making the messages looking to spammy) - finding highly relevant directories and categories (not the 30000+ directories submission with a script) - social bookmarking, etc. How much time does something like this take per link? I was looking at some SEO companies packages and some try to sell 100s of hours of link building without stating how many links that would get me. (and I fear that most of the links would be unrelated due to semi-automated submission tools). So instead I am planning on hiring someone from rentacoder for a few dollars per hour. But I need to have some kind of performance metric. What do you think, how many links can someone build in one hour? Matthias
Why dont you find someone to pay by the link instead? Do up a payment scale like, highly relevent PR2 = $X semi relevent PR2 = $X And so on. I dont like paying anything by the hour, they could drink coffee for 50 minutes of it. I prefer to pay by the job or level of achievement, less chance of nasty surprises.
Agree it is best to pay per project. That way you know you are getting back links. If you prefer by the hour then you could get someone for around $2 / hour. Chances are you won't get many back links in one hour. They would spread the work out and try to get as much out of you as possible. If you had an honest person working for one full hour then around 1 link per minute. Between 60-100 at a guess. It would depend on what sort of SEO they were doing in that hour. Directory Submission, link exchanging, forum posting etc.
I would have thought that if you pay $2 an hour you will get $2 worth of work. You are right in what you say about going for quality links to relevant sites, why don’t you try doing it yourself for a week or so, just a couple of hours a day, see how you do then when you are hiring some one you will have something to measure the results by. I also like the payment scale idea that sweetfunny said, it might encourage someone to go for the best links possible rather than just a bunch of easy directory ones.
Better pay per link. I have been buying links from huge sites that have great content and I am really happy about it coz somehow my link popularity has grown just by others finding my site on these big sites and linking to me. If you wanna get links, then go big and you will get impressive results.
Plus I really recommend targeting new directories. They will try to make sure they approve your site becasue they are new and want to grow from sites like yours.
I would disagree, paying by the hour can be a very powerful tool. You just have to make sure you treat your people well and they will treat you well. You cannot hire someone you have never met on the internet, you have to find someone you can develop a relationship with rather than a mechanical 'pay per link' monkey. You also can also tap into their ideas and intuitions.
Pay per completed tasks seems to be appropriate as you never know if they will truly work for the rate you are giving them. Also, it really depends on how good the one you hired in marketing your site.
building too much link in a short time period will be considered unnatıral links by search engines. this will hurt your seo . it's a suggested way to become slow for link building
Just to give you some indication what I am talking about. I got an offer from a company for a six month package with all kind of services. One aspect is link building. Activity Quantity Man Min/Activity Man Hour Link Building 200 90 300 Link Building Request 200 0.5 1.666666667 Link Building Validation and Implementation 200 5 16.66666667 So in total they offer to build 200 links for me, they believe this takes ~318 hours and it would cost $2226. This is about $11 per link.... Obviously this is a little bit overpriced. I spent two hours on Friday to find 20 sites and I got 10 links, 1 recip, 3 denials and 6 outstanding answers. All the sites were in the Google Top 40 for 3 different keyword combinations. Now, if I can find someone to get the same results for $7/hour I could focus on more exiting tasks.... I think I will try to offer a per link compensation on rentacoder, but based on very specific parameters on how to find the sites I want links. Let's see.
Its alway better to pay $X per link exchange of $XX per 100 link exchange instead of paying per hour.
Per hour - somebody could go out and 100s of thousands of links if given the money. This can be done by pruchasing sitewides.
Quality link building isn't about getting so many links per hour, but about getting a few quality links a day. Quality links will ultimately help your site more in the serps.
I'd always go with the $x per link. Just state your terms; say must be cached in x search engine, must not include more than x links out, must have whatever PR (I personally think PR value is pretty irrelevant) If you say build me 10,000 links in 10 hours someone can just go out and spam forums, blogs etc. I would advise be specific about what your after.