I was in my office today when I heard my sales manager (and Ninja) today on the phone (his office is next to mine, and he’s got a lould voice) at one point he raises his voice even more in exhaustion, saying something to the effect of:
"It’s not the number of links that matter, it’s all about the quality and neighborhood that effects your search engine rankings…if you’re looking for hundreds of links each month, I’ll send you over some links to sites where you can buy hundreds of crappy links on links pages….problem is, most of these will have no value at all when it comes to increasing your search engine rankings…"
So I’m in my office thinking "Good Job Chuck – You tell him!"…and I’m thinking also about the strongest subpage tool we’re using now as well, and how the links we’ve been getting now with this tool are from pages with lots of backlinks to the exact pages were our links are. (sorry the public tool has often exceeded use…it’s getting hammered this week).
Though I don’t spend much time actually writing emails requesting ads anymore (I’ve got 16 Ninjas who do that for us every day), I did send another few requests out on Sunday, and one one site I bought ads on 2 of his pages.
The first page was relevant to one of our clients, and that page had 69 links to that exact page, of those 4 were from .edu’s.
The second page I got from this site was relevant to another client and had over 3000 backlinks to that page, and of those 185 were .edu’s linking to that exact page.
My links were placed in the body copy, inside of the text, in the middle of sentences. They will also generate click through traffic.
I’d say that this one link would be worth more than 10,000 links from some crappy link package deal done by a company that specializes in selling "bulk" links.
If someone is so concerned with volume of links, go to google and search for things like "bulk links" or "link trade" or "link trading"…look at the paid ads over on the right side and find those promising hundreds or thousands of instant links, yea, here’s one – only $24.95 per month:
Instant Links from 10,500 Websites
Improve your search engine ranking
….maybe I should change the "Improve your search engine ranking" to "Flag your site as someone trying to artifically inflate your links…and get tons of spam to boot"
Like I’ve been saying recently – get links from pages that have backlinks to them. This guy’s 10,500 links I’m sure all come from pages that have no trust value (no outside backlinks to them), these pages I’m sure are clear links pages that don’t pass any real value. I’m also sure that the co-citation you’re putting yourself in will put your site in a neighborhood you don’t want to be in and will flag you as being an untrusted website.
Think like a google engineer would – those PHD’s are pretty damn smart and simple link tricks are only a joke on you if think they have any value. Pressing buttons and getting 1000’s of links at once where any have any value is not going to happen. It’s not a numbers game, it really is a quality game.
9 Responses
Haha… this was funny… I can image hearing your guy getting his voicer a bit louder… could have been me 🙂
cheers, Christoph
Hi Jim.
It’s amazing how people still fall prey to such spurious online marketing tactics. I remember people used to have or maintain link farms to increase their “link popularity”. I think it is same as setting your own website as you home page to increase hits :-).
Very true! On the other hand, buying bulk links might still work for certain scenarios:
If you are in a niche with relatively low competition and trying to optimize for a SE like MSN (and don’t care about your ranking in Google).
MSN isn’t (yet) very sophisticated in evaluating link profiles and still puts quite a lot of weight on on-page optimization criteria.
However, if you wanna build a business for the long term? Forget about buying bulk links…
Robert
This is indicative of selling something so complex. People have a hard time grasping what it is we do, especially when they try to understand. I sell to alot of real estate agents and they are so focused on selling homes, they don’t have time to learn SEO. I feel ya here.
Black hat links don’t last anyway. Though it is amazing where some cheap link spam will put you…
WikipediaWikipediaWikipediaWikipediaWikipedia
I think when people start looking for ways to market on the internet they get tricked into the “great rewards for little effort” approach. Unfortunately people have to learn the hard way.
Hey Jim… I’ve been paying close attetion to your link building posts lately, and with that in mind I come across reviewme.com, a site where you can have registered blogs review your site for a fee(raning from $20 to $250). You find a relevant blog, submit your a request for a review, and if the reviewer agrees they have something like 48 our to write your review.
The cool thing is that it’s easy to find relevant blogs to buy a review from, and it basically means you get a blog post dedicated to your site, so the links are pretty organic looking. The only thing is that the reviewer must mention that it’s a sponsored review somewhere in this post.
I bought a review for one of my sites, and was impressed with the setup, but do you think about about the SEO possibilities for this service?
Jim great post. I was actually going to use a program like link-blaster.com/ but then I realized that all the sites I would be linking to were useless. They probably don’t have any backlinks and Googlebot will never crawl them so I immediately took my site down. Thanks for the advice. Now I definitely won’t make this mistake again.
This is an excellent post, and shows a lot of foresight since the last two Google updates this year directly attacked malicious use of non-contextual spammy link farms. Those that got short term gains for themselves and their clients, paid the dear price in 2007. Kudos for being ahead of the curve.
Comments are closed.