6 ms·

Ask HN: How do SEO consultants get backlinks?

• patio11 13y ago
  Most people who claim to be able to rank for arbitrary keywords are lying. Of the universe of people selling SEO services who also do link-building (n.b. not co-extensive), common ways to acquire links include: 1) Content marketing 2) Guest posting 3) Buying links 4) Private I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine arrangements 5) Comment spamming 6) Controlling authoritative sites which can link to their own/client sites 7) Classical linkbuilding -- sending out lots of emails to people with related or unrelated websites asking them to link to your site These include several tactics which Google publicly discourages. You can automate or semi-automate portions of all of these strategies. It is really, really important that you understand the following sentence: Google will eventually describe as black hat any SEO strategy which both a) works and b) can be scaled algorithmically. Content marketing is, on current guidance from Big Daddy G, pretty lily white, but if you figure out a way how to do it such that you rank for [student credit cards] and [canon ink cartridge], your tactic will eventually receive adversarial attention from Google. If you had a client which was a painting service, you'd probably say "Look, you don't really want to rank for [painting service] worldwide. You want to rank for [painting service] in Worchestershire, which is the only region you actually service. We're going to do some table stakes onpage SEO to make that happen, make sure your Google Local data is accurate, and then try to solicit a few dozen links to your page via methods you don't care about. This will make you enough money to justify the $X00 I'm going to ask from you monthly for this." The answer is slightly more interesting if you're in more competitive markets than painting services in Worchestershire.
• RealGeek 13y ago
  Most of the SEO consultants are selling nicely packaged snake oil. Many get links by blog comments, forum and directory spamming. But, there are few good consultants as well and they use several creative and hard ways to build links. Following are some of the effective white hat link building practices: 1) Competition research: Find out your competitors backlinks using a tool like http://www.ranksignals.com http://www.ranksignals.com, and try to get backlinks from their sources. This is easy and highly effective. (Disclosure: http://www.ranksignals.com http://www.ranksignals.com is my product) 2) Content Marketing / Guest Posting: Ask relevant bloggers in your niche if you could write a blog post on their website. They usually credit you with a link. 3) Infographics: Create an awesome infographics and spread it around the web. Don't forgot to provide an embed code with a backlink on your website. If you get enough bloggers sharing it on their blog, you will have lots of relevant links. 4) Sponsor contests and giveaway: Reach out to high quality blogs and offer them to sponsor contest with a giveaway of your product. This is almost free to you if you have a digital product / service. 5) Create an awesome design and submit it to all the design showcase websites like Dribble, Behance, Deviantart and hundreds of other web design galleries. These are hundreds of easy links right of the bat. Moreover, popular web design blogs (like SmashingMagazine) may pick your website and link to you; these blogs usually have very high PR.
  • matryoshka 13y ago
    These are brilliant suggestions. All of them are worth investing your time in as they will pay back in high quality backlinks - the ones that do make a difference in Google rankings.
  • notastartup 13y ago
    absolute gold. upvoted
• stevekemp 13y ago
  I run http://blogspam.net/ http://blogspam.net/ which is a service which filters blog-comments in real-time for a "spam vs. ok?" result. The submission of comments is relentless, and automated. I can see the very same comment submitted to 100+ blogs from 50+ IP addresses, in almost real-time. I've no idea what software is being used, to spider blogs, identify submission-forms, and mass-submit, but I see evidence of it daily. This comment-spam stuff is supposed to be bad, supposed to be marked down by Google, and others, but given the sheer amount of comment-spam out there I can only imagine it works pretty well.
  • mhoad 13y ago
    The tool you are thinking of is called XRumer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer) and it is the bane of the internet and the industry. Steer clear of it is my only recommendation.
    • stevekemp 13y ago
      Given my preference for blocking/detecting its submissions I'm not likely to have any use for it - but regardless thanks for the pointer.
• mhoad 13y ago
  So I have done SEO at enterprise level for many years now (i.e. not the snake oil that is commonly labeled as SEO). My first piece of advice would be to not under any circumstances go with what you are suggesting by creating your own artificial link network. Not only will it not work but it will more than likely hurt you significantly. In fact I would go as far to say the same thing about all link networks, they are a ticking time bomb that will be waiting to blow up in your face. My personal suggestion for someone who is fairly new to this is to take a look at http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies for what I consider to be the most comprehensive list of link building strategies on the net. You can also get a feel for what the value of each of these strategies would be there as well (for your own sake, avoid the low quality ones, they too are a ticking time bomb). Also for what it's worth trying to include your keywords in the anchor text of these links is waaay less important now (thankfully) than it used to be. A general rule of thumb I follow is if it looks out of place then don't do it. 7/10 I am perfectly happy to just have my brand name or URL as the anchor text to my website.