There is so much myth and disinformation on DP and the net in general. I think it's time for some enlightenment. Links That Suck 1) Forum Signatures In SEO terms - worthless. Links carry next to know juice. Earlier on in the year I posted to 30 high PR, highly content related forums in my niche and saw no increase in the serps for the keyword used. I think it's safe to say the search engines are intelligent enough to recognise forum signature links and disregard. 2) Blog Comments Yes, worthless. Google can obviously see what is a blog comment and disregard the juice in a link. Also remember that a link on a page along with 100 random links is going to pass little juice even if the search engines recognised it. 3) Directory links Submit your site to 1,000 directories for $10!!! And a blog post from PR 0 topically related blog will be worth more. I even found Yahoo, DMOZ and BOTW to be pretty worthless. I also submitted a site to 100 CSS Gallery sites and saw no serp gain. I believe Google treats Galleries and Directories the same, little to no juice passed. However, I still do the odd bulk directory submissions from reputable members with decent PR. As part of a co-ordinated SEO campaign I believe they add to the "link noise" which can assist in watering down the attention to other perhaps more greyhat areas of a campaign. 4) Footer links Well, they don't completely suck but they have really low weight in terms juice passed. If you're ever acquiring links try to get contextual or blog roll rather than the footer. Footer links work great in extremely high volume but even then there is little juice. Footer links work great in distributed software as you can get volume without any work. But something like 10 footer links from PR 7 topically related sites isn't going to have value. If you can develop some software that is used on thousands of sites with your link in the footer that is really powerful. Links That Don't Suck 1) Blog Posts Yep, the good ole blog post. We all know it works. I try and stay away from blogs that only have paid posts as content. Always remember the more TOPICAL a site is in relation to yours the more the link is worth. A blog about hair dressing is not going to help your internet marketing blog as much as a link from another blog about internet marketing although it does still count! But a blog that has no topic but just full of paid posts about kitchen sinks, forex, casinos, iphones, credit cards and xanax will surely pass 0 juice. I believe Google's algo can identify such blogs and if they can't it won't be long. In my example, a blog about hair dressing, although not connected to internet marketing is still a "real" blog with lots of content about hair dressing. The site holds value. In the same vein this is kind of why directories hold little weight - no site theme other than being a link farm. 2) Blog Rolls Still worthy and holding more weight than footer links. I tend to stay away from blogs with either too many Blog Roll links and too many non-topical outbound links. I always stay away from blogs with 5000 categories (dilute juice much?). 3) Article Links Yep, still works. The juice coming the actual directories is minimal but if your article gets distributed to others sites and blogs with links intact you are golden. Remember that article directories are treated like general directories and general blogs. Spinning your artcle 100 times and submitting your 100 spins to 100 article directories is approaching pointless. You are better off becoming an expert in 5 Article Directories, publishing quality content to all that is completely different and interesting. I'm always on the lookout for decent article writers but most article writers just produce bland keyword stuffed content. Think out the box, produce thought provoking and generally interesting content! Which article directories to choose? Think TRAFFIC and not PR. Wouldn't it be awesome if Google provided a traffic stat from its toolbar like Alexa? But using Alexa and directories in the top 5k: 1) ezinearticles.com 172 PR 6 2) ehow.com 214 PR 7 3) ArticlesBase.com 719 PR 5 4) buzzle.com 1,624 PR 5 5) goarticles.com 2,273 PR 6 6) helium.com 2,443 PR 6 7) articlesnatch.com 4,194 PR 3 8) articlealley.com 4,374 PR 5 9) articledashboard.com 4,511 PR 5 10) searchwarp.com 5,256 PR 4 11) amazines.com 6,280 PR 2 12) ideamarketers.com 7,678 PR 3 13) isnare.com 9,392 PR 6 Code (markup): Quality content that is marketed properly on social media will always bring the best results. This is why your best content needs to go on your own site (for inbound link love). There are so many "Social Media Optimisation" companies out there but very few have a real clue in my experience. A decent company should be able to guarantee the front page of Digg and massive Social Media exposure for your content and charge a pretty penny for it too. Links That The Jury Is Out On 1) Link Wheeling I haven't tested this yet and I'm going to be shortly with a reasonable competitive keyword that I haven't worked on lately that we rank currently at around 150 in Google. To be honest I have my doubts. These web 2.0 properties have been slapped pretty hard so will be interesting to see how much juice can flow. 2) Angela's Method This method focuses on links in user profiles on high PR sites. I had 50 done and saw ZERO benefit. All the links provided in your report DO NOT GET SPIDERED. I have just pinged my last 50 manually at Pingomatic so we'll see if it makes any different. I have a Google Alert set up so I know whenever someone links to us. 3) WordPress Theme Sponsoring Kind of a hard one to gauge. Over the past month I think I've sponsored 5 or 6. It's cheap and I try to choose decent themes. Also remember the links are in the footer so you need volume. I have some ideas on how to make this more successful but it does cost extra. I think this area of link building deserves added attantion. OMG Wall Of Text TL;DR Version? 1) Forum sigs suck. 2) Blog comments suck. 3) Directory links suck (but good for link noise). 4) Footer links suck unless you are generating hundreds or thousands on unique sites automatically (software, themes etc). 5) Blog Posts are great. The more the linking blog relates to your site's topic the better. 6) Blog Roll links are great. The more the linking blog relates to your site's topic the better. 7) Article Marketing is great. Spinning thousands of articles to thousands of directories is not great. Focus on the top directories, produce quality unduplicated content. 8) Link Wheeling - results not in. 9) Angela's Method. Not encouraging so far. 10) Theme Sponsoring - has possibilities but the standard but one link of 3 on random themes will not work unless you do it on every theme that is released on DP. I believe I've covered all the forms of link building that are popular here on DP these days. Would love to hear feedback and other ideas and experiences.
One of the reasons that blog comments are not taken into account as much (or at all) is because spammers use them to post their links. In my old blogs I got about 1000 to 4000 new comments daily on one blog
I think there is some good information in here, but there are a few things I'd like to point out. - Blog comments that are on topic, and not 'no-follow' are great backlinks to acquire. If the comment and article are on the same topic as the site linked to, these are almost as effective as the blogpost itselt. This is is counted as a true, organic backlink, and there's no reason to think they suck. That being said, if you spam articles, or is the link is to a totally unrelated site, or you use automated software to post your links, then yes, this can suck. - Most directories now do suck. However, there are still many, DMOZ and Yahoo being the most well know, that have very selective criteria for entry, that Google still give quite a bit a link juice to. You're right though, about the bulk submissions, they're all crap, and it's one of the wort mistakes a new website promoter can do. - Be careful with article marketing. sure, if you manually submit a unique article to each site article directory, then it can be very beneficial, however, what you don't want is 1000 websites all with the exact same article that has your links in it. If that happens, most of them will be counted as duplicate content, and won't count as backlinks.
hmm interesting, this goes against what I've read from other people. I'm looking forward to see what others have to say.
I agree with the first and third posters! Blog comments are still valuable when niche related and "do-follow."
partially agree, but there is nothing like a worthless link, unless it is "nofollow". if you don't see benefits from forum links, blog comments, directory links, it is because these sites have a large number of outgoing links. if done on a large scale even forum, blog commenting, directory links will bring benefits. I have sites that have links only...from directories and footer links. These sites still do well in Google.
You have to leverage Time vs Effect. A dofollow link from a topically relevant blog might have some value but the search engines are not stupid and adapt quickly. Although Google loves blogs I highly doubt it loves blog comments. A blog comment takes time. You need to find a topically relevent blog, make a comment that makes sense and hope it gets authorised. It takes time and you might not even get a link out of it. If you do get a link you can sure the link is worth next to NOTHING in terms of juice passed. No decent SEO worth their salt will use Blog Comments in their strategy. You could outsource it. I hired someone to do 100 blog comments. I gave it some time and after a few days I checked and out of 100 I saw 5 comments accepted and 3 were nofollow. And I'd rather have 1 decent blog post in a topically relevent site than 50 topically relevent comments. So blog commenting done write needs to be done by you. Think how much time that is going to take. You're better off writing content to your own site with contextual links. So to recap. Blog commenting = Time = Therefore Outsource = Bad Results = Therefore Do Yourself = Takes A Lot Of Time = For Questionable Link Juice. Google doesn't like pages or sites with huge amounts of followed outgoing links. It's why general directories, article directories, galleries etc automatically give little juice. Saying that niche directories have value. I like to use SEOmoz's LinkScape to mine competitor's links and in top thousand links rarely do I see a directory in there (I do sometimes) and never have I seen a forum link or blog comment or even article directory link. If your SEO strategy is just blog comments, forum sigs and general directories sheer volume will get you somewhere, no doubt about that but never will you be able to compete in a competitive vertical. I would say my industry is in the top 10 competitive niches on the internet and I know I wouldn't have a chance. So although "no link is worthless" it is worthless to me depending on the amount of time it takes to get that link against it's possible juice flow.
Excellent points NexDog Certainly one of fav thread .. BTW i have been hearing this nofollow vs dofollow thing so frequently I have collected following facts Do follow: Link Juice(PR,backlink) will flow. Will help in getting indexed(crawled),PR,backlink and improved SERP position No Follow:Link Juice(PR,backlink) will not flow. Will help in getting indexed,crawled and no increase in PR or backlinks ... dunno about SERP position So IMO no follow is also somewhat useful since it helps in getting indexed(crawled) .. Am i right in thinking so ..? And also i am getting confused with the term indexed and crawled ... i am sure there is diff between them but i am not able to understand it .. can anyone explain it in simple words
Yep, a link that is nofollowed still gets crawled by search engines. It just doesn' t pass any "link juice".
Thankyou for this useful information, helps to build up a good idea of what is worth the money and what is not!
It is nice to read your post. As far as in my experience, ONTOPIC Blog comments really help a lot to increase SERP. As well as forums postings too, regardless of the niche, it helps. I have more success cases. But what you have to do is, You do NOT have to get just few 30,40,50 and stay back and cannot say, I did not get SERP. You have to be very active on those blogs or forums where you are posting your comments or replies or new thread. Being very active will help you to get more direct hits as well as REGULAR SEO juice too. Normally, I used to register on my niche related forums and do about 10-15 replies daily there, At the same time, I used to carry out this for 30-45 days. So, I will get enough results of it For blogs, daily it will be 2-3 comments on a blog (depends on new posts there), -- That really helps Apart from this, I agree, blogging really helps to get FAST/INSTANT increment in SERP. However, if you do NOT have any other backlink and just do blogging, I don't think it is more useful. There should be more and more hard work to get good SERP. I am sure, google is going to made the work of webmasters or SEO more had by implementing new algorithm. Let's see.....
Nexdog, you make a lot of sense. I agree with you about blog comments taking a lot of time. I would rarely ever search for them, but, if I run across a juicy related one, I'm down! But I wouldn't dedicate my linking strategy to it. Most of them "top dogs" usually have people linking in to their content, or buy tons of one-way links.. Solid points and tips you bring up Nex!
These are just my experiences and I test everything before spouting. I'm actually about to start a targeted test based on Angela's method and a Link Wheel test. I'll post my results. I'm not saying that forum posts and blog comments are totally worthless. Their sheer marketing possibilities make them awesome tools but you need to be active, regular to the site and provide real content. I used forum posting to launch my primary business back 2002 and focused on 3 forums (no blogs then) and built up over 6,000 posts. It took 4-5 hours every day.
there are other ways to get good quality backlinks, if you are clever enough to look for ways to get them. Of course, many people act like sheep and ignore whats in front of their eyes....
Any answer to this fellas ..? BTW how about social bookmarking ...? I do think it will help (though digg from now one will use dofollow only for non trusted sites )
I agree with one poster that said that there is nothing worthless. If you are "building" links you have to make it look natural. Your natural link profile should include forum links, blog comments, articledirectories, high-quality links and even a few no-follow links. These links happen naturally if you have a high-quality site, so you have to keep that in mind if you're building.
In general the points may have some sense, but I disagree strongly about your disregard for directory submissions. They aren't just good for "link noise", they do work in affecting SERPs as well. I have a blog where I tested this out. The only campaign I did for it was to submit it to a 1K directory package. Weeks later, it ranked well for its keywords and it even got a PR3 on the following Google PR update. Granted, there are many spam directories out there but the directory submission packages on DP are generally of quality; you just need to be smart enough to pick a quality service provider.