Looks like link trees don't work anymore (You have been warned) watch this

mich158

Ok, I have been following Scritty (The guy who made the video)  for over a year and a half now and I think he has a ton of useful info about link building on his blog. Stumbled upon one of his videos yesterday explaining that google can easily detect self promotion if you do it as a link tree. Then he is introducing a link mesh which he claims to be far more effective.

I want to hear your opinion guys. Anyone doing this? What do you think about all this concept?

watch the vid here

2Take2

If you are doing tiered link building properly, then that's basically what you should be doing anyway (with a nice big set of tiers linking to what he calls his tier 1 profiles).

Nice video and nicely explained though, he certainly seems to know his stuff, and I've certainly picked up a few nice tips from some of his posts over on BHW in the past too.

mich158

any tips on how to create these profiles with a the structure with gsa or even with ultimate demaon, I have them both. If you can point me to a video tutorial would be great. Scritty didnt do it yet.

Mike

Now if we could get the genius @sven to write some code to clean up our existing links. I don't mean to just delete all the existing verified links, but somehow re-write the anchor text and leave the links where they already are. Instant re-ranking of my penalized sites!

2Take2

Sure, everyone has their own ways to do things, but I'd use SER Engines, RankWYZ or FCS Networker to create the tier1s (with multiple posts) and back them up with tiers from GSA SER.

That said, it doesn't matter what tool you use, as long as it can post to the same accounts multiple times.

The structure is pretty self explanatory, as per his diagram and the way that he explains it in the video, no?

bloupbloup

90% of what so called SEO specialists say on the internet is utter rubbish

Negative SEO does not exist. 

This video lasts 20 minutes but i will give you an evidence in few sentences. 

Look at pageranks from websites of templates authors. They have huge pageranks. However, there links are located at the footer of any of the websites that use their template and the anchor text never changes. It is clearly self promotion. 

Here is a random example i just took from my tumblr feed right NOW.

here is a website and there is little C at the bottom right

http://earthlynation.tumblr.com/

Click on it and check the website pagerank... it is a pagerank 5 taken from sitewide footer links of many websites with exact same anchor text.

sweeppicker

@bloupbloup, you have to consider their are various thresholds and other factors Google considers. Negative SEO absolutely exists. I have empirical proof from experiments I did over the summer on my own properties. 

sawa73

@bloupbloup WPMU get penalized for footer links in wordpress templates http://moz.com/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

mich158

Anyone doing mesh linking like Scritty is suggesting or you all stick to the good ol link tree?

Wizzardly

Watched the video and though to myself Meh. Been there done that. And to say link pyramids are dead is just plain wrong. 

What he is basically describing is creating a private blog network where your tier 1 sites are full blown sites with plenty of content and only a few links to your money site. I agree, this is a good plan. 

But what he seems to be saying you are done there. Where are your private blogs going to get link juice from if your not building tiers? 

I personally use the idea of sending spreading my tier 2 links around the tier 1 website pages and only a small % to the page containing the links to my money sites. I personally believe this will help shield from penalties greatly.

mich158

@Wizzardly thats a pretty good point thanks. you mean a small percentage sent to your money page or to your money site as overall?

Wizzardly

I just imagine my tier 1 as full blown sites and build links all over just like I would my money sites. Then on the tier 1 have only a few contextual links to my money site. Some of the tier 1 pages with actual links to my MS may or may not get links built directly to them, but very few. Just build the Tier 1s so that the link juice flows from the homepage (where most of the links go) to your most important pages (ones with links to MS). 

Overall it's a pain in the ass I am finding. But it is needed for long term sites.

Don't get me wrong though. I'm producing sites which are much more aggressive and use nothing but SER tier links but I assume those will get penalized someday.

Satans_Apprentice

I watched the video. It's not a whole lot different than tiered link building. He uses "co-citation" which is what is already built into GSA - Link to Authority Sites. There is evidence that co-citation will also help your rankings. It's probably a pretty good idea to create your own niche's authority site list. 

I've been posting on Matthew Woodward's site, and he claims that none of his sites have gotten penalized. All of the tiered link building services on BHW are still going strong.

Here's the thing:

1. Of course your links can be traced back to your money site. Duh. Organic links can be traced as well. It's how the Internet works.

2. All of your links have links to other pages/sites. Just look at the page. It probably has 20+ links to other pages, plus the authority links. 

3. Creating quality content that will generate clicks is great. If you have the time. Having quality tier 1 content is essential for making sure that Wordpress doesn't remove your blog. Having quality pages with no links on your blog is common sense for making it look natural.

Simple question that I asked earlier - Who has been penalized by adhering to "Best Practices"?  I will bet that anyone who has had a site get hammered used excessive anchor text.

We got hammered for footer links on a customer's site. Footers get you in trouble when you use exact match keywords. We got stupid and used exact match anchors. The site started off as 100 pages, but had a calendar function that generated 20,000 new pages with links in a few months. Bye Bye anchor text profile. We changed the anchors, had the site crawled, and our rankings came back in a week. BTW, The Incredible Indexer may be able to help. Change your anchors and have them index the pages. They'll probably get crawled faster.

Unless someone gives me some convincing evidence, keeping your keyword anchors under 20% will keep you out of trouble, for now. I'd suggest getting an account with AHrefs or Majestic SEO and checking out the competition's anchor text profiles and imitating them.

We are going to be building mini sites in the near future to hedge against google hitting Web 2.0s. I have a hard time seeing it happen - killing the Web 2.0s would create massive collateral damage.

RayBan

Didn't google say that they take into account only the first link on page or were they just lying ? 

bloupbloup

@Rayban

true !

Google only records one level, that would cost lots of money to crawl and keep in the google index the whole backlink structure. Google will never do that. 

2Take2

@rayban - Under normal circumstances, google only take into account the first link on a page to any other given page.

I.e. If you have 3 links on a page to www.yourspammywebsite.com it will only take into account the first one it finds.

However, if you have 3 links on a page, one pointing to www.yourspammywebsite.com, another pointing to www.hisspammywebsite.com, and the final one pointing to www.myspammywebsite.com, then it will take all three into account.

One link per URL (and AFIK they can also be different urls in the same domain).

Wizzardly

@2take2 is correct. Or at least that is the working theory based on past experiments. The only place it is relevant is when talking anchor text and which one Google is going to use.

RayBan

@2take2, @wizzardly - where do you put your own link - beginning, middle, end ? I`ve seen various methods, but what's your expierience. 

2Take2

They say that it is best to put your link as the first link on the page, and in the first paragraph of the article body, but I generally just insert the link in a random position to make it look more natural.

Everyone has their own ways of doing things though.

Wizzardly

Randomly and wherever looks natural. At some point you just overthink things when there is no way for you to know if they have an effect. 

tsaimllc

@bloupbloup - "

90% of what so called SEO specialists say on the internet is utter rubbish"

you're clearly one of them lol.

Pratik

@tsaimllc haha. Btw negative SEO sadly does exist. I've seen lots of guys suffering from it.

Wizzardly

@pratik I concur. It's big business these days. 

tsaimllc

Yes, and I am one of them (well, my client site).

bloupbloup

@ tsaimllc 

It takes 90 days for Google to take a link into account. 

How do you know if your problem is related to a penalty?

bloupbloup

@ tsaimllc 

The following URL is a pagerank 9. It weights more than cnn.com and as much as whitehouse.gov

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer.html

However, it does not come from any contextual links. Only (often sitewide) links with no anchor text but only an adobe image. 

Adobe.com is not penalized. 

Wizzardly

@bloupbloup I can not disagree more with the 90 day statement. 

gooner

Yea it's not true or it would take a minimum 90 days to rank, which it defo doesn't.

bloupbloup

I think the internet forums are packed with propagandists about SEO. It is great that people think that negative SEO exist because people are scared to build up automated links. The successful people are those who aren't scared to jump on any possible backlinks. 

It is beneficial to Google that you @tsaimllc thinks there is negative SEO because then, google don't want people to buy GSA, they want small sized and medium sized companies to buy expensive advertisements on Google adwords. 

Lots of so called SEO specialists have created a fear that is not founded. However, Google provides an official paper that is not enough commented. 

That's the Google webmaster guidelines (section link schemes)

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

I prefer to follow what google says officially that so called self proclaimed specialists who just have no idea of what SEO really is. 

In fact, in the vast majority of the cases, when people think they have been penalized by a penalty they have in fact lost backlinks. For instance, it is the case when all your forum posts goes on the second, third pages. This is when one of your link in a blog article goes on the second page...

You can check the backlinks you lost by visiting majesticseo or ahrefs

In fact, You need a huge amount of backlinks to be really successful. You can build up a small TIER 1 but then you need lots of backlinks in your TIER 3...etc...etc...

I have never seen the use of disavow tools and i have never seen the existence of negative SEO. In fact, i have seen that either a domain is totally penalized  and it does now show off in google results or it is normally ranked. 

I had bought once a penalized domain but it was due to the fact the previous website was packed with pages with keyword stuffing. It is very special, it is when each word is an anchor text in a 200 words paragraph. 

SEE you.

Wizzardly

@bloupbloup I don't know what to tell you. Negative SEO exists, it works, and it works well these post penguin days, fact. The newer or less authoritative your site is, the more vulnerable it is. 

sweeppicker

@bloupbloup. Do you have any empirical data to prove your claim that negative SEO does not exist because I've already tested the theory over the summer using a variety of analytical tools and link building methods and my data proves otherwise. I would encourage others to test it themselves on some throwaway domains if they are in doubt.