When Advanced Link Building = no rankings
Preface: I presented this at last year’s SEOmoz’s SEO Conference Mozcon and will be presenting there again this year, so come join me!!!
So guys this morning I’m fired up, I’m fired up because I am seeing clients get smashed by competitors who deploy the lowest of low quality SEO tactics, I’m fired up because I am getting more and more evidence (that post is coming soon) that building links with high quality / high authority domains – without getting some heavy amount of anchor text is STILL a recipe for failure, even though we all know that getting anchor text in the majority of your links is not natural, what are we to do?
I’m watching some crap SEO firm outranking us without a single link that has their brand name as the anchor text, they have no twitter following, no blog readership, no youtube channel, nothing…yet they are outranking so many respected quality firms, its ridiculous. Social signals improve search results? In fringe cases yes, but in a lot of others not seeing it.
So with that said, I wanted to share my presentation from last year’s Mozcon – to show you guys how I presented this issue last year, when I had a client who was getting stomped even after they got links from some of the oldest and most popular publications in the world ( I list those publications in the presentation and in the video). It was painful to see, and I decided to work on reverse engineering (to the best of my ability) search results using SEO tools like open site explorer and majestic SEO. This year I am going back to Seattle and I am back on my SAME crusade…but now I am going to work much deeper on the strategy side…once you see yourself getting killed on directory links…with exact anchor text matches, how do you fight fire with fire in a HIGHER quality way?
The presentation this year is also going to focus on how by taking the higher road you’ll be protecting your rankings for the long haul, but for now guys…all your advanced tools might not mean a thing, simple SEOmoz tools are getting me all the ammo I need to see how I am getting beat and I want to vomit based on what I am seeing…
Here is a video too on me discussing a similar topic:
Posted: 06.23.11
Joel Klettke:
Wish I had been at that presentation. I really like the well-roundedness of this approach. Too many people just spout “GET AUTHORITY LINKS!” when rankings aren’t where you want them to be. High-level strategy, a “game plan”, is what I’d say most link builders completely lack.
Dictina:
On one of my sites I have seen with my own eyes the effect of ‘Nada’ you mentioned in the presentation. A link in an authority sites isn’t what used to be in terms of ranking.
Yousaf:
Would love to get hold of your Excel templates :D
Gab Goldenberg:
Fascinating what you’ve done there with collecting and collating all the data, but it seems all rather tedious and time consuming, especially for smaller campaigns. Any thoughts on that? Genius methodology though in terms of thoroughness and validation of data…
chix:
Well, everyone is jumping into a bandwagon and one should keep up to be able to survive. I know the system is unfair but we have to cope up.
Mark Kennedy:
Hi Wil,
Another good post. While there are a lot of strong SEOs sharing a lot of great an innovative strategies, there is no cookie-cutter approach. And every industry, actually every keyword, needs a custom link-building strategy to be successful. And analyzing the competition is the one of the best ways to start.
What I really liked is that video you shared. It’s a great blueprint (especially for smaller businesses) for competition research. Maybe you can turn it into a blog post itself. Don’t bother to analyze the listings for your targeted terms that are big brands, wikipedia or exact match domains, but instead analyze the more direct competitors and take from that what you can get, or at lease some concepts of what may work for you. It’s a brainstorming session in itself.
Adrian Drysdale:
It’s a killer. I spent a week chasing up the BBC for a link, finally got it… I thought this was ‘the one’, not a single boost. I could of spent that week targeting 10-15 mid range bloggers and prob would of gotten better results in the long run.
Adrian Drysdale:
@Wil what do you think? Quantity or quality?
Jon Payne:
This is perhaps my favorite topic right now, and I’ve preached the same message many times. Often what should be seen as high-quality links aren’t having the impact they “should” have. Instead, what should be seen as low-quality links are more impactful. What’s an SEO firm to do? We want to be high-end and future-proof, but at the same point we need to get results as well.
Wil Reynolds:
@Jon I couldn’t agree more, while everyone is going batty over social’s impact on SEO no one’s talking about how many quality sites are getting beat every day by people who are just buying links left and right.
Wil Reynolds:
@joel we learned this by messing up and relying too much on authority links, so if anything this was learning from mistakes.
@dictina to be honest I think authority links have never had the weight in the algo I think they deserve but that is likely b/c the guys at google are much smarter than I am and they realize that a link from a place like that would cause some other downside.
@yousaf – Mark posted it here I believe: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/how-are-they-beating-you-quick-seo-analysis-tools-part-1/2010/08/12/
@gab – come on dude you know me…api’s power the who thing kiddo :) It runs in 2 minutes, tehn we export to excel and run a macro on it to format it – 30 seconds for that too.
@mark – thats where I come from buddy….nothing cookie cutter – ask your client a ton of questions to get to know them so you can make an actual unique link building strategy.
@adrian, isn’t that the sad part….you do what we are “told” we should do….work your tail off and…NADA, poof, nothing. I wish more people talked about this.
Branko:
I applaud you on your attitude. Instead of whining on how Google is not fair, how spammers suck, you saw an opportunity to learn and grow and make your linkbuilding even better. Wish more of the people in the industry would take the same approach!
AnonSeo:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, anonymously.
Grey hat SEO is the way to go. By the time you try white hat campaigns out, the industry changes or the technology or the service offering or the product. I crush white hat sites all day long as they try to justify their approach to “be able sleeping at night” where I launch grey hat campaigns (paid paid paid, paid everything) and I make my money and get first mover. When the campaign is solid and established, I start backing out the grey parts. Yes, my stuff can always get nuked. It’s a chance I take.
Sorry, Rand, et al. White hat just never worked for me.
(Praying that this post doesn’t somehow hurt me. My big mouth gets me into trouble).
Adrian Drysdale:
@AnonSeo I wouldn’t go to that extreme but I hear what you are saying. Link building wise you can get away with a lot because if you buy a few spammy links here and there and you suddenly start to drop in rankings.. well why not do the same thing to your competitors? For this reason I’m seeing Google not penalising sites for bad links. BUT you can be damn sure that Google will penalise you for onsite things such as keyword stuffing, link farming, doorway pagesetc etc.
That’s my opinion anyway.
Sarfaraz SEO:
Regarding Adrian Drysdale’s question, i think in the present situation getting huge amount low quality links and socialize the website on networking websites create more impact rather to have links from quality websites.