This blog is tailored to:
- reviewing link building services
- how to use them
- how to ascertain IF they’re working for you,
- and link building strategies to implement.
However, there is a danger to slamming your sites with backlinks because too many links will cause negative things to happen at some point.
So, what do I mean by TOO many links?
Simple…
Going from ZERO – 60 MPH is good for a 4-cylinder car, not a 4-cylinder website.
If you’re an owner of an aged authority site getting natural links from all corners of the ‘net AND you’re adding content at a very frequent and vicious pace….then it’s almost impossible to over-link
…but if you’re like most site owners,
- your site isn’t an authority site
- you’re not getting natural links from all over the ‘net
- you’re adding content when you have time
So, you’re probably trying to compensate for lack of traffic and/or content by building backlinks instead.
When it comes to traffic generation, there are so many ways to go wrong:
You can target the wrong keywords- (too generic competitive non-targeted)
You could be optimizing your content poorly so it’s not sucking in traffic properly.
And your link building could be hurting you.
Dave Kelley from LinkVana once told me that it’s safe to assume that the search engines know how old your site is and how many links it’s credited you with, THUS FAR.
Therefore there’s been an average number of links/month THUS FAR
So when you decide to start on a link building campaign to boost your site in the SERPS, a very safe (but expensive) way is to go the LinkVana route, which is basically you getting just a minimal amount of backlinks that have powerful effects on your sites.
This isn’t a LinkVana pitch, you’re too smart for that, but all I ‘m saying here (in too many words) is that a rapid acceleration or increase in backlinks will set off some alarms bells in the search engines eyes, and that’s what causes sites to get sand-boxed sometimes.
The best way I’ve found to get my sites UN-sand-boxed is simply to add more unique content and keep the links coming in.
Almost every site I’ve built ( I have over 20 so far) have disappeared form the SERPs for a week or so, but after this happened to the first 3 sites, I stopped worrying because they ALWAYS come back.
Ever the optimist, I always view a site disappearing form the SERPs as the search engines holding a closed door meeting saying,
“whatta we gonna do with this site? send it further back in the SERPs , let him reappear as he was, or kick up to the front row?”…
For me, consistency is what gets my site un-sand-boxed, and it’s also the key to NOT getting it sand-boxed in the first place!
If you’re going to ramp up your link building you don’t want any of that time consuming stuff to be all for naught.
Just ramp things up slowly…
You should know that SEO is a long term strategy and the ONLY sites that get page 1 in a day are the web 2.0-style properties that end up ranking well for non competitive terms until someone with a real site comes along and pushes everyone that doesn’t have a real site back to page 2.
Hope this serves you well, my Ridalin just kicked OFF so this is as far as I’m going with this concept
A good follow up to this post that should help further cement your knowledge about overlinking is this post here on Link Velocity
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{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for sharing this good resource of info. You can ask others to link to your web site. One of the easiest ways to do this is to offer to review a product on a similarly-themed website and offer to write a testimonial for their product. At the end of your testimonial, include your name and a backlink to your web site. Most webmasters are more than happy to publish another testimonial for their product, and many will make your link live. Of course if they do, you have another inbound link.
Very nice article. I’m really worried about going over with my link building. So far I don’t have any sites that’s been penalized but I had one Ezine article that did because I over linked it too much! hahaha. Thanks
.-= Raymond Selda´s last blog ..Wealthy Affiliate Review =-.
Hey Ray,
If the links are pouring in consistently then there won’t be any penalties. Sometimes those EZAs go back in SERPs no matter what you do, then magically reappear and stay there for a long time.
New EZAs get posted on a high PR page of EZA’s on their “most recently published in XYZ category” page, which is why new EZAS tend to rank well then drop no matter what you do, at least for a while. When the backlinks get credited and attributed, that’s when you know where you really stand.
It’s a good idea to not link to your EZAs until they’re published for a week or two, for reasons stated above, plus people re-publish your EZAs will links intact sometimes so you’re “fighting” with them in the SERPs for a bit until things settle.
Hi Daniel, This whole link building process has me a little confused. I just got started. I’m taking a web building course via the XSITEPRO people, so I’m building a site from scratch. In the mean time I bought into a membership that provides niche sites that I promote. I have no real control over the sites. The only link I can have is the subdomain. I am having a time with some of the directories ( article) rejecting my articles because they say I am violating the affiliate link rule. I am going to subscribe to to UAW on Friday. (payday) You talked about the power of UAW getting links, and to be careful about just using one url. Will this service work for me. I have your guide to traffic generation. Do you have courses on this subject? I am very worried about the traffic issue.
Hi Randy,
I wouldn’t bother with that membership site sending you more sites than you know what do with.
I wouldn’t bother with XSitePro either.
Not having full control over your business is just a disaster waiting to happen and you need to take the bull by the horns here and own everything.
I strongly suggest you learn how to build your own site from scratch and learn how easy it is to use WordPress and make blogs.
UAW does more for your sites from a link building standpoint than it does for your traffic generation direct from articles, but yes it does work (really well!) .
If you don’t own nor control the sites provided to you, yet you build links to them to achieve rankings you’re adding to the link juice of the main site hosting the sub-domained niche site, therefore I think this is a waste of time, especially since other people may be getting similar sites and they’re promoting them as well, I would assume
Hey Dan,
Quick question, and this might be unrelated. How safe is it to let other UAW articles be published on my site?
I have tried this before with Free Traffic System service but I got allot of redundant and off topic articles and I really don’t they were even rewritten either.
.-= Anthony´s last blog ..How To Setup & Use Yahoo Pipes =-.
UAW delivers extremely targeted articles, based on category names and tags on your site, and you can auto-approve to auto publish or just accept all articles in pending mode then approve them if they’re good enough.
One thing you want to do is make sure you’re getting backlinks to every article submitted to your site, otherwise your UAW-articles-built sites will have upside down link juice and never really rank well.
Thanks,
Dan
If overlinking hurts your sites, how come you can’t just overlink your competitors and knock them out of the top 10?
I’m really interested in someone’s opinion on the subject. It seems as if one could just spam links at everyone above them on Google and take the position from the others.
Dan, the key is to maintain link velocity. Overlinking negative effects occur is you go form ZERO to 60 with link building then stop suddenly. It’s not natural.
It IS possible to knock your competitors out of the SERPs by slamming them with spammy links, and it’s also possible to get their email addresses banned by Akismet, too, its just something that would take a lot of effort to do, may only be temporary an di fany o fthos elinks actually “stuck” then you just did a lot of SEO work for your competitors.
The point to this post was to advise on implementing a natural link velocity, which can beat ANY pace, really just so long as it is maintained.
Hope this helps,
Dan
Yeah, I agree with you “Daniel” a natural pace of link building is a good way for maintaining your current rankings and rising your rankings over period of time.
I have experienced, same thing got so many good links + bad links (SB, Link Exchange, Article Submissions at dir’s and comment) in a very shot of span of time, because i thought i could rank within 2-3 months if i do lot of link building and…..sit back and relax (like guru says…LOLZ).
But i cost me a huge waste of time…..doing 20 days non-stop link building for 5 websites and those sites are no where in the serps got permanent sand-boxed. After 1 year yet i can’t see them in serps
Hey Arshad, thanks for sharing.
One thing to point out here, though, I don’t think there’s such a thing as permanent sandboxing, at not in my experiences, and I’ve done all sorts of backlinking methods, paces, sources, etc… to get UN-sandboxed, just keep doing what you were doing that got you sandboxed in the first place.
That might sounds like a waste of time but the REAL waste of time is giving up on site you started with.
This is why I recommend using some automated yet pure, old school white hat linking mechanisms like twitter linkwheels, auto social bookmarking, normal article submissions etc… so if you DO get sandboxed, then you can dial it back a bit and just let automated stuff bring your site back into the good graces of the search engines
Thanks for the article…Your site is a perfect example – I am going to book mark it or link it from our site. The reason why is that I own a recruiting firm (and I’m just opening up another busness), but when my clients always ask why their SEO company is not doing much, the answer is simple: if the people working at the SEO companies (CEO excluded) were really great, they would be like you and own 20 sites. Yes, there are many exceptions, but I think the comment that you made about owning 20 sites is great for my clients to see.
Re: Your Article – I do agree that too many links will set off a red light for Google – though I don’t have actual stats to prove this. However, if it did set off a huge red light, anyone who knows anything would screw their competitors, right?
If it’s okay to link to your site: right now, we’re low on pr (it’s embarrassing) though through my knowledge, let’s just say that I would be blogging as to how upset I am as still a 4 – 70 ezine articles and submission to yahoo, etc. will hopefully do it. anyway, if it is okay with you, I’d love to reference this.
Right now I run an executive sales recruitment agencyexecutive sales recruitment agency and just put the investment down on a yoga company. If anyone would be interested, after I sell this business, I would be more than happy to tell them the industry as the industry leader pulls in 7 million a year and in a month with a Yahoo submission, busness.com, etc. You can be ranking on top ; )
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Ken Sundheim
Sounds good Ken, thanks for dropping in. Please do send a link or 70 my way
WE tested this theory of overlinkig: sent about 1000 links to a domain that was new and had no “priors” and it DID get de-indexed, but came back into good standing in a week or two, proving 2 things
1- You have to send a huge number o flink sin relatively short amount oftime in order fo rit to get deinxed
2- De-indexing is only temporary in almost all case
I suggest to read what should be the follow up post to this post you’re commenting on, the one about Link velocity
Thanks,
Dan
I have attempted to write a comment on this blog and every time I submit it refreshes the screen or gives an error. Do you think the author could possibly check into the reason this is happening?
Dan where do you recommend to place the links in the body of the article or resource box?
Both, amidst content is better, IMO, but no case study proof of my own to say exactly why. So, I do both ..in article content and in resource box, IF both parts are DoFollow, just remember when outbound linking more than once per article, to link to different urls, and if you can…different websites entirely
To achieve maximum results from UAW people recommend to link it to the resource box. Since many article directories reject your article because of the fact that her body are the links. What do you think about this?
Valdimir, please post these questions over at this post here but basically, whatever works for me is discussed there….beyond that, I’m not really too concerned what others say about how to use it effectively, just try things out for yourself, implement, write, submit, test, tweak…..just stop asking questions!:)
Best of luck to you,
Dan
I read on someones’ blog that you can over link by excessively using your keywords in anchor text, and that you can fix it by using your domain url for your link. I’ve been experiencing something lately, along with others that I’ve been reading about, and that’s the lost of a lot of backlinks all at once. It’s gone a step further with me. I saw the disappearance of all my links, however they did come back two days later. I read that new websites go through some serious ups and downs, with something called the “Google Dance”. When does a new website begin to stabilize in the search engines?
Thanks and God bless.
Overlinking is possible, but only for new sites, it’s best to just focus on building the side out properly first with proper monetization, site design, offers etc…. then fill it with content, ensure that everything’s indexed, then maybe in a few months just hammer the sites wit hlinks.
I’m pretty aggressive , yet CONSISTENT with my link building, and I find that consistency is the real key, keep adding content as you add links, the more content the more links… still somewhat natural, but to be 100% certain and safe, yo ucna just let site lie wher ei tis for a whil eno heavy linking then blast away later on down the road.
About singular anchor text linking being excessive by its very nature, I find that to not be true, read this post here on SEO Gurus to see how others disagree with that notion, and why I disagree with the main premise discussed there.
Also, about the Google dance, it’s a good thing for new sites, your sites are trying to climb up the SERPs, to establish themselves somewhere NEW in the pecking order of rankings, therefore the dance is expected. For new sites, there will be much dancing, and is somewhat dependent on the competition and could last weeks maybe even months, depending on your linking abilities.
Older, more established sites usually don’t drop off the listings for more than a day or two, and usually these sites’ Google Dances happen like this:
Ranked #35 for a while
New links come in
Drop to #42
Then up to #27
Hi Dan,
First of all great article, great blog I’m going to link to yours from my blog.
I’m a new UAW user (about 9 days when i wrote this comment) and my UAW strategy revolves around ranking videos on YouTube and in particular I am trying to rank high on the search engine(both youtube and Google Universal search) for a rather competitive KW( about 250k searches a month on Google) for this one video i uploaded 2 weeks ago and the thing is though my video was ranking high both on youtube and even on the universal search,(I was Page 14 3 days ago on Google universeal search!!) and position 2, and 3 on youtube ) and today I cant seem to find my video even when i toggle up to page 30 on Google. and even within youtube i got de-indexed..not so far on youtube, but the indexing is very noticeable.
heres what i did-
1)every day I submit 3 new articles at 250 links per day(750 links a day) and i stopped till i had 12 articles at anyone time going at 250 links/ day. (thats 1750 links/day)
2) I target only 2 KWs ( i think this is my problem)
- the reason why i went fairly aggressive with my youtube videos is because I wanted Google to rank it high on the search engine and simulate a “viral video” backlinking scenario.It worked but now I feel I am being penalized, and currently I stopped all article submissions. (actually they have all been sent and im not adding new articles)
- Unlike ranking websites, I cant target multiple URLS, do you think I am over linking way too fast? should i continue, submitting articles at this rate? I am worried that my video is being de-indexed for good.
It has only been 2 days i think since i got de-ranked, i am not sure if i can get back up there, I hope its one of those “Google Dance” act.
I hope to get some feedback on this Dan if you can share your insights on this, I will return here to update you on my video progress.
Yours truly,
Brandon
Brandon,
If I read Daniel correctly, you need to keep doing what you were doing, in order to bring your sites (video pages) back in the SERPS.
Trouble is, you stopped back linking abruptly.
Need to be consistent with yor back linking,
Jim >
Jim, that’s correct… otherwise it just gets worse if you continue to completely stop your linking, counter-intuitive I know but that’s how it works…
Now this is what I call *informative* Daniel, thanks for the clearly layed out roadmap. As much as I hate to admit this, I believe I have done everything exactly how I shouldn’t have done it. I have a new site, 3 weeks old and put up 2 articles to about 400 article directories and a further 720 backlinks to high PR blogs. Upto the 2 articles I was doing fine on page 1 of highly competitive keywords. As soon as I did the 750 backlinks(dofollow), the page went down to page 2&3 and I think it will initially keep going down.
I believe the only way to get around this is to put up about 5-10 article posts per week to compensate the acceleration of links.
Whatever happens, THANKS for sharing expertise with us.
This is a site that I’ll definitely be praising and recommending
Imeye K.
Oh….and Happy New Year