I don't want to keep rehashing the same thing I have been doing for over a year now but one question I get asked consistently frequently is whether NHSEO still works after [INSERT EVENT/SE UPDATE HERE] and the answer everytime has been an unequivocal yes it still works just as it always has been.
I recently had to post a bunch of proofs to someone on another forum that was intent on insinuating (without a single shread of proof) that NHSEO doesn't work for getting links, that the links it did get were of poor quality (not sure how he made both of these arguments but lets put it this way, intelligence was not his strong suit) and that due to the quality of links it would get you penalised or banned instantly.
Many people have done and still to this day see massive improvements in traffic thanks to NHSEO, including myself. I have been an internet marketer and SEO for over 6 years professionally and had more than a passing interest before that point so I have plenty of websites that I have done testing with and have not really seen anything to suggest that links will get you penalised (content and on-site factors is a whole different ball game), I have seen an increase of links result in a manual review that has resulted in a penalisation but again it is the content that has been the cause for the penalisation.
In this thread on another forum I posted the results of just over 3 weeks of running NHSEO on 6 profiles, these settings were not changed from default other than to increase the number of threads upto 35-70 posting threads and 5-10 searching threads (I change it depending on my mood). The PR breakdowns of all of these profiles can be seen below:
Profile 1
9/29/2012 2:50 AM | Domain PageRank Breakdown:
PR0: 1936
PR1: 445
PR2: 290
PR3: 228
PR4: 95
PR5: 32
PR6: 9
PR7: 3
PR8: 0
PR9: 0
PR10: 0
Profile 2
9/29/2012 4:44 AM | Domain PageRank Breakdown:
PR0: 1926
PR1: 506
PR2: 291
PR3: 210
PR4: 92
PR5: 32
PR6: 13
PR7: 3
PR8: 0
PR9: 0
PR10: 0
Profile 3
9/29/2012 5:43 AM | Domain PageRank Breakdown:
PR0: 1428
PR1: 338
PR2: 224
PR3: 182
PR4: 85
PR5: 32
PR6: 10
PR7: 4
PR8: 0
PR9: 0
PR10: 0
Profile 4
9/29/2012 7:04 AM | Domain PageRank Breakdown:
PR0: 1180
PR1: 295
PR2: 189
PR3: 144
PR4: 88
PR5: 19
PR6: 11
PR7: 5
PR8: 0
PR9: 0
PR10: 0
Profile 5
9/29/2012 8:15 AM | Domain PageRank Breakdown:
PR0: 1213
PR1: 305
PR2: 205
PR3: 163
PR4: 85
PR5: 29
PR6: 10
PR7: 1
PR8: 0
PR9: 0
PR10: 0
Profile 6
9/29/2012 9:09 AM | Domain PageRank Breakdown:
PR0: 611
PR1: 147
PR2: 107
PR3: 80
PR4: 29
PR5: 13
PR6: 5
PR7: 3
PR8: 0
PR9: 0
PR10: 0
As you can see from the PR breakdown there are more than a handful of very high PR links, how anyone can say that the links are of a low quality such that you would get penalised is absolutely beyond me. If you wanted to you could limit the posting to only get PR1+ or higher links but really that is no good, every website should have a natural looking link profile and this should include more lower PR links than higher.
A natural linking pattern is the key to continued success.
Do you want to see the result these links had on traffic figures? I also posted screenshots of my traffic stats for August against September, this can also be seen below:
August
September
October
As can clearly be seen in the screenshots above the average traffic increased 50% from one month to the next with just NHSEO and no other linking whatsoever. Also it is interesting that the traffic is increasing week to week and the traffic figures in the last week are far higher than the first week so it is likely the figures for next month will be even higher.
When you take into account that only 3 of the profiles were pointing at this domain it is even more striking that the gains could have been bigger had I had all of the links being sent to this one domain.
Also it is important to note that I only started promoting these from the 1st of September so it isn't even like it took a long time for these links to take effect.
I know not everyone will believe what I have posted here as there are so many people posting absolute rubbish about the recent updates so I would like to (as I have on the other forum) offer for
ANY moderator of the forum to jump on my TeamViewer and I will gladly show them my VPS that is still running NHSEO and my website stats and rankings etc to show that I have not just photoshopped an image of my traffic stats.
With all of this laid out it is very clear to me that those that dare say things like NHSEO is damaging or that backlinks are not important these days clearly do not understand the way sites are ranked now. Backlinks are very important and are likely to continue to be an important part of the ranking algorithm for the foreseeable future, it is not just Google that use backlinks as a major factor in deciding where sites should rank, it is pretty much every search engine going right now.