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The niche that my startup operated in was eventually shut down, but we had a very similar situation. I emailed other sites and asked them to include a link (man

The niche that my startup operated in was eventually shut down, but we had a very similar situation. I emailed other sites and asked them to include a link (many replied back asking for compensation, which, according to Google policies, should've been nofollowed, i.e., made not to count for SEO), bought ads on private niche-specific sites/podcasts, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I also paid someone to write "high-quality content", which Google claims is the #1 way to rank, for months. In the big picture, these strategies are very expensive and not effective at all. We had about a one year head start and were the only place that provided the service we offered. Eventually, a (bad) competitor showed up. They engaged heavily in spammy SEO tactics and social media astroturfing and surpassed us within a couple of months, even though their product worked only 10-15% of the time. We refused to engage in those spammy tactics. Partially out of principle and partially out of just not having interest in that muck, as it's not remotely attractive to people who are used to being honest and doing meaningful non-spam work. But that decision absolutely did cost us. My advice is to think carefully about what may actually be over the line and what you've been socialized to believe is "uncool" or "distasteful". Then do those "uncool" things without making much noise about it (potentially even making some noise against it). Like everything else, there is the written rulebook and then there is the way things are actually done. Business is competitive and if you're not taking every advantage you can, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch. You have to be aggressive. That's hard to internalize (for me, it's taken multiple significant business failures), but it's crucially important to be successful. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. As for Google and SEO in general, every successful firm is at least "grey hat"; they're absolutely leveraging their portfolio as a "private blog network" (that is, a large, high-quality link ring) and otherwise regularly doing things that are borderline or off-book. If you grill them long enough, you can get close to having them admit this. Google has been totally and completely gamed for years. You have to know that going in. If you're dependent on SEO, you're going to have to play the SEO games with all of their uncomely accouterments, or your business will lose out to someone else. It's really that simple, and no one wants to admit it. All these people say these tactics only work for "a little while", but they're mostly wrong; unless you're being blatant, it seems to be quite easy to hide from Google's spam team. The real thing here is that Google is ripe for disruption. Virtually every query you input is going to be based on someone's application of SEO strategies meant to trick Google instead of based on the ultimate relevance/quality of the content.

Trundle 10y ago
Buying links wasn't effective? That's like 80% of SEO if you have any sort of budget to work with.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I didn't buy links because they weren't SEO-legal, and because, to be honest, most people wanted an affiliate-style program to share the link. I tried to work that out with someone and they went dark and tried to launch a clone of our service (which failed after about a month) instead. After that, I didn't spend much more time manually requesting links back. Whenever I did, I was always met with either no response at all or requests for money. Note that I was not really "link building" in the conventional SEO sense of emailing 1000 webmasters each week and getting 5 of them to add me back. I was just propositioning sites that I thought would have interested readers, under the naive assumption that they mostly wanted to be a useful resource to their readers. I could've bought links in one of the various ways that's done: an SEO firm, a blackhat forum, etc., but I was naive and wanted to believe that word of mouth + social media + high-quality offerings and content would take us the rest of the way without making us a dirty "link buyer" who would surely get caught and destroyed by Google. The competitor showed up and quickly demonstrated that none of that mattered (they actually didn't have any content at all, and ranked with about 4 pages total on their site). With a professional spam operation, you can rocket to the top pretty easily.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  SEO does not work that well anymore, unless your budget, I suppose, is absolutely astronomical and you spend years and millions of dollars to build a brand http://greyenlightenment.com/seo-is-a-waste-of-time-and-money/ http://greyenlightenment.com/seo-is-a-waste-of-time-and-mone... Even though SEO does not work well, my advice is don't buy links from link brokers...they won't work, and such services are almost always a scam. The websites selling the links have inflated/useless metrics... Hiring an SEO agency also not worth it, unless you have millions of dollars. Any mid tier SEO service is almost is guaranteed to be a scam. They will bill you $2,000/month for links they buy for $200 that you can buy yourself. Buying links off forums worked well in 2005-2007 before Google cracked down and removed the pagerank metrics. Zillow can spend millions buying links to rank for all the real estate and mortgage keywords, because they have a blank check. Few have that privilege. In 2005-2007 SEO was much easier..now all those techniques no longer work well. The problem is google changed their algos to discount links from many sites (such as Reddit and elsewhere); second, they have put much more emphasis on domain-niche authority. That means, if you write a viral article about daytrading and it gets shared and voted thousands of time on a social media sites, it may temporarily get a good SEO boost for those competitive keywords, but then slide back to page 8 or so. A the old, established daytrading sites established news websites will outrank, due to authority.

Trundle 10y ago

Buying links wasn't effective? That's like 80% of SEO if you have any sort of budget to work with.

cookiecaper 10y ago
I didn't buy links because they weren't SEO-legal, and because, to be honest, most people wanted an affiliate-style program to share the link. I tried to work that out with someone and they went dark and tried to launch a clone of our service (which failed after about a month) instead. After that, I didn't spend much more time manually requesting links back. Whenever I did, I was always met with either no response at all or requests for money. Note that I was not really "link building" in the conventional SEO sense of emailing 1000 webmasters each week and getting 5 of them to add me back. I was just propositioning sites that I thought would have interested readers, under the naive assumption that they mostly wanted to be a useful resource to their readers. I could've bought links in one of the various ways that's done: an SEO firm, a blackhat forum, etc., but I was naive and wanted to believe that word of mouth + social media + high-quality offerings and content would take us the rest of the way without making us a dirty "link buyer" who would surely get caught and destroyed by Google. The competitor showed up and quickly demonstrated that none of that mattered (they actually didn't have any content at all, and ranked with about 4 pages total on their site). With a professional spam operation, you can rocket to the top pretty easily.
paulpauper 10y ago
SEO does not work that well anymore, unless your budget, I suppose, is absolutely astronomical and you spend years and millions of dollars to build a brand http://greyenlightenment.com/seo-is-a-waste-of-time-and-money/ http://greyenlightenment.com/seo-is-a-waste-of-time-and-mone... Even though SEO does not work well, my advice is don't buy links from link brokers...they won't work, and such services are almost always a scam. The websites selling the links have inflated/useless metrics... Hiring an SEO agency also not worth it, unless you have millions of dollars. Any mid tier SEO service is almost is guaranteed to be a scam. They will bill you $2,000/month for links they buy for $200 that you can buy yourself. Buying links off forums worked well in 2005-2007 before Google cracked down and removed the pagerank metrics. Zillow can spend millions buying links to rank for all the real estate and mortgage keywords, because they have a blank check. Few have that privilege. In 2005-2007 SEO was much easier..now all those techniques no longer work well. The problem is google changed their algos to discount links from many sites (such as Reddit and elsewhere); second, they have put much more emphasis on domain-niche authority. That means, if you write a viral article about daytrading and it gets shared and voted thousands of time on a social media sites, it may temporarily get a good SEO boost for those competitive keywords, but then slide back to page 8 or so. A the old, established daytrading sites established news websites will outrank, due to authority.