For years, Google has been very vocal about why you should never buy backlinks for your sites. There have been a good amount of horror stories about people who buy backlinks and then find their site completely removed from the index for up to 6 months or more. Obviously, this could literally put your company out of business if it happens to you.
And yet, anywhere you go, you’ll see all kinds of ads for sites like Text Links Ads, Links XL, and others, who broker links. They all have huge pools of publishers who they are able to sell links on their own sites through the link broker networks. This seems like a sitting duck situation, where Google could possibly sniff out the entire network and systematically crush an entire portion of the internet. But this doesn’t really seem to be happening, and that’s because these networks are doing a good job of hiding the fact they’re selling links. They leave little if any footprint, so unless Google actually came into their network to sniff out who is participating, things are pretty safe.
But it still begs the question, why does Google not want me to buy links? The answer is connected to the core of Google’s ranking technology, and is a pretty basic one once you see it.
The super simplified way of describing how Google uses backlinks to determine how a site should rank is that each backlink is a “vote” for the target site. These votes aren’t all equal; a link on a no-name site is not even close to being worth as much as a link on a big authority site. But regardless, a link is an endorsement according to Google.
By purchasing backlinks, you’re all of a sudden “stuffing the ballot box” and artificially increasing your backlink numbers. Without a way of discerning which backlinks were naturally procured as opposed to purchased, Google has trouble knowing how legitimate a site is or if the owner of the site just has deep pockets.
Because of how large and powerful Google is, they are able to set their own internal rules that everyone starts to follow because if they don’t and get caught for something Google doesn’t like, the penalty could potentially devastate their traffic and cash-flow. So Google is in this unique “internet police” position where they can somewhat control people’s behavior online simply by discouraging certain practices.
The thing is, if there is no footprint to identify your paid links with, Google has no damn clue that you paid for them. Because of this, if you have the cash, you can snatch some very powerful links that would be challenging to naturally get at least early on in a site’s life and can dramatically increase your site’s ranking.
Despite Google’s authority, they simply can’t be all knowing. Whether you have a handful of independent, powerful sites that you interlink to help each one out, or you buy links, it’s a way to fast track your site to high rankings in competitive niches.
Rand at SEOMOZ wrote a great post about his experiments with paid links, and the results pretty clearly show what I’m saying here. If you have the budget for the links, it’s definitely something to (carefully) use.
I just finished reading The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement this morning, and overall was pretty impressed. It’s a really easy read; it’s not a business manual, it’s a novel, has a little bit of a love story going on, and is over just “light”.
The main message of the book is that the proper way to manage any operation, whether it’s a manufacturing plant or a web design shop or a clothing store, is to:
Sounds really elementary, I know. But the whole point of the book is that you shouldn’t let your business and processes control you and lead you. Instead, you should be constantly criticizing and reviewing your processes and not settling for any bottlenecks or sticking points.
Another major theme in the novel is that the point of a business is to make money, and more specifically, to make a profit. The way to do this is not to create as much as possible, but instead to run as efficiently as possible. That might require making drastic changes to common practices, things that on paper seem like they will hurt the bottom line.
For example, in the book, they discover they’re running their manufacturing plant at 80% capacity. That means 20% of the time, they have machines and people just sitting there doing nothing. So they tell their sales manager to get them 20% more work. He says that they can only get it from a client who wants it at below cost, so they would lose money. But the main characters convince him that they only have materials as costs, as they have people doing nothing currently who are getting paid, so their time is not an additional expense.
On paper, the cost of a product was materials + worker’s time. But that didn’t take into account the capacity of the plant doing the work. So it went under the radar until it was brought to management’s attention. This simple oversight affected the company’s bottomline, and was caught because of the process of continually reviewing and optimizing each process as described in the book.
Overall, it’s a pretty simple book. It really focuses on identifying bottlenecks and optimizing work flow around them in order to make your business as efficient as possible. It’s like 340 pages, and is engaging, so you can probably put it down in a weekend if you’re a quick reader.
One of the first bits of advice I give to anyone who is looking to start actively pursuing SEO and link building is to start analyzing (and copying) your competitors backlink profile in the top 10 results. When looking at low competition results where the backlink numbers are low, that isn’t much of problem…you just pop over to Site Explorer and do a backlink look up and then export the results and start crawling through them.
But if you’re attacking a niche with high backlink competitors, things become a lot more challenging. That’s annoying if you want to copy someone, but GREAT if you don’t want to be copied. Which leads to…
So let’s say you’ve been working really hard to dig up these great High PR backlink opportunities. Your site is crawling up the SERPs and is about to front page. In any niche where other SEOs are watching the top ten, you better believe they will be eyeing you well before you make it up to the top.
As was said before, if you have under a thousand backlinks for the page you’re trying to rank, you’re susceptible to someone checking your page out in Site Explorer and seeing all of your cards. This is not an ideal situation as it prevents you from hiding the links you have found and built.
In order to keep your stuff under the radar, you need to fill up your backlink profile with a bunch of junk links. These can come in a variety of forms, but the most popular are pligg, auto approve comments, and forum profile links. All of those are easily automated and can be acquired in high volume for very cheap from your friendly neighborhood links dealer.
Yes.
Almost definitely no.
Absolutely they could, though most likely not negatively, except for some potential short term dancing. If you’re feeding your sites good content, and building great quality links at them, then pouring a bunch of cheap spammy links at the site isn’t going to do much, otherwise everyone else would be doing that to you.
I really can’t stress that enough. Spammy links on their own are almost never the only reason a site is penalized by Google. Just like it’s very easy to build spammy links, it’s also very easy to point them at competitors. If I could take down competitors with low quality spam links, I would do that. But it just isn’t that simple.
What’s cool about this little strategy is not only are you hiding your good links to make them harder for people to copy, you’re also diversifying your backlink profile quite a bit, which is always a good thing.
As long as you keep building good quality content on your site and keep feeding in the best quality backlinks you can find, you can feed in cheap links and be good to go. I would definitely spread things out over time though, and make it consistent. Using something like Drip Feed Blasts is a fantastic option for that. The biggest thing is not drawing attention to yourself unnecessarily.
Yep, absolutely. It requires some fancy scripting in order to do so, but it’s definitely possible. I’ll cover that in a future post.
For the most part, spam isn’t going to make you many friends in most social circles. Use discretion.
Forum profile links don’t really get in anyone’s way; they add a few pages to a forum, but they don’t ruin the forum experience whatsoever. Auto approve comments are generally on blogs that are abandoned or unprotected, which is unfortunate if the blog owner cares but otherwise is like skateboarding in an abandoned pool, no one is really going to be bothered in the end of the day. Pligg is just plain shitty no matter how you spin it, so go for it.
Other links can become more and more devious and will most likely cross the standard moral boundaries at some point in your adventures. The best advice I can give is don’t be a dick to people. Don’t trash someone’s site, be creative, there’s always multiple means to the same end.
I’m currently writing this on a full screen Notepad file. It’s the only way I can successfully write a good blog post, if I wasn’t doing just this one task I’d be on Hacker News or Wickedfire in a heart beat. Anyone who works in an office or is a big Instant Messenger knows how easy it is to blow away significant portions of your day doing seemingly “little” things like sharing stories or chatting with friends.
The biggest reason you should be cutting down your distractions and focusing on just the task at hand is because “context switching” can drastically reduce your overall productivity levels throughout the day. By simply toggling over to your Instant Messenger screen and responding to someone really quickly, you’ve broken away from your current task and it will take a few seconds to transition back. That seems like nothing, but when you’re doing that every minute, that adds up really quickly and you might end up cutting out a few hours of your day. A few good articles about this are here and here.
Additionally, a trap a lot of technical minded people fall into is checking their favorite forums or news sites to see the latest posts every 15 minutes. It seems like it’s a helpful thing to do because you’re keeping up to date in the fields you’re interested in and collaborating with like minded peers, but in reality, you’re squandering a ton of time and really just procrastinating. It’s important to stay up to date on topics and to make sure you’re at the top of your game knowledge wise, but it absolutely needs to be in moderation or else you’ll risk cutting your daily productive hours down to a mere handful.
I struggle from time to time with procrastination traps. When it comes to tasks like coding or writing, I simply cannot be interrupted or I will not be able to get my shit done. I have come up with a list of things I keep in mind as I work that help me to stay on track:
I don’t have a link to this, but I have read a few studies that have shown that any habit takes at least 3-4 weeks of persistent effort to become ingrained in your work flow. Sheer willpower is what will get you back on track and focusing again, along with tips like what I wrote above. All of your heroes sitting in offices and collectives hacking at their web app startups don’t screw off on social media sites and on instant messenger, they are sitting and coding. Keep your head down and hustle.
Anyone looking to be an entrepreneur needs to make some space on their hero shelf for Gary V. The guy puts in 18 hour days every day and is probably one of the hardest working up and coming high profile people in the world. I’m not going to go into his bio because you can search for that on your own, but I definitely recommend digging through his personal site of garyvaynerchuk.com because there a lot of great, short videos on there about different things he focuses on.
I stumbled across this video over the weekend and was immediately obsessed with it and have watched it 4 more times since I found it. It’s short, just 15 minutes long, but it covers some awesome stuff that Gary holds true to his heart that I think are essential if you want to really build a business and brand online. It also fits well with what I have been harping on lately regarding building assets and leveraging your skills and brand name.
Here’s the video:
Bottom line, you need to watch this video a few times. Gary V is the man and has drive above and beyond what most people could ever even hope to have.
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