How did they get so many backlinks?

[ButcherPete]

I have one website right now. I submitted it to web directories, social bookmarking sites, and I've been building high quality, handmade Web 2.0 sites that link to it and blasting them with bulk backlink packages from Fiverr. Ahrefs is showing that I have 150-something backlinks right now.

But I'm researching some new keywords and checking out how many backlinks the competition has, and I keep seeing sites with 20,000+ backlinks according to Ahrefs. This may be a dumb question, but how do they do that? Surely, they're not making them all by hand, are they? I can tell by the keywords that they are actively doing SEO on this site; it is not natural linking. I just don't understand how it is possible to get so many backlinks. It's certainly not possible with my current method.

- Are they blasting it with xRuber or Scrapebox? Is it OK to do that after you have so many backlinks already made?

- Do they just spend a shitload of money paying other people to work around the clock building Web 2.0 properties?

 

[sashablack]

What type of back-links are they? text? anchor links? banner links? it all depends!

 

[Meloman]

Well first thing I can guarantee you is that they do not use fiverr gigs for backlinks. Second thing is that 20,000 backlinks is easy to get with GSA, Xrumer, and a few seo services.

Also, there is no way that they build them manually, and i highly doubt that they pay people to manually build 20,000 backlinks.

 

[innosoft]

if it counts then surely its gonna be good links. mostly biggies will have their own in house seo team. lets say hiring 5 guys would do the job.. each guy makes 100 links per day. 5 guys, 500 links per day and if only 100 gets indexed out of 500, then it wont take much time to get 20k good links..

 

[banchi08]

Did you check the # of referring domains and if the links were site-wide?

I know site-wide links are as counted 1 link/page, hence it can appear as hundreds or even thousands.

 

[ButcherPete]

Well first thing I can guarantee you is that they do not use fiverr gigs for backlinks. Second thing is that 20,000 backlinks is easy to get with GSA, Xrumer, and a few seo services.

Also, there is no way that they build them manually, and i highly doubt that they pay people to manually build 20,000 backlinks.

It was my understanding that any automated backlinks straight to the money site are a bad idea... Is it OK to do under certain circumstances? (and, which ones?)

Thanks for the tip.

 

[ButcherBoy]

Everything depends...you said you did your links manual, but it's a point of view
Some guy using xrumer could say he manually press 'spam' button

About your last question, colleague Butcher
You can use automated backlinks but using your mind, quality over quantity...

Good luck!

 

[StirlingMedia]

Who cares about how many backlinks there are? What is far more important is the quality of those links.

I rank sites by using less than 10 backlinks from my PBN because they are all high authority, high PR (not important) and high trust.

 

[Initial Effort]

It's possible that they're paying someone for their links or they're building links by blasting like tier 2 or tier 3 with ScrapeBox and Xrumer. Blasting links at sites usually has massive negative link velocity so it is not recommended. Forget about the competitor's site and focus on your site by establishing more trust. Remember, having few quality links is better than having many low quality ones. Keep building links to maintain link velocity.

 

[Scritty]

It was my understanding that any automated backlinks straight to the money site are a bad idea... Is it OK to do under certain circumstances? (and, which ones?)

Thanks for the tip.

There is no practical deifference between automated links and manual links.

While it's not normally the case...
You can make fantastic links with automation
Likewise can make shit links manually

You can get penalized with Penguin 2.1 for manual linking. Doing it by hand is just "slower"... a LOT slower and can take hundreds of hours rather than maybe 10 - and if you do it right - that's the only difference there is.

In the case of these sites that you've found the main 3 things to look for are...

Authority - Is it an established authority in a field? Are the sites representing major companies, governments, other big establishments and offering resources that can't legitimately be read/dopwnloaded or watched elsewhere?
If so they will get a lot of backlinks

Age - Backlinks accrue over time. A 10 year old site with have a lot more links than a 3 month old one.

Size - A site with hundreds of real viable URL (not empty pages, tag pages or whatever) will likely get more backlinks if the quality on those pages is half decent

So if the sites you are looking at are new, thin and on topics that no-one could seriously give a fig about - then 20,000 links is a swizz and Google will know it
But judging how linke were made?
Google never know how links are made unless the link maker leaves obvious footprints. 1000's in a day, the same content, the same platform or anchor text whatever.

Just because some people use tools like idiots (some? I should say most..) there is no reason to copy them
I'm certainly not saying spam. In most cases Link "blasts" are for numb nuts and have become an epic fail. But throwing away your tools isn't the solution. Using them properly is.

Doing things manually isn't better or safer. It's just slower

Scritty

 

[accelerator_dd]

It was my understanding that any automated backlinks straight to the money site are a bad idea... Is it OK to do under certain circumstances? (and, which ones?)

Thanks for the tip.

There is no practical deifference between automated links and manual links.

While it's not normally the case...
You can make fantastic links with automation
Likewise can make shit links manually

You can get penalized with Penguin 2.1 for manual linking. Doing it by hand is just "slower"... a LOT slower and can take hundreds of hours rather than maybe 10 - and if you do it right - that's the only difference there is.

In the case of these sites that you've found the main 3 things to look for are...

Authority - Is it an established authority in a field? Are the sites representing major companies, governments, other big establishments and offering resources that can't legitimately be read/dopwnloaded or watched elsewhere?
If so they will get a lot of backlinks

Age - Backlinks accrue over time. A 10 year old site with have a lot more links than a 3 month old one.

Size - A site with hundreds of real viable URL (not empty pages, tag pages or whatever) will likely get more backlinks if the quality on those pages is half decent

So if the sites you are looking at are new, thin and on topics that no-one could seriously give a fig about - then 20,000 links is a swizz and Google will know it
But judging how linke were made?
Google never know how links are made unless the link maker leaves obvious footprints. 1000's in a day, the same content, the same platform or anchor text whatever.

Just because some people use tools like idiots (some? I should say most..) there is no reason to copy them
I'm certainly not saying spam. In most cases Link "blasts" are for numb nuts and have become an epic fail. But throwing away your tools isn't the solution. Using them properly is.

Doing things manually isn't better or safer. It's just slower

Scritty

The whole point of automated tools was getting a lot done which would be seen as manual work by the serps. Over the years, they just get better at deciphering the good from the bad.

Tools, if used right, will have the same effect as doing things manually, but you need two things:
- a good tool (one that won't post broken HTML code on a wiki where it's not applicable even)
- the perfect settings for that tool

 

[srinu0812]

You can get a huge number of backlinks from blasting forum profiles and blog comments. But at the end of the day, quality outweighs quantity.

 

[MadStacks]

Large companies have their own offices with SEO experts in them or they outsource it to virtual assistance.
Could be they are buying these links.

 

[GhostVision]

did you also check the age of those sites?

 

[shs1366]

did you also check the age of those sites?

5 year

 

[Ahmed Al Banna]

With so many backlinks they have to be using some sort of automation. People do weird stuff all the time and its hard to understand exactly what is going on. Depending on the niche and website itself you can formulate a theory about what is going on. Is it a big reputable company that could have in house SEO or smaller company that bought Fiverr Xrummer blasts?

Last week I was doing some reserach at SimilarWeb and by accident came across US based website in niche that I was interested in. I found it as listed competitor for site I was researching and was surprised to see small, unknown website listed amongst established websites. I looked at website and it was 5+ year old basic Wordpress and listed address was house in almost trailer park neighborhood. Yet this website was showing a lot of visitors but terrible statistics - 86% were other countries and few top countries only had 2-3% each and US was not even top country, 97% bounce rate, less then 10 seconds on site, etc. What do I conclude from this? I think the owner is paying some super dooper SEO expert for junk traffic. He is getting 50k visits per month 97% bounce rate and from tier 3 countries. Why this webmaster is paying for this junk traffic for few months I can't explain because his website is totally dependent on tier 1 customers. His website is not very appealing and if I was a customer I would leave it to find something that looks more professional. If I want to hire someone I judge them by their appearance first and foremost.