Newly created websites with hundreds or thousands of referring domains: how they do it?

Hello, I want to open this thread to share thoughts, ideas and opinions about how to do link building.

A bit of background before digging into the topic: I feel have a solid understating of how SEO works and I am good at everything related with on-page optimization, both on the semantic (keyword research, content writing, structured data, etc.) and technical aspects (indexation, crawling, site’s structure, etc.), but I’ve always had hard time with off-page SEO (link acquisition).



From time to time, here on the forum, users show the results they achieved with their projects showing screenshots from Ahrefs, where it is possible to see some newly created websites that have already hundreds (if not thousands) on referring domains.

I’ve always wondered how they achieve that.



For what I am concerned, you can get links in the following ways:

• Buy links (easiest but more expensive way): you can buy links for as little as $10 from a crappy domain, up to a $50,000 for a link in the NY Times, or pay a monthly fee for maintaining links from a strong PBN. It really depends on your budget

• Build links(time consuming, price can vary a lot): you have many options here.
  • You can build links for diversity that will bring little to no benefits. Such links are profile links, web 2.0, comments, etc.
  • Guest posts, that may be worth some especially if the domain is related to the niche of your website
  • Build your own PBN: this is probably the best way, but it cost a lot of money to set up a proper PBN and also certain knowledge to stay out of Google radar, being able not to leave any footprint
  • Build links on autopilot with some SEO software: normally used to push tier 2 or 3 properties, but not suitable to blast links to your main website

• Natural (or free) links (the hardest to get but the less expensive, as they come for free): you get those from time to time, especially when your website gain some organic visibility, or you can get those links buy doing email outreach and ask for a link to some website that may decide to link back to some of your content if they think it will be useful for their users (very unlikely to happen)

Another option is to register an expired domain that has already those referring domains pointing to them but 1) those domains aren’t cheap (it is basically a shortcut for buying links), 2) are very hard to get as bidding can be wild and 3) in this thread I am talking of newly created websites with a huge number of referring domains.



As said, those newly launched projects I was talking about, use to have hundreds or thousands of referring domains, which I assume aren’t be bought or build with softwares (as the DA shown from the screenshot is normally high and the website are getting a lot of organic traffic, which - as far as I am concerned - is unlikely to get if you build tons of links on autopilot).

So, my question is: how do they manage to launch a website ad after few months, having literally thousands of referring domains?

Thanks to anyone who wants to comment and shed some light on this thing, that remains a mystery to me.

You've pretty much answered your own question - either the domain is expired and has existing backlinks, or backlinks are built to it using either software or proprietary networks. The big players can have tens/hundreds of thousands of domains that they can point links from.

Guybrushthepirate said:

Build links on autopilot with some SEO software: normally used to push tier 2 or 3 properties, but not suitable to blast links to your main website

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Many people's opinions will differ from this. Especially those who produce sites in bulk.

Steptoe said:

You've pretty much answered your own question - either the domain is expired and has existing backlinks, or backlinks are built to it using either software or proprietary networks. The big players can have tens/hundreds of thousands of domains that they can point links from.

Many people's opinions will differ from this. Especially those who produce sites in bulk.

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Hi @Steptoe , thanks for taking time to answer my question. I tend to exclude that expired domains were used on those examples I have in mind (not sure if I should look for some thread where those example were posted), as they stated they were using fresh domains.

As for the rest, yes I assume you're right, and some users may have their own PBN with hundreds if not thousands of domains. With a structure like that they can quickly give a stron push to those new projects of them.

Last but not least: can you give me some insight about your last statement? I've always tough that SEO softwares that are able to build links were used mainly to send those links to tier 3 or tier 2 properties and then, in case those gained some traction, add a link to the money site from there. Am I missing something there?

Guybrushthepirate said:

Last but not least: can you give me some insight about your last statement? I've always tough that SEO softwares that are able to build links were used mainly to send those links to tier 3 or tier 2 properties and then, in case those gained some traction, add a link to the money site from there. Am I missing something there?

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That is certainly one tactic to use when working with automated links. But I personally know a number of people who are quite happy to fire off hundreds/thousands of automated links to their money sites. To caveat this though, the software they use is mainly non-commercial (self-scripted bots) and not your GSAs, SEOAPs etc, and they have dozens of money sites.

I personally have sites that I have only ever built links to using automation, and maintain a positive ROI.

It's almost always an automated tool generating those backlinks. You can tell which were bought and which were auto-generated in a lot of cases by analyzing the quality of the referring domains.

Steptoe said:

That is certainly one tactic to use when working with automated links. But I personally know a number of people who are quite happy to fire off hundreds/thousands of automated links to their money sites. To caveat this though, the software they use is mainly non-commercial (self-scripted bots) and not your GSAs, SEOAPs etc, and they have dozens of money sites.

I personally have sites that I have only ever built links to using automation, and maintain a positive ROI.

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I thought it was something like that.

"I personally have sites that I have only ever built links to using automation, and maintain a positive ROI." I'm very interested in this.