@PeterParker not quite, lets look at this logically.
For example, for people using an indexing service, indexing services improves indexing rates for all your tiers, this is a given, however, as you quite rightly stated, most links become dead within a 60 day time frame, however, making them indexed within this period makes them count and this is where competitive SEO comes into play, if you're relying on crappy link sources (sources that are moderated and kills your spam/unreliable lists etc) you're banking on the fact that you build these links, index these links ASAP and rise in the SERPs, then simply maintaining this ratio, build links, index links, die links, etc etc rinse and repeat, this is what you've got to do when working in a high competitive niche, by keeping ontop of your link juice and powering up your links and replenishing your tiers.
Anyway, above is a broader perspective of what SEO is, unless, obviously, you have links that stick, this would make life much easier overall but would still require either hugh authority themselves or mass spam tier 2's and 3's which we then need to follow the above for the maintanence phase.
The main reasons for building tiers, and the reasoning behind building a third teir (which is a very important tier to build) is to make the search engines keep your tier 2's and effectively your tier 1's in their index.
A link that has no links pointing to it, should not be considered as a link of importance therefore why should it remain in a search engines index?
Some people don't understand the importance of indexing links, people shouldn't rely on "indexing rates" all they should be doing is their jobs as an SEO and this is to build links, check these links, process these links through an indexing service, observe their rankings, if the bulk of your links are dying before they are being indexed, then your problem is your indexing service or strategy, bearing in mind these factors..
- natural short term link loss (links dying or being removed within a short time frame (0 - 10 days) - making these links count before they are moderated - you should be wanting to see the majority of your links indexed within a 3-4 week period (1 month)
If the majority of your links are being indexed within a 3 week period (21 days) and your links are averaging 60 day life span, you should being seeing good serp movements after 12 weeks of link building, not fortgetting the 40% of links that are sticking, thats a decent amount of links that stick and a good foundation to build upon.
If you're hitting the ranking positions your wanting to be at within your first campaign cycle and you are suffering from a 60% loss of links, then you should mathmatically only need 3 runs of your campaign to have very stable long term rankings, bearing in mind you keep track of your anchor text diversity at tier 1 level, which should be easy to do if you keep your main keywords at no higher than a 3% density per campaign run.
40% + 40% + 40% = 120% at which point, you've built enough links to that site/page which are sticking, due to your observational skills, so theorictially, you will not have to build any more.
so, 3 campagins per tier should do it, which sounds easy, but actually is at least 24 weeks of work, this is assuming you want to not suffer from any dances and you're drip feeding your links at a slowish rate to avoid any unatural link warnings/penalties, by all means, you can probably lessen the amount of waiting time and cram everything into 12 weeks but then your site could get slapped at any time, I'd rather wait it out knowing I'll have an earning site at the end of it, this is ofcourse for high compeitive niches, I normally play at around 30k tier 1's / 300,000 - 500,000 tier 2s / 1mill - 2mill tier 3s per keyword market within the finance industry.
These link amounts may sound/look extreme but you've got to over do it in compeitive niches to counteract link loss and build on the links that remain at a speed that shows an increase in trend for the bots to pick up on.
This is a back link monitor project which I'm currently go through that has over 800,000 contextual links between three tiers so far, if you work with BLM, you'll understand the screenshot.
With all of the above being said, you could just pay into a PBN and avoid building out so many links, but your rankings will most definately end up dropping significantly after every search engine update simply because these providers are selling their PBN's and they will end up selling it to a SE rep sooner or later.
But then again, paying for your links isn't SEO in my opinion and just lazy, anyone who buys their way to the top of serps isnt an actual SEO, their part timers
However...I understand the rationale behind having a tier 3 to index the tier 2 but ive often thought, isnt this offset by the fact that google only finds the tier 2 links thru crawling through an indexed link/s on tier 3? Or conversely ive wondered if G also works the other way round in that it already knows the t2 exists and the tier 3s dont have to be indexed themsleves in order to index the t2 its just G needs to know it has some links pointing to it to see it is worth indexing.
Thoughts? I am still undecided on that one but if the latter is the case it makes life considerably easier.
Interesting stuff Tim89. Of those 800k links how many unique domains are you hitting?
I am just building my lists and probably have nearing on 10k unique domains for contextual links with a fresh list running now which should take it to 12k-15k.
So just wondering if you are repeatedly hitting the same domains?
"But then again, paying for your links isn't SEO in my opinion and just lazy, anyone who buys their way to the top of serps isnt an actual SEO, their part timers"
@Tim89 So, someone who pays into a PBN isn't an actual SEO.
Rankings aren't discriminatory. Rankings don't care if you own your link or pay for it. You either rank or you don't.
Yes, you're in a much better position, long term, to own your pbn rather than pay into one but that has nothing to do with being an actaul SEO. You and I and anyone who knows what they're doing understand that there's a bit more to rankings than just buying high pr links.
Greg Morrison has made millions with SEO and he himself paid for links in the early stages of his career. Was he lazy?
@funguy88 yes he was, would he have made millions without purchasing links, so soon? There's no effort in buying links is what I meant, meaning you're a 'part timer' in the SEO world.
@Tim89 ... Great in depth strategy. How do you handle the anchor text diversification across your tiers lately? How many generic / lsi / branded ...etc ?
@Tim89 ..thanks. And how do you set anchors up in tier 1 while using this strategy ? I never went that far with my tiers and I might try your method on one of my sites.
Experimenting is the best way to find out @mamadou you want to keep all your money keywords below 1-3% obviously build at a higher percentage to counteract link loss, so possibly set up your campaigns with 5% exact match anchors, bearing in mind this doesn't mean waste 1 campaign by setting the percentages at 95% generic and 5% exact no, use these tier 1 campaigns as efficiently as possible and scale up using some maths.
Unfortunately I don't talk about exact specifics about my campaigns on public forums and I don't sell my methods either, so you're going to have to pick up the pieces when it comes to details.
No problem. In my experiments using high percentages of generic anchors in my customers tier 1 didn't work at all. Maybe the niches are so spammy. Who knows.
Comments
For example, for people using an indexing service, indexing services improves indexing rates for all your tiers, this is a given, however, as you quite rightly stated, most links become dead within a 60 day time frame, however, making them indexed within this period makes them count and this is where competitive SEO comes into play, if you're relying on crappy link sources (sources that are moderated and kills your spam/unreliable lists etc) you're banking on the fact that you build these links, index these links ASAP and rise in the SERPs, then simply maintaining this ratio, build links, index links, die links, etc etc rinse and repeat, this is what you've got to do when working in a high competitive niche, by keeping ontop of your link juice and powering up your links and replenishing your tiers.
Anyway, above is a broader perspective of what SEO is, unless, obviously, you have links that stick, this would make life much easier overall but would still require either hugh authority themselves or mass spam tier 2's and 3's which we then need to follow the above for the maintanence phase.
The main reasons for building tiers, and the reasoning behind building a third teir (which is a very important tier to build) is to make the search engines keep your tier 2's and effectively your tier 1's in their index.
A link that has no links pointing to it, should not be considered as a link of importance therefore why should it remain in a search engines index?
Some people don't understand the importance of indexing links, people shouldn't rely on "indexing rates" all they should be doing is their jobs as an SEO and this is to build links, check these links, process these links through an indexing service, observe their rankings, if the bulk of your links are dying before they are being indexed, then your problem is your indexing service or strategy, bearing in mind these factors..
- natural short term link loss (links dying or being removed within a short time frame (0 - 10 days)
- making these links count before they are moderated
- you should be wanting to see the majority of your links indexed within a 3-4 week period (1 month)
If the majority of your links are being indexed within a 3 week period (21 days) and your links are averaging 60 day life span, you should being seeing good serp movements after 12 weeks of link building, not fortgetting the 40% of links that are sticking, thats a decent amount of links that stick and a good foundation to build upon.
If you're hitting the ranking positions your wanting to be at within your first campaign cycle and you are suffering from a 60% loss of links, then you should mathmatically only need 3 runs of your campaign to have very stable long term rankings, bearing in mind you keep track of your anchor text diversity at tier 1 level, which should be easy to do if you keep your main keywords at no higher than a 3% density per campaign run.
40% + 40% + 40% = 120% at which point, you've built enough links to that site/page which are sticking, due to your observational skills, so theorictially, you will not have to build any more.
so, 3 campagins per tier should do it, which sounds easy, but actually is at least 24 weeks of work, this is assuming you want to not suffer from any dances and you're drip feeding your links at a slowish rate to avoid any unatural link warnings/penalties, by all means, you can probably lessen the amount of waiting time and cram everything into 12 weeks but then your site could get slapped at any time, I'd rather wait it out knowing I'll have an earning site at the end of it, this is ofcourse for high compeitive niches, I normally play at around 30k tier 1's / 300,000 - 500,000 tier 2s / 1mill - 2mill tier 3s per keyword market within the finance industry.
These link amounts may sound/look extreme but you've got to over do it in compeitive niches to counteract link loss and build on the links that remain at a speed that shows an increase in trend for the bots to pick up on.
This is a back link monitor project which I'm currently go through that has over 800,000 contextual links between three tiers so far, if you work with BLM, you'll understand the screenshot.
BLM
With all of the above being said, you could just pay into a PBN and avoid building out so many links, but your rankings will most definately end up dropping significantly after every search engine update simply because these providers are selling their PBN's and they will end up selling it to a SE rep sooner or later.
But then again, paying for your links isn't SEO in my opinion and just lazy, anyone who buys their way to the top of serps isnt an actual SEO, their part timers
I might steal it for a Guest Post on Moz
However...I understand the rationale behind having a tier 3 to index the tier 2 but ive often thought, isnt this offset by the fact that google only finds the tier 2 links thru crawling through an indexed link/s on tier 3? Or conversely ive wondered if G also works the other way round in that it already knows the t2 exists and the tier 3s dont have to be indexed themsleves in order to index the t2 its just G needs to know it has some links pointing to it to see it is worth indexing.
Thoughts? I am still undecided on that one but if the latter is the case it makes life considerably easier.
I am just building my lists and probably have nearing on 10k unique domains for contextual links with a fresh list running now which should take it to 12k-15k.
So just wondering if you are repeatedly hitting the same domains?
@Flembot around 10k
Unfortunately I don't talk about exact specifics about my campaigns on public forums and I don't sell my methods either, so you're going to have to pick up the pieces when it comes to details.