Backlinks *gulp*

[FilthyCro]

I have a phobia of seo that is largely due to backlink building. The times ive been on the sitepoint marketplace and seen .com sites for sales in the 5k range they typically state that they have 1k-10k backlinks. Now maybe its me but wouldnt that kind thing take a millenia to achieve.

Generally on these sites people go and do things like find a dofollow blog in your niche and comment on one of their posts and linkback to your site. Imagine doing that 1000 times.

Is this the kinda thing an seo consultant would do? If so I wouldnt want that job. lol.

How many links do you typically build to get some "status" i.e. pagerank.

 

[domainlover]

good question, i have been looking into this lately and are shocked at how much seo companies are charging!

 

[Ash]

How many links do you typically build to get some "status" i.e. pagerank.

Good question. I don't have that much experience but from what I've read it's more or less the authority of the pages providing inbound links rather than just quantity... quality vs. quantity.

Having said that, the limited number of developed sites I have are all PR 0 so my link-building skills can obviously do with a tune-up.

 

[neddy]

I'm interested in this too. Perhaps James or someone knowledgeable can help?

 

[Data Glasses]

sometimes i do a google blog search for the subject and yes a comment or two has to be done

But it does seem a long slow process, the comment quality over quanity seems relevant here

 

[DavidL]

Where do you start? 101 ways to get backlinks in all shades of colour from whiter than white to jet black

 

[Chris.C]

Also I think as a general rule of thumb you don't need to get too paranoid about every link being high quality because if it were really easy to get site's kicked out of the index because of low quality backlinks everyone would just be pointing crappy links at their competitors.

So most of the time if you are not engaging in complete black hat spam the worst you are going to do is just be wasting your time and money as Google will just devalue the inbound link.

So at the end of the day "more is generally better" but "better quality is more important the quantity".

OK so that's the general gist, now you just need to know who is your site competing with, are you hitting a niche geographical market or a broad international market.

If you are hitting the niche geographical market with low competition I have often found that building < 30 low quality links (directories and blog comments) will get you indexed pretty quickly and ranking well, mainly because your competition doesn't even know what link building is...

If you are going after some bigger markets, unfortunately volume does start to matter and you are going to need to engage in everything from blog commenting, directories, forum profiles, forum posts, article marketing, guest blogging, press releases, social media, etc - you name it you'll want to build links with it.

Best thing to do is not abuse any one methods or attempt to attain links from bad neighbourhoods or using automated spamming methods.

Then I'd just focus on getting backlinks from a variety of different sites and IPs, a variety of different types of links, that point to a number of different pages on the site, that use a variety of different anchor texts.

Variety and constant growth are what you are after.

 

[domainlover]

Great post Chris, thanks for the info.

 

[Ash]

+1 Thanks Chris. Some great info there

 

[zhenjie]

Spend your valuable time on building your content and good site. Spend your money on hiring others to build links for you because your time is worth more.

 

[Chris.C]

Spend your valuable time on building your content and good site. Spend your money on hiring others to build links for you because your time is worth more.

If you are going to outsource your link building be sure to get people that know what they are doing. As I mentioned above poor link building strategies won't help you ranking and will just waste your time and money - and if done in a really spammy way may harm you rankings both in the short term (and almost certainly in the long term).

Know that sometimes it is worth paying more to get someone to do things by the book than getting some cheap third world link builder who promises you the world but they uses automation to spam the web.

 

[James]

True back links can be one of the most tricky parts of the SEO process.

When you deal in the .com market is is way more competitive then the AU market, especially for specific niches.

I think you need to remember that when you build links you really need to focus on the quality over the junk out in the market, some people will obsess over things like Directory submissions yet are they going to drive ROI?

My advice is to actually get out in the market and promote yourself to build links in various niches, come up with link bait ideas that are going to build quality links!

some examples of how you can utilize inbound marketing strategies for link building:
http://www.professionalseo.com.au/tag/professional-inbound-marketing/

Kind Regards,
James Norquay.

 

[FirstPageResults]

Spend your valuable time on building your content and good site. Spend your money on hiring others to build links for you because your time is worth more.

Well said

 

[dreamscanbevisions]

..a bit late to the discussion but thought I'd share some tips. The tips relate to a low-med competition keyword in the au market. The proof this works is in my personal experience with low-med comp keywords in au.

1. run a backlink check on your competitors and check linking site's PR
2. post your links to your site from the same sites your competitors use
3. get loads of article directory links within your niche (use automated software)
4. get 5 or so .edu comment backlinks in google do this - (intitle:nameofniche inurl:.edu)
5. get your free exact match or phrase match keywords from web 2.0's. Build relevant content and link to your site. (maybe do 5 of these with contextual backlinks).
6. variety is very important so try to get links coming from: blogs, comments, forums, web 2.0's, blogroll's, footer links, direct traffic.
7. purchase a PR6 do-follow backlink related to your niche (maybe 100bucks a yr) just make sure they don't have 100 outbounds links, not faking PR etc.
8. just do it

if you do all the above for a keyphrase and keep it looking natural i.e link to your site you'll be fine in no time.

If there's very high competition then all you need to do is purchase EMD from different countries and different extensions. Build these sites up on different proxies, private ip, etc... then link them all naturally to your site over time.

Another thing you can do is buy the .com .net, etc variation of long exact match keywords related to niche build these and link to your site.

If you'd like you can also blast your web 2.0's with scrapebox, xrummer, etc. Just outsource the latter, if one hour of your time is worth more than $10.

Regards.