Putting It All Together

Deeeeeeee

OK, I've been using GSA for a while, and I really am trying to take the knowledge I have and apply it.

So it's exciting!  I have a lot more I can do with what I know.

Wondering, though, about tiers, and what's a good arrangement.

I know for Tier 1, most suggest good hand-written, or readable and unique, content on major web 2.0 and social media sites. Some people use Ranker-X, I know. There was also Santos' SEREngines, but I read recently on here that it needs an update. (Also, I know we can write our own engines, so technically we don't need anything else.)

But what beyond that? And how should the linking be? Should I then have SER post articles, followed by non-article links at even lower tiers? I'll admit, I'm confused!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's a basic question. I know that longevity of the link is key to what makes great  highest-tiers. Take out the T1 and all lower tiers disappear.

So why not just do T1 and T2? Would 10 T1s with 100 T2 links and then 100 T3  for each of those be equivalent to 10,000 T2 links pointing at T1? Mathematically, why are these different in terms of "link juice"?

Any suggestions of a place to check out model templates? (I am not planning to follow everything to the letter, just want a few ideas for linking guides. Too bad I'm so intent on always trying to find my own way, I'd have gotten more out of SEO had I just done what others reported on the GSA board actually worked. Still, no regrets. I guess this is how I learn. )

TheGypsy

Have you read this:

https://coconutheadphones.com/how-to-estimate-how-many-links-you-need/

sickseo

Personally I think you are over thinking it. It makes no difference if the tier 1 link is a "rankerx" link, social media link, web 2.0 or any other type of link with a different name. They all have the same thing in common, they are just links right? Just because it has a different name, this does not mean it offers any extra value than other links such as exploits or even url shorteners. Even rankerx which has some of the highest DA sites on the internet comes with it's own set of issues, Like highly moderated sites that actively delete your link, oh and that 50% no follow site list that it comes with will not help you rank at all.

Technical off page seo is about this: your links should follow the same rules as on page seo, you know what those are right? The on page seo that you do to your money site. Do that to all your backlinks too.

Beyond that, it's just about tiering with dofollow links and being in full control of link loss, replacing those lost links in all tiers before they make your rankings drop.

Your suggested strategy: "So why not just do T1 and T2? Would 10 T1s with 100 T2 links and then 100 T3  for each of those be equivalent to 10,000 T2 links pointing at T1? Mathematically, why are these different in terms of "link juice"?"

Have you actually tried this yet and tracked your rankings to see if this strategy works for you? Or are you waiting for someone to say "hey, that's a great strategy and I do that myself everyday and it shoots all my keywords to number 1 in a few days lol!"

Because putting a strategy to paper is just the first step. The next step is to put that strategy into GSA and see if it actually works. From experience, yes, if you do that, it will shoot all your keywords to number 1 lol

Deeeeeeee

"Have you read this:"

@TheGypsy: Yeah, a long time ago. Kind of forgot about all that.

@SickSEO: Thank you for the clarification.

"Beyond that, it's just about tiering with dofollow links and being in full control of link loss, replacing those lost links in all tiers before they make your rankings drop."

I think for the first time, I'm actually understanding all this all from the proper perspective.  Yes; I do overcomplicate things. 

I try to make my T1s with care. I'm doing it by hand now. It's OK. This is what I did before I used GSA tools. Actually kind of fun.

Right now have a few new projects with just a T1 and T2. T1 is hand-created, T2 is SER with only engines that don't use articles selected.

(I have a good set of spintax articles for this. I have them loaded in the project as spintax. I know I could spin it out myself and find the most highly unique articles and just use those, but I'm just letting randomness do its thing.)

sickseo

I had almost forgot the days when I used to build T1 links by hand. I used to spend a lot of time and money on curating content for my T1 links. I even hired and trained a full time employee to write my content - highly spun with nested spintax, word, sentance and paragraph spun.

I stepped away from that type of seo many years ago and replaced it with automation. In terms of speed and cost, the automated way is much quicker at producing rankings and also works for thousands of keywords. 

To rank the number of keywords I chase now using the more manual "whitehat" approach is just not feasible. There is certainly plenty of benefit in making the tier1 links great especially if they will be permanent links. But if you use automation to build tiers to them, link loss alone will make the value of your t1 links go up and down. So it will still be a never ending approach to seo. You will need to keep building those tiers to maintain the ranking power it gives to the t1 link.

So I just go full on automation. 3 tier pyramids with any do follow link. I've got special software for link checking in tiers and it's a real eye opener to see what actually happens to the tier 2 and tier 3 links after some weeks and even some months. Even the t1 links built with gsa will die but even after 3 months I've still got 20-30% of them still live on the tier 1. They are easily replaced and easily powered up which is how I see it. Whilst enough of them are live in the tiers, rankings hold.

Even rankerx is the same in terms of link loss. Over 3 months I built about 2 million links using different multi tier templates. After link checking and removing all no follow links from tiers i was left with about 10% live links in the tiers, which was still about 200,000 do follow links. But what happenned to the other 90%. 

As for content, honestly, it doesn't matter. I've been using spun content from kontent machine and i'm still running the same projects with the same spun content that I set up last year lol If you think about link loss, and understand duplicate content vs syndication, then it really does not matter. When using nested spintax, one highly spun article can generate over 100,00 unique variations. It's a lot cheaper and quicker than doing things by hand. Most of my T1 links are exploits, forums, url shorteners and blog comments and these don't use article content. 

Best thing I can suggest is to experiment. You'll be surprised at what is possible in seo. 

Deeeeeeee

Thanks, so much! I really appreciate the time and effort you put into your response. It means a lot; it's really relevant to me, at this juncture in my SEO adventure.  Listening to your story, I hope I can also get to a point where I'm using these tools properly and getting spectacular results.  I know there's no "one right way" to do this, but there are also plenty of wrong ways! lol

But thanks for explaining the ground rules of all this.  I feel like I jumped into SEO blindly, and I'm missing certain crucial ideas. When I started using Search Engine Ranker, I had a "kitchen sink" approach, just because I didn't want to miss a single linking opportunity. lol

I am enthused, and reading your response I feel even more excited at the possibilities. I have a bunch of new projects, different experiments to test ideas.

I see a lot of people buy "GSA" and after a week are doing better than I am after four years. lol  I am examining my use of the SEO tools and trying to find areas that need improvement. I think I just never really went hard enough on T3, to be honest. I saw improvements using SER, no doubt, but the results I was getting could have been better. I think I didn't build enough links over time.

There are aspects of my work that feels like drudgery...but this is usually where my application of knowledge is weak and I haven't set things up properly.

-I still need to find an API to make my spun articles from CG better, grammar-wise.

-I still need to find cheap proxies to use with CAPMonster. (Don't want to burn my SER proxies!) Those are link opportunities I'm missing out on!

The truth is, a long time ago we were posting 250 and 450 character descriptions by hand on directories. In the end, how varied was it? I mean, a lot of it was essentially duplicate content. So I get your point regarding syndication and duplicate content.

It does eat up tons of time doing T1s by hand. I don't mind, as in a sense I get a feel for the niche, but I need strong automation behind that, else there's no point. 

For four years I used SER directly pointing at my MS. I know some say never do this; wiser people will say it depends on the quality of your spun content, and which engines you use. *IS* this OK to do? I never had an issue with it so far.  But I've not been running the T1s pointing at the various MS projects in a while. (Actually, I run a few SER>>MS projects that just generate generic anchors, even still!)  Is this "safe" to do? What factors are involved in determining this? Just curious.

Again, thanks so much, friend! I appreciate the feedback! 

sickseo

I'm not a fan of capmonster. It seems to support other types of captchas for sites that aren't in gsa. I tested it for a few hours and quickly gave up and got a refund. Xevil is definitely way better. It's still hit and miss on simple captchas, but v2 and v3 solving is excellent. 

To understand what's possible with seo, it's definitely best to test the so called limits. When I read things like "don't build more than 50 links/day" just make me laugh, but at the same time I feel sorry for the ones that read that and then follow it too.

There are no limits that i've found. I build well over 100,000 T1 links in 24 hours to money sites urls. I've done it to a single money site url plenty of times with no penalty. When done as part of a 3 tier pyramid inside of 24 hours, rankings go crazy and dance for a few days and eventually rank inside of 2 weeks.

If you picture a number 1 ranking and then picture the number of links across multiple tiers that are required to hold that number 1 ranking, and then you go build that very same pyramid structure inside of 24 hours, guess what happens? You rank very, very quickly.

But if you take weeks to execute that very same pyramid strategy through manual work and manual link building, then you won't take days or weeks to rank, but you will take months or even years to rank. So speed is a very important factor, especially things like vpm. 

I've been using GSA to money site for years and have used every single engine available on the money site. I use seo spyglass which is like ahrefs and it shows links that are at risk of penalty. I've never had links in there that were showing as high risk. Sure I've experienced rank drops but that's normal if your links die and you don't replace them. Re-building tiers has always restored rankings for me. Noobs will blame it on the latest algorithm change, but personally it's down to link loss. If you can stay ahead of the link loss then you can rank with just GSA for the long term.