2017 Link Building Information from Website Magazine
Here is the gist of the article, and note that most seo's build very few white-hat backlinks.
"+ IMPORTANCE OF BACKLINKS: 72 percent of SEOs believe backlinks are a "significant' ranking factor, with 24 percent indicating they think backlinks are only somewhat important and that many other factors play a part in the ranking algorithm. Just 4 percent of SEOs assume backlinks have "little" influence on rankings.
+ LINK BUILDING CHALLENGES: The same barriers to building backlinks are encountered by SEO professionals and small businesses engaging in the practice in-house. Dealing with "boring" industries, a lack of opportunities, low response rate, a personal lack of experience, and the requests for fees are the primary challenges.
+ MANUAL & PENGUIN PENALTIES: Most SEOs have had no backlink penalties (80.1 percent) while 14 percent did not know and 5.9 percent indicated they had been penalized. Of those that did receive a penalty, manual actions were less frequently than Penguin, but SEO's indicated that manual penalties were easier to recover from.
+ BACKLINK QUANTITY: The survey also revealed how many backlinks were being acquired each month. Link-Assistant did not go into much detail but it appears (based on the chart below) that well over 80 percent of SEOs acquire less than 20 links per month and approximately 15 percent acquire between 20 and 100. Only a handful of respondents build over 100 links per month.
+ LINK BUILDING TECHNIQUES: 23 different techniques to grow links (organized into 7 groups) were addressed in the study including creating content assets (infographics, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), PR-based methods (press releases, interviews, etc.), outreach (link reclamation, broken link building), social media (content-sharing, viral campaigns, etc.), local-focused efforts, community-driven tactics (commenting, forums, Q&A sites) and miscellaneous tactics. Creating content and social media were the two tactics that received the most use among SEOs.
Comments
One thing to note on the highlighted text about link quantity - it's difficult and expensive to acquire 20+ 'white hat' links per month in most niches. Once you've picked the low hanging fruit for your niche, each link probably costs anywhere from $100-$300 if you're properly accounting for everything. These costs, plus the far less certain nature of the results, cause a lot of webmasters to go slower, see the incremental improvements from their link building campaigns, and then continue investing if appropriate.
@redrays viable is what we chase and profitable is what we hope for
I am about to launch a subdomain translation service on my MS that does real-time translation based on geo-location. I will report back my findings on this as I am entering a number of foreign markets and will track the traffic stats very closely with each launch. This will be a pretty easy way to see if traffic and engagement matters for rankings as we are starting at zero for a baseline.
Pretty sure Fred has something in it that checks if a domain has been repurposed and had its niche changed then strips its link power. The Google Webmasters YouTube channel has a video from around Jan/Feb where he says that if they wanted to counter PBNs thats exactly what they would do then in March Fred rolls out.
As for building on fresh domains, this blog post made a big impact on me when I read it and I've never figured out how to avoid the footprint pointed out in the last graph: http://www.irishwonder.syndk8.co.uk/2013/04/10/whats-wrong-with-niche-link-selling-networks/
I have four pages I want to run an initial test on and if it works I plan to make this my main direction to do in and scale the network up as best as possible.
@shaun is your plan to roll out the PBN network intact, i.e. interlinked, or to build the PBN site, index it, and then drop it into the network? I do the latter and seems to work for me.
I have four initial money pages to test it on. I made a similar network last yeat, had about 70 domains but I fucked it off rather than keeping it going. It was all .xyz based stuff though, this time im going with .com, .org or .nets only. I have been going over some analytics from the money sites I used the old network on and their trafficd seems to spike within days of it being pushed live but I was trying too much stuff and had too many pages to track to realise it at the time.
As i'm on the affiliate/display ad side of things I can target the keyword from the begining to make sure it is low comp so i'm hoping that helps too.
@redrays
Do yous post manually to them or automate it? I was going to use SER to post to the network but I'm a mac user so need a VPS to run it and I have dropped my VPS subscriptions so have been looking at using FCS Networker instead as its meant to be able to post to self-hosted WordPress and its SaaS.
@echanney
Mine are multi-niche sites rather than sticking to a single niche. All my stuff based around this is based around theory though as I havent really tried it much.
@echanney I operate in a big market but a clear vertical so all of my efforts are specific to my industry/products. I am not a big believer in diluting content. I write about what I am after. So my PBN's are all industry specific, but never ever inter-link.
@shaun I post manually. I write manually. Nothing automated. Pure WH in that way. I don't have that many sites where it is a big deal. I knock out a few articles per day in the morning and post. Easy peasy. So 3 articles a day lets me handle 90 PBN's a month with no problem. If I had a bigger network then I would have to leverage some automation to get it done.
@viking - in my experience the quality of links going into pbn sites is the most important factor in how effective they'll be in moving the needle. That said, I'm rolling out a batch of fresh domain pbn sites with no inbound links, so we'll see. Pretty cool stuff on the financial site, can't wait to see it
I am slowly learning Python but I have zero interest in coding
"From what I am doing fresh domain PBN is working just as well as aged domains I have purchased"
How can this work? Fresh new pbns may have close related content but with no link profile will bring almost no value in terms of ranking moneysite. Am I right?
Understood. That is why people often restore the old content + urls. But still regarding fresh new domains - how are they supposed to work? I mean they definitely can work but I assume it must take at least a year or so to build some links and get them aged. Unless the strategy is to make some automated tiers with web20/gsa but in this case I think I would rather use new web20 platforms on T1 as the risk tolerance is higher
Planning 100% unique human wrote content on it to link to my MS' and not expect anything for a year or so.
Viking put it well in another thread a few month back about building a network of domains that will age into something good.
@shaun as far as I am concerned the only advantage of PBNs built from scratch is that they will most likely pass the manual review, if you even have any. But the question is - is it worth investing time and money? The main idea of using expired domains as PBNs is that they give you "almost immediate" boost. There are different strategies ofc however I believe in ROI and scale it up.
btw I have been testing fresh new domains powered up with with GSA + sereengines. They worked however I needed around 10 such domains to have a similar effect to 1 expired domain with around 25 RD. I think I don't need to mention how much more time I spent setting up 10 sites + building tiers
I have manually checked aged expired domains in the past and I have found it took much longer to find something worth the time of building out than it does to set up a few fresh domains but thats just my experiences with it. I moved over to just buying pre-screened aged domains but they are expensive and I feel their efficiency has gone down since Fred.
I saw you put almost immediate in quotes so just wondering how soon of an immediate boost you see with your sites when doing it? I have noticed SERP jumps after the 4-5 week mark from the links being added and then more jumps every few weeks after that with the stuff I have online.
I agree getting good expired domains is getting harder and harder. I spent a lot of time to develop my own system of getting expired domains that works fine and fast but I am targeting non-English markets. If I were to get .com expired domains I would probably be screwed as well.
By immediate effects I meant 1-2 weeks. This is a result of 1 PBN.
The cool thing is that when I point several PBNs to my MS site and the domain becomes strong (6 months at least), new KWs tend to rank high without pointing any new PBNs to them.
I have been trying to rank with new domains used as PBNs (3 months old sites) however with not big effects (compared to expired domains) + unstable. I sent around 10 of them
How many domains do you have now? I bought 20 initially, 13 are live, 4 are waiting for content and 3 are yet to be built but I am leaning towards scaling it upto 100 domains ASAP as a proof of concept.
I'm using SER to post my filler content that links out to random sites to the domains rather than doing it manually as I am using human made spun articles to try keep the cost down for the filler content. I plan to post the content that links to my MS' manually though and they are manually created articles.
I have four MS pages ready for testing with this, three are just going to be given the pages from the network with one having a T2 of Manual web 2 built to it and then a T3 of SERE and Contextual SER to that to see if that page acts much different to the ones without the T2/3.
If it works I will probably go all in on this plan but do 100% unique content on the next network having writers with publishing accounts to the network login and manually writer the content direct to the blog and post it for me.