Link Building

[Minnsy]

Hi,

Firstly I am not an expert in SEO or link building, so excuse ignorance.

Colleague of mine has around 600 websites (all English language), he is not based in the UK, but in Europe. His sites cover a fairly wide range of topics, and as such in the past has used these sites to help companies improve their rankings, by linking from his relevent sites to theirs. He has case studies where rankings have dramatically increased by this activity. He is not looking for reciprocal linking.

What I am asking is

a) How important is linking when it comes down to ranking?
b) Do you think what he has is of value/interest to companies, assuming there is relevance btw the sites being linked?
c) If what he has is of value, would you target SEO companies or site owners for the service?
d) Do people pay for just linking, or is it normally wrapped up in the whole SEO deal?

I know this will probably raise a whole heap of questions, happy to try to answer them, but really looking for a top level set of answers to the questions above to see if this has any legs or not...

Thanks

David

 

[ShoppingVouchers]

I'm not the most experienced SEOer, but I'll have a bash at answer these questions:

a) Very important, links from relevant sources, with relevant anchor text is vital in any campaign.
b) Depends on the quality of the sources, many companies offering this service will advertise it by saying "100 sites, PR2+, all different IPs" or some such nonsense, but people are willing to give anything a try it seems, so yes it will be of interest.
c) I'd target SEO companies if you don't want to do much work for little profit, or target customers if you're willing to chase them down.
d) Yes they do, I've never paid for links, but lots of people do.

 

[petera]

a. Link building is the most important SEO fastor after on-page optimisation
b. By the sound of things what he has is potentially very valuable. Of course it depends on a number of factors eg, pagerank of those websites, subject, structure etc.
c. I would recommend targeting SEO companies as they are more likely to appreciate the value and potential benefit of what he has. Also, the majority of companies who are serious about SEO will do it through an agency.
d. Yes, peple pay for link building either as part of an SEO package or as a standalone service. It's a big industry.

The links from these websites would have to be provided in the right way for them to be of maximum value ie. embedded within a body of content, article or review, rather than just a sidebar link or a listing on a links page.

I'd be interested to know more about the websites your 'friend' has. Could you PM me some more details?

 

[david64]

a) How important is linking when it comes down to ranking?

Very important. If you competitors have more and better links than you or you are up against authority sites, you need links - end of story.

b) Do you think what he has is of value/interest to companies, assuming there is relevance btw the sites being linked?

Getting links on all of his sites will likely help your search engines rankings. if the sites are all established + non-spam sites they will provide good increase in rankings whether the sites are related or not. What he is proposing is not in the Google guidelines though. He proposition is something which is being solely done to manipulate search rankings. You won't get penalised, but his sites might depending on how thin and out of place the links to your site are.

c) If what he has is of value, would you target SEO companies or site owners for the service?

What he is offering is best to keep under the counter as if word get out about it Google might deflate his sites in a number of ways.

d) Do people pay for just linking, or is it normally wrapped up in the whole SEO deal?

Yes. People pay for just linking. Some people pay in excess of £5,000 / month for links. The most I have ever known is 35,000 Euros per month for 8 sites.

 

[jason830]

Link is very important, you know the pr is reck with backlink, quality and quantity.but if you paid for the link,when google find it, it will have a bad effect for your site.

 

[I, Brian]

Links are significantly important, but are very conditional both in terms of the websites linking, the website being linked to, the competitiveness of the keywords, and possibly also the spread of IP's - amongst other factors.

If someone is hosting all 600 websites on a single server, the linking value could be extremely limited, as Google has patents going back to around the year 2000 dealing with methods for filtering out links where they originate from too close an IP range.

Also - once someone advertises publicly that they have a network of websites, they invite closer attention from Google, and devaluation and potential penalties as well.

Feel free to PM me and I'll be happy to provide a few helpful pointers where I can.

 

[david64]

Google has patents going back to around the year 2000 dealing with methods for filtering out links where they originate from too close an IP range.

I was speaking to someone in hosting who said that the there isn't so much of an issue now regarding SE rankings and having links from too many sites from class C IP ranges due to the new hosting environments that hosts large amounts of sites on one IP and the dwindling number of IPs in IPv4.

I've also ran some tests with sites linking to another sites on the same IP and it doesn't seem to make much difference. I'm not sure how far that can be pushed, but I've seen sites in the adult sector that have links from over 1,000 domains on the same IP.

Also - once someone advertises publicly that they have a network of websites, they invite closer attention from Google, and devaluation and potential penalties as well.

Indeed. If this was offered openly as a service, it would only be so long before Google devalued the sites in some way. If they are think sites that only exist for manipulating search rankings, they would be de-indexed, if they were non-commercial sites they would have their PR lowered and they might possibly get away with it if they were business sites.

 

[Hotel_tour]

[FONT=&quot]Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your site FROM other sites on the Web. Building links is one of the most important factors in being paid to website top placements on the most important search engines.

Thanks
[/FONT]

 

[ScottWood]

It would be more worthwhile for your friend to have 20 well optimised, regularly updated sites than 600 !

But yes, linking is extremely important to improve search engine rankings!

 

[Ali-v-8]

links are one of the factors to be taken into consideration by an SEO.
One bit of advice i would give is be very careful about paid links.

make sure that your internal linking is good and it will help when your external links kick in.

 

[emmadean]

My boss before has this network of sites and I could not understand why he has these until I realized that it will be used for link building. But of course these sites should be optimized first to see the benefits of it.

 

[Minnsy]

Hi, and thanks for all replies. Colleague's company provides generic SEO services, of which link building is major part. I am waiting on him to get back to me with some further info, and then will get back to you as to how this might proceed. Let me stress that I am not an expert in this field, but certainly based on the results and success he has with clients where there is valid and justifiable reason to link, the results have been excellent.

Thanks again for input/info.

David

 

[websitedesign]

Links don't bring in traffic if they are from directories or crap sites

that nobody visits.

It's all about the quality of the links and knowing where to find them.

Do some research into your keywords/industry/competition/customers/etc and

you'll probably find some great links out there that will bring in great traffic!

 

[websitedesign]

Links don't bring in traffic if they are from directories or crap sites that nobody visits.

It's all about the quality of the links and knowing where to find them.

Do some research into your keywords/industry/competition/customers/etc and
you'll probably find some great links out there that will bring in great traffic!

 

[I, Brian]

I was speaking to someone in hosting who said that the there isn't so much of an issue now regarding SE rankings and having links from too many sites from class C IP ranges due to the new hosting environments that hosts large amounts of sites on one IP and the dwindling number of IPs in IPv4.

I've also ran some tests with sites linking to another sites on the same IP and it doesn't seem to make much difference. I'm not sure how far that can be pushed, but I've seen sites in the adult sector that have links from over 1,000 domains on the same IP.

Heh, webhosts tend to be extremely clueless about SEO - however, the point about how much if any filtering goes on at the IP level is certainly an interesting discussion.

I've had other respectable SEO's say they've seen signals suggesting that Google does not devalue links within the same C class - but nowadays there are so many different signals Google could use to determine if all websites are on the same server, with same ownership, etc, and apply filters accordingly.

Even still, I would be tempted to side with the argument that C class filtering may not take place - but even still, I would recommend a good spread of links from a range of sources, locations, etc, as a method of best practice.