Where to get links?

[wonder_lander]

I don't have time (or the energy) to trawl the web looking for sites that are in a simialr niche to beg/buy a link from so what options does that leave me with?

I see on various forums people selling links backed up with wiki links and blasts but that sounds all to spammy and messy to me. Has anyone bought one of these packages and had decent results?

Since the recent spate of Google Algo changes I've had a few sites drop down to mid page 1 for they main keyword and one has gone to the top of page 2. I'm looking on the best way I can to boost their rankings back up!

If important the niches are:
Cooking/Catering
Car Related
Wedding Related
Photography

I guess as this forum is mainly related to domain trading this may not be the ideal place to ask but I thought I'd try you guys first before wandering into somewhere like the Warrior Forum or Wicked Fire!

 

[Edwin]

If the Google algorithm update has taught people ANYTHING it's that short-cuts don't work. TANSTAAFL applies to SEO too.

Build links the "hard way" if you want to have any chance at success. Google has declared war on all the spammy ways to grow link profiles, and you can bet if a particular process hasn't been penalised today there are a bunch of very, very bright PhDs in Google Towers working on it right now so that it will be factored in tomorrow...

 

[wonder_lander]

Thanks for the reply Edwin and that's exactly my thoughts too. I just wondered whether there was any merit in these types of packages but it certainly sounds like there isn't.

I guess the same can be said of people selling posts on private blog networks too?

For someone who doesn't have the time to do link building the old fashion way but isn't wedged enough to spunk a load of cash at a pro-SEO company what are the options?! Obviously there will be a "cost" to any kind of sub contracted service but are we talking £50 per month, £150 per month or £500 per month?!

When I look a the poeple ranking above me I can see that alot have crappy blogroll links but again I thought these were dead and buried now?!

 

[retired_member34]

TANSTAAFL

I had to look that up...

It is frustrating when you have a decent site being out ranked by others using suspect link building methods but unless you want to suffer this problem every time Google rolls out an update then you just have to forget any quick "methods".

 

[Edwin]

For someone who doesn't have the time to do link building the old fashion way but isn't wedged enough to spunk a load of cash at a pro-SEO company what are the options?! Obviously there will be a "cost" to any kind of sub contracted service but are we talking £50 per month, £150 per month or £500 per month?!

"Give up" is option C).

There's no dodging the hard work, either by yourself or by paying others to put in the effort on your behalf. Google has seen to that.

If you need some ideas re. link building, have a look at http://www.incominglinks.com/ (a site I put together a few years back). The directory section is bound to be out of date, but the tactics never really change.

 

[Blossom]

The directory section is bound to be out of date, but the tactics never really change.

Be careful which directories you're submitting to - Google has cracked down on a lot of them, others are never updated, and you could easily waste a lot of time thinking you 'must have' got a lot of good links. The ones which rank the best very rarely pass the best benefits on.

 

[Edwin]

Be careful which directories you're submitting to - Google has cracked down on a lot of them, others are never updated, and you could easily waste a lot of time thinking you 'must have' got a lot of good links. The ones which rank the best very rarely pass the best benefits on.

Hence why I talked about the "tactics". If you check out the site, you'll see that everything I advocate is white hat.

 

[Blossom]

Hence why I talked about the "tactics". If you check out the site, you'll see that everything I advocate is white hat.

Not sure what your white hat comment is in reference to

I checked out your site - your methods are good for fishing out the highest-ranking directories, but those aren't are strongly correlated with being the ones that pass the most juice any more.

 

[Brassneck]

I don't have time (or the energy) to trawl the web looking for sites that are in a simialr niche to beg/buy a link from so what options does that leave me with?

I see on various forums people selling links backed up with wiki links and blasts but that sounds all to spammy and messy to me. Has anyone bought one of these packages and had decent results?

Since the recent spate of Google Algo changes I've had a few sites drop down to mid page 1 for they main keyword and one has gone to the top of page 2. I'm looking on the best way I can to boost their rankings back up!

If important the niches are:
Cooking/Catering
Car Related
Wedding Related
Photography

I guess as this forum is mainly related to domain trading this may not be the ideal place to ask but I thought I'd try you guys first before wandering into somewhere like the Warrior Forum or Wicked Fire!

At the moment, I think guest posts / articles seems to be one of the safest approaches judging by the approaches we get from SEO companies. However in many cases you will still have to pay to get your article published although some might want to exchange articles if you have other sites to offer something back.

If you PM can give you some suggestions.

Stephen.

 

[Jamie101]

At the moment, I think guest posts / articles seems to be one of the safest approaches judging by the approaches we get from SEO companies. However in many cases you will still have to pay to get your article published although some might want to exchange articles if you have other sites to offer something back.

If you PM can give you some suggestions.

Stephen.

Guest posting is something that I've recently started doing lately. I'd recommend that everyone uses myblogguest.com , it's really good although it takes a bit of time to find the decent blogs that are related to your niche.

 

[chippyb]

Yep and be carfully if you do use someone as they could just ruin all your rankings like someone has just for me!

 

[retired_member36]

Yep and be carfully if you do use someone as they could just ruin all your rankings like someone has just for me!

Sorry to hear that mate (Hope its rectifiable),

Its what puts me off getting someone else to do any link building for me because at the end of the day they only care about the money they are getting and often disappear by the time your penalised.

Doing the work your self is very tedious and time consuming but atleast you know the ins and outs of your link building stratedgy.

 

[chippyb]

I hope it is to.

I have been emailing them being pretty cross as this was a good earner of a site, with plenty of keywords in the rankings, about 24 or so. They have said to me its the google dance, I said bull shit as all of the rankings have dropped well over 100 places each over night.

Im now in the middle of trying to write a lot of content for the site to hopefully cheer up the search engine. best leave the link building for a while now.

 

[wonder_lander]

Cheers for the useful discussion guys.

As I say I'm not necessarily looking for shrot cuts put certainly looking at ways of focusing my link building efforts from an outsourcing perspective.

Guest blog posting looks like a very useful method and should suit our types of sites quite well.

 

[Sussexite]

There's no escaping that some work will be involved.

But one really good link is worth a large number of poorer links and won't necessarily take you longer to get.

And don't waste your time getting spammy links.

If you are confident that your site is worth linking to, then you should concentrate what time you have on getting a small number of really good links from relevant authority sites / pages that will stand the test of time. Even if it means writing a page for the sole purpose of getting a link to your site from them.

One way of looking at it is to try to get the #1 best link that each of your competitors has for example. If you achieve that, then you will go a long way with relatively little effort.

 

[wonder_lander]

One way of looking at it is to try to get the #1 best link that each of your competitors has for example. If you achieve that, then you will go a long way with relatively little effort.

How do you do this?

I have a subscription to Majestic SEO and I also have Advanced Web Ranking.
The sites higher than me in the serps are things like wikipedia and the bbc.

 

[Sussexite]

How do you do this?

I have a subscription to Majestic SEO and I also have Advanced Web Ranking.
The sites higher than me in the serps are things like wikipedia and the bbc.

If the only sites above you are wikipedia and the BBC then you have beaten all your beatable competitors and should start to look at ranking for longer-tail and related phrases too and adopt the same approach to your competitors there.

You need to use imagination and persistence to link build. Aaron Wall (SEO Book) reckoned that only 1 in 15 attempts to get a link is succesful and that's probably about right.

re the How Do You Do This? - can't be answered in one post It's a massive subject and you're going to have to do some studying rather than hope that someone will say "this is the answer". If you need to learn about SEO then you should start reading sites like

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

and the many other excellent resources out there - many of which you will find by reading some of the threads on the SEO section of Acorn.

 

[Blossom]

There are a few tricks for Wikipedia, but none of them are in any way ethical.

 

[Edwin]

There are a few tricks for Wikipedia, but none of them are in any way ethical.

Not strictly true. There is a way that's perfectly ok, but it will take REAL work and it only works for certain topics.

Basically, you have to identify a relevant Wikipedia article that already has a number of quotations with attributions in the form of external links, then author a white paper or case study that would slot into the topic of the article, and pull out a highly relevant quote from the document. You can then embed this additional quote in the Wikipedia article, with appropriate "credit" (i.e. a link back to the white paper page on your website).

However, this will only work for topics where a white paper or case study would be a natural thing to expect, and where you can advance the subject with some genuinely "novel" information that's not just a rewrite of somebody else's article.

 

[chippyb]

Is there anything you can do if a company ruins you site and loses all your rankings?