99% of People Are Building Backlinks All Wrong

MisterF said:

Those selling crap do so mainly due to 2 things.

Cheap price and / or fake reviews.

This is some of the crap being offered as guest posts;

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These were nothing more than crappy PBNs advertised as up to DA70 sites.....

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So how do you spot these crappy sellers? Obviously DA70 or 50 is not evidence of great backlinks as they can easily manipulate the DA and increase it.

AAW said:

So how do you spot these crappy sellers? Obviously DA70 or 50 is not evidence of great backlinks as they can easily manipulate the DA and increase it.

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Common sense often is enough.

When people are offering guest posts for $40 including the content on a DA50 site....

Look at the posts on threads, look at the reviews and more importantly the people leaving the reviews.

Don't you think a member with 73 posts, 1 as an introduction and 72 on the same sellers threads looks dubious?
Check to see if the sellers have ever been Shitlisted too.

frostMatt said:

Guilty - probably not doing enough of it to be honest.

Just to clarify, in your experience, are the only worthwhile backlinks these days genuine guestpost outreach, topic relevant niche edits, and homepage PBNs?

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@splishsplash just opened a can of worm of FACTS, he didn’t offer solutions (YET), he was talking about the subject in general, if he would want to tell you what to do then this post will be the best post of all time. I would love to some guide from him
I learned few great stuff from him that I have been applying to two websites and they are working for me. When he works on something for you, he offers good suggestions so his work can show good results! NONE of the others I hired here have done this. To go above and beyond the hired tasks is something rare in the SEO world. I will pay $$ for his ebook if he ever sells one LOL.

OP but just good content is not enough to get links, u need more than that and that's the primary reason why we are here in this forum

MisterF said:

Common sense often is enough.

When people are offering guest posts for $40 including the content on a DA50 site....

Look at the posts on threads, look at the reviews and more importantly the people leaving the reviews.

Don't you think a member with 73 posts, 1 as an introduction and 72 on the same sellers threads looks dubious?
Check to see if the sellers have ever been Shitlisted too.

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Ok I hate to say this but one person I have hired for some guest posts (they were not cheap by all mean) was complemented by Mr. Bass the moderator! And since I trusted the bass, I went ahead and ordered from that guy who seems from Hong Kong it China or Taiwan or ... that person did some posts for me that were ridiculous!! He put my competitors videos in the posts!! Then later the sites he did the posts on removed all posts so I basically lost the money.
A moderator here SHOULD NEVER complement any seller UNLESS the seller is 1000% is good. May be that guy did great stuff to the bass but when he got so busy because of the “complement” he started to do shit stuff to deliver on time and to be honest he took so long to deliver mine. I’m sure I was not the only one who got this shit.
This is serious thing we are discussing here! This is our life work and our hard work on the line, allowing people to do shitty work and mess up your hard work is not acceptable and we may have to start working differently on this here.
Let’s be honest, backlinks and such are the most important things you do for your sites, why allowing shitty people to make $$ from us offering crappy services!
YEAH we see the Disclaimers but this is NO ENOUGH. We have to do more.

RayChand said:

OP but just good content is not enough to get links, u need more than that and that's the primary reason why we are here in this forum

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He didn’t say just good content is enough! LOL. Read his post again.

AAW said:

Ok I hate to say this but one person I have hired for some guest posts (they were not cheap by all mean) was complemented by Mr. Bass the moderator! And since I trusted the bass, I went ahead and ordered from that guy who seems from Hong Kong it China or Taiwan or ... that person did some posts for me that were ridiculous!! He put my competitors videos in the posts!! Then later the sites he did the posts on removed all posts so I basically lost the money.
A moderator here SHOULD NEVER complement any seller UNLESS the seller is 1000% is good. May be that guy did great stuff to the bass but when he got so busy because of the “complement” he started to do shit stuff to deliver on time and to be honest he took so long to deliver mine. I’m sure I was not the only one who got this shit.
This is serious thing we are discussing here! This is our life work and our hard work on the line, allowing people to do shitty work and mess up your hard work is not acceptable and we may have to start working differently on this here.
Let’s be honest, backlinks and such are the most important things you do for your sites, why allowing shitty people to make $$ from us offering crappy services!
YEAH we see the Disclaimers but this is NO ENOUGH. We have to do more.

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BTB or any other marketplace mod approves services based on what is delivered to them as part of the review process. It's isn't a compliment it is an approval to say the service reached required standards.
The seller is required to maintain the same standard once the BST is live.

If what you received is not what was ordered in terms of say metrics for a guest post, word count for an article, pages for a website, non native English content when advertised as native etc etc, then raise this with the seller and if need be go down the Shitlist route.

"Then later the sites he did the posts on removed all posts so I basically lost the money." This as an example is case enough for a SL.

I will add something to what you just explained.
So I used to work for company 6 months back and I created backlinks with the most relevancy like if My project is about lets say contractors I will only post in the websites that are related to architecture such as archinect etc. I Don't Think I got a good bump in my rankings sooner. But after Lets say 4 -5 months the project was on top of the searches which I was working for.
But I will never demotivate someone to build backlinks from forums or web 2.0 blogs or web 2.0 profiles. They can be sometimes rank booster too.

This thread is so interesting and educational.
As someone extremely new to this, I can only hope to be able to, one day, benefit from any of this knowledge.

I realize that this is completely irrelevant to the topic... However I do feel like these sorts of threads, where there are so many statements and opinions from people, who seem to know their feces, is encouraging and discouraging at the same time. Does that make sense? Probably not.

For someone who grew up with the mentality that having a company (or just working for yourself) is a surreal and ephemeral thing, meant for some other people, who possess untold secrets and I will never even get to see them...
It is difficult to grasp even the idea that one can earn a single digit, of any currency, without actually having to 'wageslave' as they say.

Yet here, some people who probably have had a great deal of success, are arguing so passionately about what is the best course of action.


It is awesome. And scary. Thank you.

jagsweb said:

Great entertainment on this thread started by a guy selling pbn links telling others their methods are trash. If you try hard enough, you can make any strategy work. Needless to say, there are some good points made here. Quality trumps all.

Focus on the experience, your end-user, providing them with an experience that far exceeds anything they will get elsewhere or at least anything they might have access to. Pbn's, web 2.0, all that shit is a waste of time in my opinion, but that doesn't make them bad. Why spend your time working on something that may go poof in an update tomorrow? Too much of any one method can be toxic. That is the message from Google over the years. Natural SEO is about diversity and quality.

How many times do you have to go through that before you wake up and realize there are much better ways? If you want good strong backlinks, learn how to network with people.

Make a list of 100 site/influencers that you want to associate with/ get links from. Target the influencers that your target audience worships. Start contacting them 1 at a time and pitch a collab to them. Something that would benefit their audience.

Plan on getting a clear no from almost all of them. It only takes 1. Once one agrees, go contact everyone that said no and say thanks for your time. By the way, _____ said yes and we are scheduled to ____ on ____. They will be wondering what they might have missed when they turned you down since one of their peers has said yes.

After you've finished working together run a google ad targeting the influencer's name and site targeting whatever you did together. Now you are targeting your target audience with their favorite influencers endorsement. It doesn't get much clearer than that. If you doubt this method, ask Russell Brunson.

The collab I got for a client(guest post) last year with Men's Health went on to be the most-read piece on the site and led to them offering her two front covers on the magazine. Now a different magazine is pursuing her and she has been on multiple podcasts since as well.

Just a few key high-quality backlinks that are evergreen and drive traffic. The 1 link in the bio of the guest post has sent a lot of traffic to her site which also added many quality backlinks from other sites. No google update will wash any of that away. No bs fiverr trick will go poof in the night.

While I agree with multiple points in this thread, in my opinion, pbn's, buying links, and all of the other hocus pocus crap and manipulations, right or wrong, are far more work than is needed if you put your head down and just keep hammering away at it. You have to find what works for you and scale. There are many different strategies, just because you dont use one doesn't make your perfect and theirs shit.

If you build a site and your SEO is marginal and the links leave a ton to be desired but you have consistent high quality traffic coming from multiple sources that engage with multiple pages while on site and some convert consistently, Google will still rank your site and rank it well, with or without many backlinks.

All you need to do is go to google and profile the top-ranking pages for any results and they definitely are not in backlink or DA order and never have been. That's my 2 cents. Ive only been doing this for 20 years and have built up 2 extremely large, very successful agencies. What works for you is 100% dependant on your effort!

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This is a pretty offensive way to start your post, and it's not really accurate. I didn't say anyone elses "methods" were trash.

Just because you self-proclaim to have 2 extremely large agencies doesn't mean you have all the answers when it comes to pbns and buying links. There are plenty of people who swear against buying links, and plenty that buy them and make 10's of millions.

If you actually read my thread and understood it you would realize the whole point of the thread has *NOTHING* to do with pbns, guest posts, buying, not buying. These things are irrelevant. The point was that 5-10% of the backlink profile of most sites is what is giving it the power, that people should focus on getting just a handful of good links per month. How they do that doesn't matter. Whether it's buying guest posts, building pbns or getting natural links the concept is the same. For pbns this means not buying $50 domains and sticking a few posts on them, but rather adding 20-30 over the course of a year with domains in the range of $700 to $3000. Links are links. The algorithm doesn't know if you've setup a "pbn", bought a guest post or obtained a natural link. Even for the most risk-averse of projects, I would still advise 5-10 ultra strong private pbns. It's IMPOSSIBLE to get a penalty from that. Updates don't come along and wipe out people with pbns. This is just ridiculous. Updates change things for everyone. You can see all the pure whitehat people moan about how they followed the rule book and lost all their traffic. This is the problem. Links are links. Quality is quality. Trash is trash. A $2k domain, with 30k words of content on it, with your link on the homepage will never look like a pbn. You don't even need to have the link on the homepage. You could setup virtual silos on your pbn and link to your internal posts from the homepage. Article with link, gets link from 5-10 other posts, fresh and re-built pages + 1 from the homepage. That will never in a million years, even to an SEO look like a pbn. Just because you have a conception of pbns as being trash spam blogs doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.

sashilover said:

Really insightful! OP, one question for you:
Accodingly to your theory, the juice from a backlink only follow when the source and target pages has topical connection, if that' true.
Repurposing the content on expired domains will cause the lost of the link juce from its backlinks profile, and that's the totally bad idea?

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It's not a switch, on or off. Juice flows even if there's no topical connection, and you can repurpose pbns and still get juice from them. I'm actually working on some case studies to test non-repurposing vs repurposing. I know I get great results via non-repurposing, but I want to compare them in a more controlled way.

The important things are this :-

1) If you get links, especially with target anchors to inner articles(as opposed to naked/brand to the homepage, which is more forgiving) then you'll notice more dancing with links the algorithm deems "weird", ie, articles that don't have any connection. Now, what we don't specifically know is if the algorithm is sending juice, but just not ranking the page because it's detecting something fishy, or whether it's just sending less juice and causing a dance because it's detecting something fishy. If juice is still sent, this means that even repurposing a pbn will still capture the juice, and then as long as you match the topics when sending your link, juice will flow to the end destination, your money site. If less juice is sent, then repurposing will be distinctively less effective.

2) When you actually want to rank an "expired" domain(and I quote expired because auciton domains don't expire. Only drop-caught domains actually expire), then repurposing will NOT work. Because here, in both situations, whether less juice is passed, or wether juice is passed but ranking power isn't passed doesn't matter. In both situations the site won't rank.

This is what my case study will help to uncover. It's quite complicated, so I'll try to explain the 2 things that could happen.

1) Juice is always passed, but ranking power is not.
2) Less juice is passed.

In 1, we have 2 concepts, juice and ranking power. This means, a page, could in theory hold juice, but not the ability to use that juice to rank, but it could still pass on that juice to somewhere else that could use it to rank.

If I get similar results with the 2 sites I'm setting up, 1 having a pbn with repurposed domains, the other non-repurposed, then I'll create a second project to see if I get the same results. If that's the case, then it shows that juice is always passed regardless of topics, but it's not usable to that page, but it can be passed on. Then we have the question, if it can be passed on but not used, can it be passed through an internal link, or can it be passed only to another site.

frostMatt said:

Thanks a lot for answering my questions and not skirting around them, it was quite a surprise to see! And thanks for the links, admittedly it has changed my view and I'm more inclined to agree with your theory now as I can see sense in it, plus it aligns with what Google themselves have said.


Very good point regarding expired domains not carrying over ranking power when your immediately change their topics; I hadn't looked at topical authority this way before but that's a solid point.


Just to carry on playing devil's advocate, how do PBNs not suffer from the same issue as the other high authority but poorly interconnected sites? I could be wrong, but for purposes of keeping costs manageable, don't the majority of PBNs accept all topics? (I'm guessing it would be expensive to have multiple sites per PBN network, with a PBN in each niche, though I'm not a PBN owner so can't say for sure). I've seen some PBN networks before and in almost all cases they were 'generic/news' type sites which had a random collection of customer articles, from best hairstyles to pet food and car repairs etc. I guess the other problem is that for understandable reasons, PBN owners don't let you see their network, so it's difficult to know if you're actually getting something non-spammy and with other topical relevant pages, or something which has all sorts on it.

With this in mind, what makes PBNs so good? Is it just when they're homepage links? If so, in your experience, are PBNs worthless if you're buying anything other than homepage spot ones?

Just to carry on from this, how does this apply to news sites? If I go onto a popular newsite like SkyNews, CNN, NBC, etc. they have all sorts of random and non-interconnected pages as that's just the nature of news.

For example, a section on SkyNews that I'm looking at right now has the following headlines:

• "Moment of joy: Cricket game breaks out in south London street after 10pm curfew"
• "Unexpected arrival for plane passangers as baby born in middle of flight"
• "Rare orange lobseter is re-homed after chance discovery"
• "Embrace differences: Teen secures record for world's longest female legs"
• "Potty-mouth parrots split up by zoo bosses after egging each other to swear"

So let's say that the 2nd from bottom article included a link to the girl's personal website (assuming a DoF0llow), would the low topical and connected pages class it as a poor backlink?

I appreciate that topical connection is probably just 1 of many ranking factors and so there would be others at play which might dictate that actually it's a good link, but hopefully you see where I'm coming from.


Agreed. I tried bootstrapping things at the beginning but quickly learnt that unless you find an incredibly low-competition niche (which lets face it, most niches will already be tapped in by someone unless) the rate of growth is incredibly slow if you're not willing to spend a sizeable amount of money.



Guilty - probably not doing enough of it to be honest.

Just to clarify, in your experience, are the only worthwhile backlinks these days genuine guestpost outreach, topic relevant niche edits, and homepage PBNs?

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RE: the expired domains see my response above. You can potentially repurpose domains for pbns, and this probably still works fine even though I don't do it and haven't for a good few years, but you can't repurpose and expect to rank better than a fresh domain with the repurposed site its self.

Simple, because with a pbn you're giving yourself a link from its homepage, where all the juice is. On a garbage site the fresh page on it has no juice, no links from anywhere and isn't even listed in a category page. And if you want to create an inner page link, you can link to that from the homepage to pass juice to it.

pbns accept whatever you want. You own the pbn. I don't recommend using public pbn networks unless you want a link with 50 other people on a cheap domain.

You will never be getting topically relevant pages. How could you? It's not profitable to charge $10 for a pbn link and give someone a quality link on a low obl topically relevant domains You're going to get a link with dozens of other articles in every conceivable topic.

Yes, they're close to worthless if buying anything other than homepage links. Fine for some cheap tier 2 links or to boost some guest posts a little, but you aren't going to get any major ranking increases from them. A non-homepage link, on a weak domain with crap content is what you'll get for $10. How could anyone expect anything less? I couldn't even give you a quality article for $10. A coffee and a cake from starbucks is about it.

News sites do actually have more topical relevance than you think, but only the ones that are setup correctly.

Go and google "boris johnson".

For me, theguardian.com is #2 with the page https://www.theguardian.com/politics/boris-johnson

Why? Because they do virtual siloing.

Here's some articles about boris.



Notice they always link back to the boris johnson page with the anchor "boris johnson". Sometimes contextually, but always under "Topics:"

Newspapers will have strong topical relevancy for news topics within politics, sports, entertainment and so on. They aren't just random mish-mash collections of garbage

Like on https://www.selfgrowth.com/successskills_articles.html "what does white label seo mean?" "what is a leadership competency and how do I create a competency model", "the benefits of working with an animation studio". It's just topics on everything. Everything you could imagine is on there, and the content is thin, unlinked, unstructured, lacking any topical depth

Here's one of the top linked articles on selfgrowth - https://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/the-surprising-benefits-of-wearing-leggings

lol.

A link with the anchor "best selling leggings" to www.ryderwear.com/collections/womens-leggings

Back to newspapers, also remember they have mamoth links. selfgrowth has garbage links. 33% of its RDs are nofollow.

Newspaper links are good, yes.

The thing is in seo there's no absolute hard and fast rules.

You wouldn't say no to a link from theguardian.com in ANY of their articles, regardless of relevancy. There's just no way it's going to be bad for your site.

A link from selfgrowth on the other hand is crap. Their links are crap. Their content is crap. They barely rank for any keywords. Topical or not, it's still crap.

People are also way too focused on the traffic a site has. As well as its metrics. These things mean NOTHING. Traffic and metrics are not ranking factors.

Here's an example


I'd take a guest post on that if I had a site in fashion, gifts, workouts etc

It's good content, has a few good links and is real and has been around for years.

She does not target keywords and that's why she doesn't rank. It's just random articles.

But the problem is you couldn't go out and buy these kind of links from a seller, because the moment you're going to accept low traffic stuff they can sell you any old crap. This, you'd get from custom outreach from someone who knows how to pick sites.

Here's another - www.layersofchic.com/


It's not about the type of backlink, whether it's niche edit, pbn, guest post. You just want quality contextuals. pbns are quality when private because you control them and you make them quality.

Yeah, you need money. You can't go offering people $20 or just an article for a guest post and expect them to be keen. You'll get a few like that, but you have to be willing to spend $50 to $500 on a guest post depending on the site.

splishsplash Great and very informative post thanks for sharing.

OP some great gems here. I agree, quality over quantity

quality over quantity is a good rule when it comes to link building, but lots of people can't afford quality links so they are stuck with quantity.

Exactly, people focus on quantity links, and not on quality links.

Even the guest posts now a days are just a crap, selling the links from the sites with 1000's of external links.

Thankfully, I am doing the right

gipulvorka said:

I think he means that PBN can be very risky in most cases and you can get a Google penalty, which is not the case with Web 2.0.
Even If Web 2.0 doesn't help, it won't do any harm either.

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But I think it makes no sense creating links that won't help you rank, even if they don't bring penalties your way. It's an absolute waste of time.

How can you identify quality links and where do you look specifically?

thebotmaker said:

How can you identify quality links and where do you look specifically?

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Pretty much just by hand.

It's like when I pick pbn domains. I don't have a set strategy. I look at backlinks, past traffic, past content. Not to see if they were clean, but to see what the site was about.. Was it something real, of quality.

Even when looking at backlinks, it's not about going by metrics. Yes, great domains will always have those meaty DR60+ contextuals from big sites, but just because a site is DR15 doesn't mean it's bad.

It's the same strategy when deciding on whether something is guest post worthy.

Just look at the site. Who owns it? Is the content good? Do they have natural, real looking backlinks with a good chunk of links from blogs(regardless of size/dr)

A DR15 blog with 80 traffic per month that ranks for a few hundred keywords, but has some real contextual links and is created by a real person just as a hobby is a good link. It's not SUPER STRONG, but it's "quality".

The algorithm is quite complex when it comes to off-page. I'm on record saying it's still quite basic for on-page, and it is. But for off-page it's not.

It's very difficult for a computer program to assess an article anywhere near the level of a human, but it's easier with current technology to determine quality backlinks.

Remember that 90% of pages don't rank for anything. Most people are not SEOs, they're just writing random hobbyist stuff and not trying to rank. A lot of small blogs get their readers from social media.

So just because they don't rank for much doesn't mean they are not quality. They're real, non-spammy and have good topical relevance.

You can also backlink your guest posts. While I don't recommend you just hit someone's site with pbns unless it's a guest post on a bigger site, then 1-2 pbn links to the guest post is fine.

For smaller sites you can use a web 2 link to the guest post, then backlink the web 2 with some cheap pbns.

A private pbn is different. There's no harm in creating a little quality pbn from a $50-$150 domain and adding a link that's properly hidden from crawlers(almost no one knows how to do this and I won't share this)

You find the links by just searching around. Start by looking at all your competitors backlinks. Look at sites ranking in the top 100 for lots of longtails in your niche. Blog searches.

Do it all manually. You can usually find someone on facebook, twitter, instagram or worst case a contact form/email.

Doing automated guest posting is fine on top if you have a big budget and want to add as many contextuals as possible each month, but most people aren't at that level.

@splishsplash Great post as always, I suggest you make a video (in-depth) on how to look for good guest posts/links and how to identify bad links.

This would be great to then get the video pinned in the forum I really do feel this would be beneficial to BHW community.

The irony here is that this guy's signature is promoting a trashy PBN service.

another great tip from wolf himself,,,