4 ms·

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

by Trundle 10y ago

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.
- rhizome 10y ago
  unless your budget, I suppose, is absolutely astronomical and you spend years and millions of dollars to build a brand In which case, you'd probably be better off using your budget to purchase placement from Google[1], which causes the ratchet to tighten. The future of Google Search looks grim and portal-like. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915016
- paulcole 10y ago
  > SEO does not work that well anymore A more accurate statement would be: 2005-2007 SEO does not work that well anymore.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    What's the guide to 2017 SEO? As far as I can tell, it involves a) begging for links; b) buying links; c) gradually building your own private link ring of "content sites" so that you don't have to do a and b so much. Outside of SEO, now popular is also fake social media profiles. What's the guidebook there to "Social Media Optimization" (I'm sure there's a real acronym for that by now), and how are Facebook/Twitter policing their datasets to prevent spam and fraud? afaict they're not, beyond basic anti-scraping methods like blocking anonymous proxies, etc. Not trying to be aggressive, just really don't think that there is any reasonable way to do organic internet marketing anymore. It all boils down to either spam or advertisements. Spam (used broadly here to include astroturfing, PBNs, etc.) is the more effective solution by far, which means if you don't do it, you'll lose to the competitor who will. I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO, but on further inspection, they're just referring to using all of their clients' sites to link back to each other and insisting that they're the only ones who know how to do this. It is true that an SEO firm's rate may be worthwhile if it buys you access to a well-governed link ring, but personally I'm skeptical of the abilities of anyone who has chosen to be involved in that type of career path. It's usually sales types who think they're good at computers, i.e., people who don't really have any idea what they're doing beyond convincing someone to pay them money.
    - 10y ago

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

by Trundle 10y ago

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

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.

rhizome 10y ago
unless your budget, I suppose, is absolutely astronomical and you spend years and millions of dollars to build a brand In which case, you'd probably be better off using your budget to purchase placement from Google[1], which causes the ratchet to tighten. The future of Google Search looks grim and portal-like. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13915016
paulcole 10y ago
> SEO does not work that well anymore A more accurate statement would be: 2005-2007 SEO does not work that well anymore.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  What's the guide to 2017 SEO? As far as I can tell, it involves a) begging for links; b) buying links; c) gradually building your own private link ring of "content sites" so that you don't have to do a and b so much. Outside of SEO, now popular is also fake social media profiles. What's the guidebook there to "Social Media Optimization" (I'm sure there's a real acronym for that by now), and how are Facebook/Twitter policing their datasets to prevent spam and fraud? afaict they're not, beyond basic anti-scraping methods like blocking anonymous proxies, etc. Not trying to be aggressive, just really don't think that there is any reasonable way to do organic internet marketing anymore. It all boils down to either spam or advertisements. Spam (used broadly here to include astroturfing, PBNs, etc.) is the more effective solution by far, which means if you don't do it, you'll lose to the competitor who will. I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO, but on further inspection, they're just referring to using all of their clients' sites to link back to each other and insisting that they're the only ones who know how to do this. It is true that an SEO firm's rate may be worthwhile if it buys you access to a well-governed link ring, but personally I'm skeptical of the abilities of anyone who has chosen to be involved in that type of career path. It's usually sales types who think they're good at computers, i.e., people who don't really have any idea what they're doing beyond convincing someone to pay them money.
  - 10y ago