Is Your Link building Service Doing A Good Job?

by Daniel on March 8, 2009

This post is about determining whether or not your Linkbuilding Service is doing a good job for you.

Some users of linkbuilding services sometimes think that as long as their sites are moving up in the rankings that the service they’re using is working.

The problem with that fallacial thinking is the facts that your sites are strengthened by adding new content and links so the true effectiveness of linkbuilding services are obscured by the non-static-nature of sites.

In college, the most boring class for me was Statistics, but the stuff I learned from that class is proving invaluable now, especially when anlayzing linkbuilding services and their effectiveness, or lack therof.

Statistics teaches you about the methodology behind testing and why so many tests are flawed by the very natur eof their design and the subject of scrutiny (testing = your sites).

Sometimes, too, the tests are designed in such a way to produce results the tester hopes to see.

This is similar to the theory of “the observer affecting the experiment”, some phrase I picked up from my college Psychology classes…

MAN! It seems like some of that stuff from the college days actually got through to me somehow, gotta tell the boy this!

Side note: Someday when my son is older and I tell him that even the most boring classes in school will have some value, I will have backup and proof that this is all quite true.

So, if you think your linkbuilding service is doing a good job, exactly what are you comparing it against?

What is your baseline?

When you shell out money for a linkbuilding service, you have expectations, right? You want to see results as a consumer, therefore you will look for any signs of imporvements.

If your site starts off with ZERO backlinks to it and all of a sudden you start building links…then ANY amount of links obtained will help, no matter what their quality or number.

Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to judge a linkbuilding service by small signs of improvement, but by the quality of the links you get and the effort required to get those links, and the overall value of links obtained versus expenditure of time/money.

That sentence above is basically how you determine if a linkbuilding service is worth doing: your expenditures versus quality of the asset-building links obtained. I sometimes refer to links as asset-builders because each additional link you obtain or just naturally get is something that adds more value to your site, one way or another.

If you’re using only one linkbuilding service to judge it’s results, AND you’re affecting this test by adding more content frequently to your sites, then the mere act of adding content will affect the results.

Therefore, there is no static baseline to judge your results from…
You’re not applying external “stimuli” (backlinks you hope will affect your site somehow ) …to a non-changing entity.
Your site content has changed, therefore the nature of your site has changed somewhat.
Your overall on-page optimization has changed and sometimes this tells the search engines your site is more about XYX than it previously thought, especially if the site was writing specifically for certain terms, and especially if your site is set up for deep spidering and is getting spidered deeply.

Also, if you’re using more than one linkbuilding services for the same site, it becomes almost impossible to discern what is working best since there’s now multiple external influences affecting a non-static entity (your site).

Another thing affecting your judgement of linkbuilding services effectiveness is your competition:

If your SEO competition is also getting links to their sites for same KWs, then there are even more variables thrown into the mix here.

With your SEO competition doing the same things you are (adding content and backlinks) there’s even more external influences affecting those third parties (SEO competition) which in turn affects the total overall picture (who ranks highest?)

Crazy, huh?

Some of this sound slike SEO gobbledy-gook so let;s break it down into simpler forms.

If you’re changing your site constantly with new backlinks and content, then the test subject…your site is developing during this test phase, so that affects the validit yof the testing.

If your competiiton is doing the same thing, then that adds even more variables to the mix.

How can you know if your linkbuilding service is working for you, when you’re not getting ahead of your comptetition?

Maybe they’re trying just as hard as you are to get above the fold on page 1, too!?

However, let me say this…

Your competition isn’t always changing it’s content on the exact pages you’re trying to beat them out on.

Plus, you might be trying to get backlinks to a static site, and I realize that, so if that’s the case, then none of the suppositions above (external stimuli/backlinks applied to changing entity, your site…matter.

Your rankings in the search engines can remain somewhat stable for certain keywords, but are still subect to some kind of constant change due to the fact that competing sites are adding content and backlinks all the time.

Back to statistics for a minute, here’s how to truly understand and test ANYTHING, really.

Testing linkbuilding services…

What exactly, are you testing? 3 criteria for judging a linkbuilding service

Speed with which high rankings are obtained
Value of the backlinks obtained
Value of service being used?

If merely achieving high rankings is your primary criterion for the linkbuilding service you’re using is , then price really isn’t a big concern to you.

If value of backlinks obtained is your measure of a services’ value then you’re probably more in the middle range here, trying to build links to sites that need them while being cost-conscious.

If merely getting links at cheapest price possible is your main concern, then you’ll most likely get lower quality links at a cheap price.

In other words, you can buy your way to the top, or earn your way to the top, but my main point here is that improved rankings due to YOUR efforts spent writing 50 articles a month to a linkbuilding service may not be as effective as spending the same for another service which ismore effective, or just AS effective, but less time is spent to achieve results