I’ve decided that doing link building service reviews is all well and good, but sometimes a test gets skewed when the SEO landscape itself changes, or if a test doesn’t/didn’t take into consideration the history of a site itself, and an entity with a unique relationship with the search engines.
By the way, I’ve usually taken their sites relationship thing into consideration with some reviews as you may or may not know, but I think it’s time to delve a little deeper into why some people say a service stinks for them, while others send me emails thanking me for the recommendations…
Relationship of a site with the search engines?
Yes, this means how old it is, quality of the content, frequency of the content, the kinds of links it has, link velocity history, if any etc… Now normally, I knew what to expect with some service since link volume normally just ranked a site, and more links meant higher rankings, but thing MAY have changed, and hopefully things have changed, because SEO should be a skill set if you’re doing it yourself, not merely a budgetary concern (buy more links get better rankings).
Luckily for me, and for my continuing, never-ending education with SEO, I have dozens of sites I can test things out with.
What I am testing, and I encourage you to follow along and design your own tests…
Profile links - To prove one way or another whether or not we can still rank a site with just profile links directly to a money site, I have a 2 year old site getting hammered with profiles links ONLY for 3 straight months, or more.
Low volume, low trust link s- To prove one way or another whether trusted links are necessary (versus getting hordes of low quality high volume backlinks), I’m using several services to produce link volume to an old, established, aged, inner url and sending lots of different kinds of links to it repeatedly until it gets about 1k credited YSE links to it.
High PR links - When’s the best time to use these types of links and does it depend on your SEO competition? Is it better to use this as a measure of lost resort, after you’ve received multiple links from articles submitted to the same 1500 directories, or whatever, and need a final push to get over the competitors, to the top?
Sitewide links, footer links, blogroll links - Do these still work (yes) but what’s the best way to make them work for you?
Testing on the whole EMDs, thin-sites fiasco…
It’s been suggested that while the majority of sites on the Internet are less than 30-50 pages, that having more content and less spammy or overtly aggressive link building would seem to work best for sites, whether they be new, old, or just thin…
1- I’m going to take 2 sites that are thin sites, EMDs, and hire a full time writer to write kick ass well-researched content on them for the rest of this year, and I’m not going to link to them at all… to prove whether or not there’s even a need to build backlinks for sites optimized for medium competition keywords and phrases.
2- Reviving dead Adsense sites just with more backlinks. no added content, just adding links. This may prove fruitless, but I remain somewhat open-minded.
3- Reviving dead Adsense sites with more content and links, might be necessary to have both since this gives sites the best chance to revive.
I’m of the opinion that testing out any type of backlinking method or service or tool requires a better understanding of how a should should react to new links from whatever source, and by whatever means was used to generate those links. So these tests are needed ( I think) in order to make the reviews on link building services valid.
Tiered linking – I know the benefits of doing this and have done it plenty of times, but there’s gotta be a good way to use link wheels to maximum benefit, as there’s been slaps on link wheels in the past, and I’ve seen some crappy links rank some highly trusted Web 2.0s pretty easily.
1- Profiles links blasting to articles on good major article directories or web 2.0s
2- Article marketing inter-linking – same idea as #1 above just sending article links to other articles on “better hosts” or to high quality web 2.0s.
Blog commenting - Scrapebox style low quality blog commenting versus high PR blog commenting versus manual blog commenting from related sites and urls. This will be tough to test because it’s not like I have 3 sites that are almost exactly the same, which would be the only way to see which of these methods do what, exactly…
Side note, different kind of test:
Adsense versus other monetization methods.
While I consider my job here on this site to help you figure out how best to go about your link building, I guess it doesn’t hurt to help out with some advice that helps you earn more from your SEO efforts.
Therefore, we’re going to take 2 sites in same niche, work them up in the rankings, put Adsense on one, and something else on the other, like CPA offers, affiliate links, Amazon ads, selling leads, etc… (all dependent on what I think the niche would convert well with, (example: people looking for health insurance quotes may not be into air purifiers from Amazon, but a niche site about air allergens might, who knows? The market will tell you, that’s how you find out).
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Looking forward to this Dan,
Hopefully we can all put our heads together and figure this thing out.
Link building is not over, things have just changed a bit and studying the competition that is holding strong is the best way to do this as well.
I’m glad you are taking action on this and we can all benefit from it.
Thanks for being a top notch stand up guy in our link building community.
Do you think that the adsense sites that were penalized and slipped to page 5 or worse will come back to regain their page 1 rankings or is this penalty a permanent one? The same thing happened to a bunch of my sites six months ago in September 2010 and they have not regained their rankings back yet.
That’s one of the tests we’re doing now, in myriad ways…
Another thing I might do, is take Adsense codes off the site, transfer to a buddy, rank the site then put this different site, with different content, hosting with that other person’s adsense pub id on it and see how that goes. For me it’s all about the knowledge gained, not the Adsense earnings, even though it did kinda suck to have 300/day income stream get chopped by 70-90%.
But to answer your question, yes I think the sites will regain their rankings prominence, I’m just not sure how long it will take, or what it will take
You bet they will. I’ve had stuff slapped in the past and made the mistake of leaving them alone – guess what? They never came back. I chose to renew a few that were in high trending markets and started adding some content and backlinks – and they came back within a couple months at most (could have been much sooner -can’t remember exact time frame since it’s been awhile). That’s my experience, but I guess if it works for me it should work for someone else right?
To be making $100k ($300/day) and losing 70-90% over night is a bit more than “sucks”. If there was a human being on the other end to provide any human feedback, it would be more than helpful. Such is how the search engine world operates.
Glad to see you testing out new strategies. Only thing we can do.
Thanks for the constant learning experience.
I guess it’s all relative Paul, I sort of knew I was headed for a beat down with it all (Adsense mini sites), and I’m hoping this re occurrence (it’s happened to others many times before) can be highlighted here but with some strategies on how to reobund form things.
On the plus side I learned something truly truly remarkable… what 2-3 niches to focus on with new sites or aged sites with one keyword in them plus PR, if available. Then I just hire a writer who’s truly an expert on the subject matter to write for the site for 200 or even 400/month plus profit share, just keep the valuable content coming. I know lots of writers who’d jump at that opportunity, and now that I know which 4 sites are worth doing that for, I sort of have an unassailable income stream mapped out (in my head anyways).
What I’m saying here is, this flash in the pan Adsense earnings flurry during last 4 months taught me which niches did really well by me, and if content rich sites are truly valued, and one good site made 75-100/day, it’s worth spending 10-20/day for upkeep and value-adding with content. Just trying to show people how the glass is half full here….
Dan, i like your optimistic thinking! Keep up the good work.
Also let us (Your blog readers) know how your experiments are working…
Even a paid course of your findings would be great to get this knowledge.
Exactly man. I was slapped just like you on one of my adsense accounts that made well over 5 figures a month. All de-indexed overnight =( All mini-xfactor type websites. Guess I should have seen it coming.
Anyway, you can’t look at it money lost because the majority of this battle is actually FINDING the niches you know you can compete and make money in – and exactly how to do it. Even if your sites got slapped – you know that niche is profitable and you can take a different approach to ensure you don’t get slapped the 2nd time.
BTW – like you I took the top sites that were making the most money out of that adsense account – remade them (bigger, better, more white hat-ish) – and 9 out of 10 are all ranked, 3-4 months later. =)
Hi Dan,
You mentioned that TLA provides low quality links similar to UAW and AMA. Which service are you planning on using for higher quality “trusted links”. I strongly believe that link spamming with services link UAW, AMR and AMA is becoming weaker and caused the slap for my sites.
Can you please list couple sites that offer higher quality links, unless manual submissions is the ony way to acquire them. BTW, i really enjoy reading your blog. You’ve helped me save a lot of money by providing an unbias review of these services. Thanks!
Awesome tests, Dan. Can’t wait to hear the results.
Something else I am going to test is if keyword optimized anchor text links have lost some of their value. You said something on the mini-site post that got me thinking about this. Who are the only ones who use Keyword optimized anchor text links? Us, right? Natural link building rarely conforms to these proper SEO standards.
Seems like it would be an easy target for the big G to target these kinds of links if all they want is “natural” links.
I’m going to test out more straight URL links plus more content. Love to hear your thoughts.
The thing is, keyword optimised anchor has never been “natural”, and yet G seemed to lap it up for a long time. Part of me thinks they liked the fact SEOs were telling them exactly what the focus of their pages was and how much they valued them via the amount of keyword optimised anchor links built. But your right Matt, I have noticed a similar change recently in their effectiveness, so the question is why has G decided to pay less attention to them now?
BWT, thanks Dan for your ongoing brilliance and willingness to help the community. I look forward to reading your next findings. And thank you also for using the word “myriad” correctly, not saying “a myriad” like most people do.
Hi Duncan, welcome, and thanks.
Took me a while to remove the “of” after myriad, used to say “myriad of” ….etc… now I just type horribly, one thing at a time, I guess
Good points there, and good luck with that test.
I didn’t mention this in the post, but I’m testing out some LSI tools now, tools that tell you what combination of keywords and phrases should be in an article or site in order for it to rank well, easily.
We’re submitting a rather long article that fits this description into EZA, and we’ll see what happens
Seriously Dan…after reading all your posts/information/ideas/tests etc that you give away for FREE..I can honestly say..that your stuff is better than all the ebooks combined that I have ever bought/borrowed etc..
Ebook from Dan one day ?
Dan, I read your comments on backlinksforum regarding the linkpushing service, I am trying to do something like that myself, but on a more consistent basis. So your remarks were pretty comforting
I’m about to go for some blogroll links…. are you testing these at the momeent? If so, any possibility of giving us a sneak peak at the results, whether they work or not, in the comments?
Looks like I forgot to mention what services I was testing, too, but I think SEO concepts come first, priority-wise.
linkpushing worked well for 1 out of 5 emds with very little content, that’s barebones update so far
Dan, are you saying that you used in on 5 domains and it only worked (so far) on one? Or did you only use it on one domain?
Daniel great post again from you. How can you comment on Adam’s seo service ? I saw your review on their website. How expensive it is ? are they working with big budgets ?
Thank you
They seem to deal with big budgets, form what I was told. but they’ve also done some smaller end type of things, too. I actually reviewed their linking methods, and am about to set them on to some projects to see if their services work for the things I throw at them, which I have no doubt they can do.
Seeing is believing though, and from what I’ve seen them do for others, they seem pretty effective, but still that’s ancient history as far as I’m concerned, and I’m more concerned with what they do for me, if that makes any sense
Not to butt in – but Adam was a 0 on a scale from 1-10 with his wordpress theme project. Zero communication. Finally he mans up and replies after almost a month. A lot of upset customers who paid him money, and he wouldn’t answer the phone; email; or reply on the other forum.
301 redirects to get your name to #2 for keywords is fine, but have better customer relations is a basic business tenet.
I agree, I got that BFSO, too. He’s working on it, is all I can say
Dan – I read your positive review on Adam’s site. If it was not for that – the way Adam handled things – I would have dumped it in a NY minute. That was as shoddy a way to handle business – equivalent to a decent 3-carde monte dealer. I hope it works out and he stays in contact.
Onto bigger and better things.
100% agree Paul, I just happen to Skype him a few times a week and I know what’s going on in the background, which leads me to be more patient I guess. But I always get any type of service provider I cna on some sort of IM, Skype etc… after ordering because I know these things happen. Anyhoo, that’s another thing I’m testing out as well, wordpress themes sponsorships, aside from sitewide linking, blog roll networks, more content, no added content but more links, more content and links etc..
But yes, it stinks I know and maybe I get preferential treatment sometimes, but even so, I still don’t have what I ordered either, so we’re in same boat. If I were you I’d stick with getting that BFSO and while you’re waiting, think on ways to leverage what it’s supposed to do for you and your sites portfolio.
Dan, yes. I can tell you that my skypes were not received.
But I’m still in the bfso. I think it should work. To the extent 500 wordpress themese with anchor text will impact a name, it should be interesting.
OT: Best thing I learned from you in the past few days was your reply about the $300/day going down the toilet. I only looked at it from that angle. But you know the names, niches that made you money. Now you just have to rinse & repeat – but add tons of additional content. Hell you’ll be coining $3,000/day. A lot of great info in that post. Bottom line you’ll come out on top with the knowledge you have gained from getting the $300/day. So thanks for that series of posts. It made me rethink a few things too.
Thanks man, I appreciate that. I didn’t want to encourage any envy or jealousy by mentioning that the 300/day while sizable to many, was just a project for me in my head, not something I was attached to, nor something I miss terribly much.
OT for you Paul: do you want to see any seo-related ebooks reviewed on this site o’ mine?
I try to keep things tightly focused here (seo, link building, reviews etc…), and don’t want to stray from the path here and delve into reviewing ebooks and stuff, but I’m thinking that the newbies being mislead by non-stop guru ebook launches might be well-served by reading some other types of reviews… and I know “my” readers will chime in, keep me honest and add value to the convo like you all always do…
Keep it tight, or expand a little?
Looking forward to your feedback on that, please… thanks
Dan, thanks.
To answer your question: “yes”.
Your interviews have all been instrumental in not having to reinvent the wheel and automate a lot of the work. You change with the times. If linkvana can’t hang out anymore, you replace it with bmr. I’m grateful.
I would like to read an interview with an ebook, “FatCat Report” – or any successful “how to” adsense ebook. The FatCat author hyped http://superapprentice.com/ constantly in the book (“private site” for all things adsense development, including an easy sales platform) – so I’m checking that site out.
An ebook like this – where the author claims to make $50k/month adsense – shows you his screen proving it, may have something to offer. Obviously we know it needs to be changed with more content, additional features. This is something we all can do, improve, and learn from – in our own niches.
I’ll use anybody’s affiliate codes, buy their products, support the cause – if they truly attempt to teach/enhance a person how to make money. Not a “stuff envelopes for $100/hour” – but how to make an authority site that ranks over time; buy market samurai, get a decent domain, etc.
I want to support the developers, graphics folks who can help me make sites that I can make money via adsense.
The trouble with ebooks is they are on bhw within 5-minutes.
I would like to take part in this.
My “slap” was now almost 2 years ago. No rhyme nor reason to it, lost a very substantial income stream inside about 3 weeks.
I would like to add that after my intial anger (RAGE more like) I rationalized for ages. Looking carefully at sites that had arrived on page 1 after I had departed. Seeing what sites had just “stayed” roughly where they were and all the rest.
I examined links, PR, age, content, content frequency, site type (i.e if it was a CMS etc)
My net result after about 3 weeks head scratching was zilch.
I followed link trails to good areas, others to bad areas. Saw sites that were;
New,
Poorly written,
Linkless and highly commercialized i.e jammed with adsense and affiliate links) totally outrank sites that were
Aged,
Well written,
Carefully linked and more-or-less none commercial.
And sometimes the other way around.
I followed keywords like “Debt Services UK” and checked the quality, link pattern, content and age of the sites on page 1.
Saw great sites and really really poor ones on page 1 (1 page sites with dead links and no age. One of them (currently at 7 if you search from the UK) has thousands of really poor profile links, many from terrible neighbourhoods (sex etc)
But you tray ranking for this phrase and beating this site..
Not a chance without being 1000x better.
My answer to all this is Google has totally lost the plot. The algorithms are now that obtuse yet complicated that I doubt any one person even knows what the hell they are trying to achieve.
Even to the relatively well trained eye, outside or corporate business (and if you are competing with a “brand – they win – period) then everything else is a mess.
I think Kolmogrovian is the name for the state a system reaches when it becomes so complex that no-one and nothing can really understand what it is trying to achieve any more – including the systems designers.
Google, as far as I’m concerned, is now “Kolmogrovian”
IM’s should be hyper wary of basing any business model what-so-ever on Google.
As a person who just found this site today I have to say this coming year, and the results from your tests will be quite interesting. I think I found the site by searching on Build My Rank.
I have looked at that, and used Linx Boss for a short while. In the time of testing either of these, of course there’s a lot of talk about Google slapping JC Penny and some others and their goal of really trying to hit some link farms and other types of arrangements like this.
I ended up leaving LB after looking at a few of the sites where the links were placed. It’s not that it didn’t work, I’m just not sure how long it will work well (although I know Tommy certainly know’s his stuff there) and I got worried that via their relationship with a money site I have, that somehow that might hurt it in the long run.
I think your testing and reviews are vital because there are so many options out there. Who know’s how well or how long these things will work without major issues? Really we just want to get results without getting whapped down the road.
Interesting times and thanks for all of the great information here.
Mark, thanks for the feedback, welcome to the fold!
Mark, if you are still reading this thread, can you expand on the following statement: I ended up leaving LB after looking at a few of the sites where the links were placed.
This is a concern. What is wrong with the sites there links are placed? It seems you have knowledge that most of us don’t. And if what you know is a cause of concern, I’d love to know about it.
Hi Elle,
Yes, still here. Before simply stating what is only my opinion on this, I would ask respectfully if Daniel would be ok with me doing so. This is his website and currently he recommends this service and has more experience with these kinds of things than I do…and normally I would probably have stayed with it too, other than what’s happened recently with google’s increased focus on various link farms and all that.
If it’s ok to expand on this discussion I would be happy to share my thoughts.
Hi Mark, I appreciate that, you wouldn’t be doing Elle a favor by answering the question because the focus is on the wrong things here.
Elle’s worried about link sources despite you mentioning something about rankings, going up or down.
Rankings are the only things that matter.,
There’s no penalties for links form bad sources, except that you might get a site dumped in the SERPs if Google devalues all the links you got from those particular sources.
So, it’s a frutiless discussion in my opinion, since the wrong question is being asked, and the focus is not on the right things.
Link source, site source of links, those are the minutiae we tend to get bogged down with many times, when BIG picture, the MAIN reason we do all this, is not to ascertain the quality of sites linking to us, but to raise our sites in the search engine rankings.
Apologies if I ramble don too much, but if anyone’s looking for a reason to not use a service there’s plenty of ways to convince yourself not to use one, despite its effectiveness, if I told you I could rank you tomorrow for your be excited, or nervous because youmain keywords, would you don’t know how it’s gonna be achieved?
Anyhow, sure go ahead and answer the question, I can tell that in long run there’s gonna b a lot of link building service-hopping in Elle’s future since the focus is not on the right things there, at least for right now.
Daniel, I’m new to…what is it called…grey hat practices? I have several sites that rank well through natural link building. Mostly article marketing and none of that spinning bull either. Quality, unique content.
Recently, because of your reviews, I decided to try grey hat practices on sites that I haven’t had a chance to develop. So I ask questions to learn. Not because I’m looking for a quick fix or seeking a link building service that will get me ranked quickly. I have the luxury of waiting to see whether a service works or not. Asking questions doesn’t translate into anything else than just wanting to learn from others.
Daniel…thanks very much and your points make a lot of sense. I have to agree with what you’ve said, it’s all in the results. That’s true for me as well, but I would add that, although nothing is guaranteed, lasting results would be more specific of what I want in all of this.
I don’t want to make this longer then necessary, with a full background and all that, but in general I have several sites that rank on the first page for some of my main keywords.
Sounds good right…but I wanted to bump them higher so I started looking at link building options and came across LB which sounded really good. I had an idea of one of the guys behind it and knew they had a huge array of sites and a really good understanding of seo and the search engines.
So I tried things out and within about a month the sites bumped up nicely, one even in the #1 position. Can’t complain about that. They did jump around a bit (probably just normal stuff) but after all the talk started on google hitting JC Penny and their adversity to link farms and all that I did a backlink check and found what I figured were LB sites. (I never did much linking into these sites to begin with (a few articles, youtube, etc) so they were the only new links showing up) The new links when back to sites that normally had a lot of unrelated jibberish on them and a keyword based link at the very bottom of that text. I felt they were easy enough to spot.
At this point I got worried that at some point this type of thing would be discovered and the links I did build would be worthless down the road. Or worse, some competitor might check our backlinks and report it to google and we’d get docked for that (I think google is asking for this assistance currently but I may be wrong). And I know this is a tricky issue. If I wanted to hurt someone I’d just send a bunch of bad links to them and report it…so the question is, how valid is this argument in the first place? I simply don’t know but the thought and concern came to mind.
If correct, the latter was the bigger worry for me since the site was on the first page before doing anything with LB, I figured if I lost those links, it would just slip a bit to what it was before, but not if it got penalized.
After having hung around the IM thing for some years now, I know how things can come and go. A good performing idea (that may not be to google’s liking) often get’s overused and abused after awhile and then google figures out a way to make it null and void once it reaches a certain point. I see these automated link services possibly heading in that direction. I have no idea how google would even attempt to deal with this type of thing, but I’m no PhD.
So the question is did LB work? Yes, absolutely it works. Is it a viable solution? Yes…no question. Is it a good long term option without any risk? I can’t say that, and even LB has that on their site asking you to be sure the service is right for you, because google doesn’t approve of such things. I appreciate their honesty.
If I were to stay with LB, and to ease my own personal concerns, I would probably do what Daniel has stated in another post involving UAW, and that is to use LB to build links to hubpages, or feeder sites which could then lead into my main money sites. To me there is less risk in that approach and then I would continue to work on really good quality links from related topic sites that link directly into my best websites.
One service I have found interesting in a trial is BuildMyRank which Daniel also recommends. It’s slower and less automated but the content and related links that are created are of a lot higher quality (in my eyes) then what LB uses. Is this less risky should a competitor look us over…I honestly can’t say but it doesn’t appear, to me anyway, to raise as much of a flag.
As Daniel has noted, this whole issue may be absolutely moot and have no validity whatsoever. Some of my perspective is based on an ongoing mental shift from looking for the quick, dirty, and easy way to do something, and just build something good for the long term that will last. Play by the rules so to speak in all ways. Link building however isn’t always that simple or easy to do in that philosophy, which is why I began looking at link building programs in the first place. I hope to live long enough to figure a lot more of this out:)
I’m sorry for rambling on here, I just wanted to try and be open and honest with my personal perspective even though it’s based on limited knowledge concerning the aspect of linking.
Daniel, thanks again for allowing me to post this and for sharing your thoughts…I appreciate it.
Thanks, Mark. While we wait for Daniel’s go ahead, I’d like to ask how you gained access to the sites LB links to. From all accounts, it seems virtually impossible to determine LB links.
Hi Elle,
See my other comment which addresses this. Short and sweet, I didn’t have many links to begin with so the new one’s were fairly easy to find.
Well this is an interesting development.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
Hi all. I was just going to post some of my findings and I spotted Kevins link to the google statement. This kind of backs up my thinking.
A resonably new site of mine (7 months old) pretty much dropped out of the rankings completely with the lastest update. However what was noticeable was that certain pages dropped more than others and these were the ones that I had affiliate links on. Most of the other posts were pretty much unchanged in their rankings (btw all these pages are unique content). A week or so ago I changed my linkbuilding focus to the tier 2 Web 2.0 resources that were linking to these pages. These resources suddenly shot up in the SERPs and I also noticed the pages that had dropped started making a comeback.
On checking today the Web 2.0 resources seem to have taken a nose dive and the website pages seem to be back, all pretty much as they were previously.
I have also noticed on other sites that recent linking efforts seem to have had little effect on SERPs movment in many cases. Simliary some articles I ranked highly for seem to have disappeared today desp-ite ranking well consitently for months or years (some had had links built to them, some hadn’t).
My own view is that this is not an isolated update but rather much more of a ongoing change by google. I also believe that we are possibly seeing a number of trial and error tests by them (and possibly even some cock ups) as they put their new changes into effect.
My conclusion? While I am right behind Daniel for starting his recent tests, I think that it is probably far too early to know what google will be looking for top placement at this time. So I think in the interim it is a case of continuing to build slowly and using this time to increase the link diversity. This should at least cushion the blow a little once we start to see some stability in the search algorithms.
Big Vern, thanks for the comments and I like your attitude here, people are concerned some are even panicking but you know as well as I do that there’s algo changes, then SERPs shifts, then readjustments, then a settling point. Then when dust settles, we re-examine the sites left standing, we examine which of our sites got hit and try to THEN ascertain why they got hit and ranked lower, if at all.
Some people who said they didn’t get hit but did “everything wrong” so to speak may not be in niches worth taking a look at yet, or there’s such little competition on those niches that there aren’t any better sites to move up in rankings to replace theirs.
EZA, hubs, and lenses may come back, but I DO see that solid sites are filling in the gaps.
I have limited web 2.0s that are fleshed out, but I have one fleshed out web 2.0 hubpages hub that got hit pretty hard, despite writing tons of content for it, which other hubs that are one-page wonders only slipping back one page. Lots of EZAs got hit though, and this is weird because EZA prides themselves on doing manual content reviews, same as hubs, not so much fo rsquidoo lenses though, and squidoo lenses have been doing pretty well in serps lately, up until now.
So, if you think about it, we got EZA, which allegedly only accepts unique content, is a high PR trusted site, doesn’t do the dofollow except in resource box, and yet it got hit, maybe just temporarily. But the thing is (and this is purely speculation) good article marketers use EZA for direct traffic and best way to do this is to hook the reader, offer very little in way of valuable content, then offer up a resource box to encourage high CTR clicks, but point is, the content’s not great on EZA, from human perspective, nor is it intended to be. I offered great content on my fleshed out hubpages hub and it got whacked hard, so go figure.
So we can go in circles here scratching our heads, or just do what should work… build quality sites, keep adding good content, keep getting links head down bums up work hard see what happens…it’s a lot easier to add tons of content to a site than it is to submit dozens of spun articles all over the place….
I agree, I think in the end if you build great relevant content you’re set for long term. I am seeing a lot of my sites that were bumped earlier this month starting to come back (albiet lower rankings) – I think Google is just shuffling things around trying to weed out the bad sites. What I have noticed is the sites that were bumped earlier this month, I added more content, and much HIGHER QUALITY links to 2 of these sites – and they now hold very strong rankings again. The others that are coming back that I have done nothing with, don’t have as strong rankings as they had before, but their still coming back. Something to think about I guess.
I have no idea what will happen to EZA either – as I had 5-6 articles that were ranked for very high traffic phrases get pushed to page 2+, so I’m hoping this is temporary. A friend of mine got completely wiped out as his whole business was built on ranking articles (and nearly every article directory was hit). Reading their blog, Mr. Knight is doing some changes for the good – but it may be too little too late. They are, in the end, the epitamy of what Google calls these content farms. (BTW – does Google actually “define” what a content farm is in their eyes? I’m using the “content farm” definition from other highly respected SEO sites, which EZA definitely falls under in their definition).
“it’s a lot easier to add tons of content to a site than it is to submit dozens of spun articles all over the place”
Amen…
Hi Daniel:
I know the mini site thread is closed but wanted to give you an update. My one site that got hit, came back from #3 in google before the “hit” with the domain name keyword, to #1. It is a review site with a heatmap theme. It’s been holding there for the last three days and starting to generate some adsense income. Came back to life 4 or 5 days ago. I was really surprised when it happened to say the least. Go figure.
Jay
Daniel
What about your high PR links strategy. As i tested all this public networks of high PR context links are not that good. But i know one IM he is contacting owners of websites manually and gives them an offer to buy link. Did you try that ? My cowokers saying that mostly noone will answer.
Doing another PR homepage backlinks network test now, on older url, with PR1 , with active backlinking going to it. The test is a hybrid one, using same old crappy link volume links to boost a site in SERPs, plus doing test of the high PR stuff, then once it hits page 1, I will remove the high PR links to see what happens
“I agree, I got that BFSO, too. He’s working on it, is all I can say”
Hey guys, in the discussion above about Adam’s SEO services, the terms BFSO was bandied about. What’s that stand for?
Backlinks Forum Special Offers, like WSOs but for BF (Backlinks Forum).
NOTE: The offer was taken off/away and most, if not all parties refunded
What type of results are you getting from http://www.connecthits.com?
I submitted my site to some of their bookmarking sites and after about a week most of them have not been approved yet. Can you tell me why?
Interested in seeing your results. When are you going to update?
Can I still get a site to page one with just profile links?
If I just submitted articles to article ranks, would that get my site to page one for a medium competitive keyword?
Depends on what you want to get on page 1 for.
For local stuff I sometimes don’t need any links (just good site content).
For most stuff though, links are required. Profile links are not too bad, but if you need lots (100+) mix it up.
100+ links all through the same manner will not get you moved up much – or get you bouncing around. Neither of these things is really what you want.
If profile links you mean on sites related to your niche, yes they are affective. And if you mean your going to participate in the forum.
Then Yes!
Otherwise No!
If you aren’t diversifying your link portfolio then you will not get a long last #1 ranking!
Do:
Guest Blog posts
Do Articles (Don’t worry about getting those articles syndicated) on the top 50 article sites: http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php
Do Forum Profiles and Comments on Niche appropriate sites!
Do Blog Comments on Niche appropriate sites, with the goal of building up a relationship (don’t think links as you build up your relationships).
Do Press Releases
Thanks Elle, got your email, didn’t mean to sound abrasive or condescending here or there…
I get a lot of these questions and I know where people are coming form, they’re worried about link sources and maybe for good reason but there’s different kinds of link building methods, some direct traffic and links methods work to certain degree, shore up the value side of things, and some lower quality sites and links provide the link volume that helps, too