Still Ranking w/ Link Campaings in 2014?

[colinhatz]

Hey Guys,

I'm an SEO noob, admittedly, but I have done a lot of reading and now I want to get my hands dirty by trying to rank my first site. For practice reasons, I will rank my site by any means necessary. I'm not overly concerned with it remaining in the SERPS, although, if possible, I would like to do it in a way where it can.

My question is - are you guys still ranking sites by running link campaigns? Based on what I've read, social signals are more important than ever in SEO. Is it a combination of running link campaigns, buying likes, shares, followers, retweets, etc? How should I get the ball rolling in this whole thing, assuming my practice niche site has good on-page SEO and content.

Thank you.

 

[ilim72]

Think about this way popular sites has all kind of links pointing to them. The more you invest into social aspect of it, the less dependent on search engines you will be. To rank in google, you would need diversity of links plus likable content on the site.

 

[colinhatz]

Think about this way popular sites has all kind of links pointing to them. The more you invest into social aspect of it, the less dependent on search engines you will be. To rank in google, you would need diversity of links plus likable content on the site.

Simple enough and straight forward. Thanks. That leads me to another question, though.

Do you start by building followers and building up your social accounts, or do you begin with backlinks and link building? I guess I'm trying to hammer out one thing at a time.

 

[ilim72]

I don't know if there is golden rules what comes first. I both social and links could be done in parallel. Like in real life again, site can become popular on social sites without any links available and on another side
they can first become popular on internet (blogs, forum, comment) first and then as consequences become popular on social sites. I think that second variant is more natural and more likely but again could be either way.

 

[MosesW]

Simple enough and straight forward. Thanks. That leads me to another question, though.

Do you start by building followers and building up your social accounts, or do you begin with backlinks and link building? I guess I'm trying to hammer out one thing at a time.

Popular websites get the backlinks and social presence on the same time. You cant think the reverse, I suppose.

 

[davids355]

Either will work. Both methods together, even better.

 

[colinhatz]

Thank you all for your replies. You all are a great help!

 

[The SEO]

Content + On-Page + Backlinks + Social Signals = Higher Ranking and Authority Website

 

[SaulGoodman]

Well, there is a correlation between high SERP rankings and having a big amount of social signals, however successful sites with a lot of traffic just have more social signals due to their popularity in organic search ! More visitors automatically lead to more social signals (and money in most cases)

Some studies on this topic have proven, that social signals are just more common for big sites, but there is no evidence, that those sites are ranking significantly better just because of their higher numers of social signals !

I wouldn't take social signals to seriously, they come with your websites success overtime, as long as you don't build a crappy, unhelpful thin-content site which isn't link- and shareworthy !

In my opinion social seo is a bit overhyped atm, although it is a fact that Google is more and more trying to move away from mostly evaluating sites based on backlinks by using user data to evaluate relevance of sites (bounce rate, visit length, CTR, returning visits, social signals, search query refinements and so on ...)

Hope this helped a bit

 

[cloakndagger2]

I'd agree , social for seo is overhyped, google will always prefer it's own vain attempt at social G+ although it is the worst social network out there. At best you get a little jump (this is more because it looks viral) in most cases a site will just go to settle where it was before. Backlinks are king. Google thinks t deep to be truly social, their aim is to extract as much information as possible to use, it's that simple. People using it mainly do it because they know google loves itself so will give slightly more weight behind it's attempt.

 

[tony_d]

I cant imagine what else you'd need besides links in order to rank

 

[MegaSEO]

The biggest mistake I see you making is not caring if it gets penalized later because a big part of making money
online and doing SEO is not getting the website penalized. Learn to do it right and then you can learn to cut corners.

MegaSEO

 

[colinhatz]

Well, there is a correlation between high SERP rankings and having a big amount of social signals, however successful sites with a lot of traffic just have more social signals due to their popularity in organic search ! More visitors automatically lead to more social signals (and money in most cases)

Some studies on this topic have proven, that social signals are just more common for big sites, but there is no evidence, that those sites are ranking significantly better just because of their higher numers of social signals !

I wouldn't take social signals to seriously, they come with your websites success overtime, as long as you don't build a crappy, unhelpful thin-content site which isn't link- and shareworthy !

In my opinion social seo is a bit overhyped atm, although it is a fact that Google is more and more trying to move away from mostly evaluating sites based on backlinks by using user data to evaluate relevance of sites (bounce rate, visit length, CTR, returning visits, social signals, search query refinements and so on ...)

Hope this helped a bit

That helped out immensely. I think the best way to learn is definitely going to be through trial and error - no doubt about it. I think my intentions were simply to get the opinions of others as to where to start - backlinks, or social signals? It seems to me that creating backlinks is always a good idea (when done properly), and, of course, integrating that with social signals can only help as well.

I think I'll focus on building a quality backlink campaign slowly and seeing my results, and slowly mixing in social signals from there. A beginner case study

 

[Ghoztseo]

From my personal point of view i'll blast couple of backlinks to rank a certain website with specific keyword. Do not take SEO very complex because it's not a complicated practicals. Try to find Relevant and neccessary links to your website that's all you need. Social aspects are side ingredients, Some SEO'ers ranking their sites without any social engagement.

 

[altopluma]

The biggest mistake I see you making is not caring if it gets penalized later because a big part of making money
online and doing SEO is not getting the website penalized. Learn to do it right and then you can learn to cut corners.

MegaSEO

Hello. May I know what penalty you are talking about please? Can you explain how a site get penalized and how would it be penalized?

 

[Smeems]

You can rank anything without any social signals.

You can't rank anything without links.

 

[smokemeoutdawg]

No one is ranking in 2014. No SEO software works. This includes but is not limited to: Xrumer, gScraper, ScrapeBox, SeNuke X

Just quit now

 

[accelerator_dd]

Links are still what does the job best. Social signals might play a role, but nice links will get you to the top guaranteed.

 

[Sanasante]

If you want to rank in 2014 for any period of time I would suggest going with PBN links. They are very powerful if you can find a good network to post unique content to.

Now with that said; Tiered link building is definitely still existent. I have not played around very much this year with it but if you build out your tiers properly you can still rank. This involves setting up 6 different campaigns in GSA if you know enough to catch my hint.

Something that was not mentioned is On-Page Optimization. This is more important now then it has ever been in the past. If done correctly you can actually achieve SERP ranking with 0 backlinks.

 

[colinhatz]

If you want to rank in 2014 for any period of time I would suggest going with PBN links. They are very powerful if you can find a good network to post unique content to.

Now with that said; Tiered link building is definitely still existent. I have not played around very much this year with it but if you build out your tiers properly you can still rank. This involves setting up 6 different campaigns in GSA if you know enough to catch my hint.

Something that was not mentioned is On-Page Optimization. This is more important now then it has ever been in the past. If done correctly you can actually achieve SERP ranking with 0 backlinks.

I think setting up my own PBN is more money than I'm willing to spend right now. In the future, it's definitely something I want to do. I'm just not there yet. I want to get a site to rank without a PBN in less competitive niches just to confirm that I'm at least somewhat competent with this whole SEO thing.

After reading PHPBUILT's guide, I'm definitely going to start with pure on-page optimization and go from there. For some reason, I just don't see how pure on-page optimization alone can rank you top 50 for competitive keywords. But, maybe it can. What do I know? I'm just not having much success on my site as is, and the keyword isn't even that competitive. Granted, this is my first go at it, so it's not like I'm expecting to be #1 in Google.

The issue is, my pages are indexed, but I'm nowhere to be seen in the google ranks. I think my pages are just way too keyword stuffed, and my site structure isn't great.

Sigh. Here's to learning new things my friends.