Link Building: Quality over Quantity and Diversification is a Myth

I still see too many people focused on this diversification crap.

This usually entails a plethora of comments, forum posts, profiles and other low quality junk that has the effect of causing their site to dance around and basically nullifying the positive effect of good links.

Guys..

You can rank a site with 50 RDs and beat out guys with 800 RDs.

RDs by its self is really not a ranking factor. There's just a correlation between higher RDs and more high quality links.

Really all you need to rank in a good place is 15-20 strong contextual links.

It doesn't take volume to rank(And if you're going after high comp stuff, you shouldn't even need to read posts on a forum, otherwise you have absolutely no chance of competing with the guys who you'll be up against)

Whether you're doing pbns or guests posts, just focus on getting a few very very strong links every month. Stop building a lot of trash to your site. It doesn't work. Sometimes you'll rise up for a bit, sometimes you'll get lucky, but you'll usually just dance around and get hit by the next update.

If you built 5 strong links to your site every month for a year, you'd be surprised at the results you get. Almost no one does this, people just go after any old link they can get.

Less but quality links is what I keep on saying, I also believe one should use a combo of guest post and pbns and build monthly rather than build one time glad I’m doing it right for my clients

Basically How do we know the link is strong or not? Do the domain with higher metrics consider as strong? or there are other factors also to look on strong backlinks ?

Thanks!

This it boiled down if you have a niche, not like a general site, i'm speaking from my experience, i ranked my Homepage 4th place in SERP with just 4 links contextual links, and now I'm 1 on SERP, with 9 contextual links, so this vary from site to site niche to niche ofc

yooray said:

Basically How do we know the link is strong or not? Do the domain with higher metrics consider as strong? or there are other factors also to look on strong backlinks ?

Thanks!

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A strong strong backlink is that one who have 50+ DR with just 5-10 backlinks in back, and good links are those with 50+ DR from 5-100 backlinks.

splishsplash said:

If you built 5 strong links to your site every month for a year, you'd be surprised at the results you get. Almost no one does this, people just go after any old link they can get.

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I feel homepage links & pages/blogs with good traffic pass link juice. I considered as strong links. What's your opinion?

the gent said:

This it boiled down if you have a niche, not like a general site, i'm speaking from my experience, i ranked my Homepage 4th place in SERP with just 4 links contextual links, and now I'm 1 on SERP, with 9 contextual links, so this vary from site to site niche to niche ofc

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How competitive is the keyword?

Luco said:

A strong strong backlink is that one who have 50+ DR with just 5-10 backlinks in back, and good links are those with 50+ DR from 5-100 backlinks.

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Thanks a lot mate! this really clear out the doubts about strong links. Now I really got to focus only on quality links.

Crisp and Concise. Thanks for sharing this, much needed!

Mr Positive said:

Less but quality links is what I keep on saying, I also believe one should use a combo of guest post and pbns and build monthly rather than build one time glad I’m doing it right for my clients

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Yep. Consistent monthly building is best. Hammering a site is never good. Just a few links a month is all you need. Pbns are still king. You really can't beat a homepage link. Guest posts are good because you can scale them more, but the key with pbns is not to waste them with weak ones. I'd rather build 2-3 monsters per month than 10-15 average ones. The guest posts are good when you pick the ones that are much more natural looking so it makes your profile look real. Ie, not the generic guest posts, but ones on real, niche-focused blogs.

yooray said:

Basically How do we know the link is strong or not? Do the domain with higher metrics consider as strong? or there are other factors also to look on strong backlinks ?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Metrics mean zero. Absolutely zero. There are strong domains that are DR10 and crap ones that are DR60.

A DR 60 is more likely to be good than a DR 10, but you can't make that decision on the metric alone.

TF, don't even get me started. I don't even check TF anymore. There are domains that have 100's of monster contextuals that only have a TF of 15-20, and I mean real monsters. It's just ridiculously bad now. You'll get TF40's that have a bunch of shitty directory links that I wouldn't even use if someone paid ME.

DA is ok. I don't know why, but it correlates well with real strength. Which is weird because moz's index is pretty bizarre. You'll see some 900 RD sites in moz that have like 30 RDs in ahrefs, but I don't see many DA40+'s that aren't great. DA25-30 is generally good, 30-40 is great, 40+ is fantastic. I check DA *after* I choose a domain though. I don't care what the DA is because I pick on links, and also, DA49 doesn't mean it's better than DA42.. It's just a general. 30-40 usually great, 40-50 usually fantastic. 50-55+ is rare for pbns unless you're going after mega-monsters as opposed to your run of the mill monster.

the gent said:

This it boiled down if you have a niche, not like a general site, i'm speaking from my experience, i ranked my Homepage 4th place in SERP with just 4 links contextual links, and now I'm 1 on SERP, with 9 contextual links, so this vary from site to site niche to niche ofc

Click to expand...

Yup exactly. That's how it's done. Link building has gotten easier these days. It's generally more expensive, but it's simpler.

knopper said:

I feel homepage links & pages/blogs with good traffic pass link juice. I considered as strong links. What's your opinion?



How competitive is the keyword?

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Traffic is also completely irrelevant. Don't use it as any sort of determinant.

Think about this logically.

Traffic is an output. It's not something that would ever be part of the algorithm's input, because it is the output. If Google started using output to determine output, then you'd have a broken system.

This would be like.

You have 10 scientists, who have all produced multiple theories. 3 of those scientists always produce theories that are correct almost all the time. This is the output. The inputs are related to the soundness of the theory.

Now, the new scientists come up with a new theory, and we determine how valid it is based on their past theories. This is logically incorrect.

The other thing you have to bare in mind is, traffic is an output based not only strength, but RELEVANCY.

So, if I have domain 1, let's say it's real google strength value is 9/10 if google had a simple 1-10 measure.
Then I have domain 2, with a strength value of 3.

I then put 10k words of content on domain 1, which is both high comp and low volume. It'll probably rank for almost nothing and have 20-30 traffic per month.

Now put 1 million words on domain 2 targeting easy informational phrases and it'll have a TON of traffic.

So if we use traffic to determine strength, we can now say that domain 2 is super powerful and domain 1 is weak. Completely false and this is why pbns almost never have much traffic.

To determine strength for a pbn you're looking at the links to the site. You want contextuals. Not just authority contextuals, but good ones will have a whole spectrum ranging from small/weak blogs, through to medium and above, which is exactly what we want. I'd rather have a domain with more contextual links from low-end, but real blogs, than a bunch of high DR directory/profile/non-contextual stuff. Having a few of those is good, but not at the expense of the contextuals. You want primarily contextuals, then a few extra non-contextuals from strong domains is an added bonus.

For a guest post look at the domain as a whole first.

Then find out where your guest post will appear. This is important.

Will it just be some dead post that isn't linked to anywhere?

Will it appear in the recent articles on the homepage?

Will it appear at least in a category page that is linked to from the homepage.

Maybe a tag page?

Will it get an internal link from other articles? You can ask for this. You can look at other articles on the blog and recommend an internal link that would be a good fit for your new article. This makes a HUGE difference.

The last thing you want are those dead guest posts that will have zero links from anywhere else on the site and the only place google will find it is the site map.


Oh, and I should add on here about the traffic.

For guest posts, YES, absolutely. If a site has traffic then it's a good candidate. You wouldn't really want guest posts from sites without traffic. The traffic thing is for pbns only, BUT, the caveat is this. Just because a site has 20k traffic vs another that ha 2k doesn't mean it's necessarily stronger. So just like the metrics, DA30+ is good, but a DA 39 isn't necessarily better than a DA32. Think of traffic the same way. If it has 200k traffic then it's going to be great, but when comparing 2k to 10k to 20k you need to look at other factors too to determine the real value.

Wow! Learned a lot about Quality linking, domain metrics and traffics. I really thank you for such a great information @splishsplash .

splishsplash said:

I still see too many people focused on this diversification crap.

This usually entails a plethora of comments, forum posts, profiles and other low quality junk that has the effect of causing their site to dance around and basically nullifying the positive effect of good links.

Guys..

You can rank a site with 50 RDs and beat out guys with 800 RDs.

RDs by its self is really not a ranking factor. There's just a correlation between higher RDs and more high quality links.

Really all you need to rank in a good place is 15-20 strong contextual links.

It doesn't take volume to rank(And if you're going after high comp stuff, you shouldn't even need to read posts on a forum, otherwise you have absolutely no chance of competing with the guys who you'll be up against)

Whether you're doing pbns or guests posts, just focus on getting a few very very strong links every month. Stop building a lot of trash to your site. It doesn't work. Sometimes you'll rise up for a bit, sometimes you'll get lucky, but you'll usually just dance around and get hit by the next update.

If you built 5 strong links to your site every month for a year, you'd be surprised at the results you get. Almost no one does this, people just go after any old link they can get.

Click to expand...

Sorry, but with this post you just show that you do not understand why people make those "low quality" links. The purpose of those links is to have money anchors to spare for your strong links. You cannot really get only 5 links this month with anchors "best vacuum cleaner", I hope that you understand that? However you can get 20 naked forums links, and then safely use 5 money anchors for your strong ones. Is it clear now?

AngelSeo said:

Sorry, but with this post you just show that you do not understand why people make those "low quality" links. The purpose of those links is to have money anchors to spare for your strong links. You cannot really get only 5 links this month with anchors "best vacuum cleaner", I hope that you understand that? However you can get 20 naked forums links, and then safely use 5 money anchors for your strong ones. Is it clear now?

Click to expand...

If you still think getting 5 links with "best vacuum cleaner" will help you rank for "best vacuum cleaner" then you haven't done any SEO for a very very long time.

That's what worked in 2012. Now, that's not how you rank, and your pbns should be a mixture of brand and phrase. Not naked. Naked is not that natural for contextual links.

I couldn't think of a worst strategy than :-

Get a bunch of naked forum post links, then get 5 exact match links from pbns.

It's no wonder some people struggle to rank sites.

What is rd

papiforreal said:

What is rd

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referring domains/root domains

What you’re saying correlates perfectly with what I’ve been doing for clients recently, and I’ve seen lots of success from it - very low volume, high quality links built regularly - month after month - and deliberately avoiding anything exact match.

But but but... Sarkark has so many positive and fully legit reviews....

Interesting read. Thanks for all opinions. Waiting other SEO expert to jump in to the boat.

What's your opinion on linking to a specific post vs homepage? Since you build so little links, I'm guessing they all go to the homepage or do you switch it up? @splishsplash

Thank you for sharing, very informative.

splishsplash said:

referring domains/root domains

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Is RD simply a backlink?