No doubt they have more links but is that actually correlated with their rankings? I say it is very slightly correlated if at all. I think there is another reason why they rank for example the fact that the list of super high authority domains linking to kayak.com is much larger than either cheapflights.com or hipmunk.com. If the pure number of websites linking at the website were highly correlated with results wouldn't we expect cheapflights.com to outperform hipmunk?

Linking root domains:
cheapflights.com = 2,669
hipmunk.com = 1,428

My point is no matter what you do at some point the old school brute force link buying method becomes only a small part of the equation. All the current examples of link buying working are showing it's good at a launching something or ranking a low competition keyword. In scale there are better methods and better uses of money that will have a much more significant impact and also position you well for the direction search is headed in the future. Can you buy an edited well placed high authority link? Probably yes but the internet community is actually a very small place and an action like that is going to carry significant risk. There is no doubt it can work but the risk reward scenario is pretty clear cut right now not to mention Google+, Search Plus Your World all these changes are sending a very clear signal of where the future is headed. Most link buying schemes are going to be high budget and need a big pay off and is that something you want to undertake when you know that there is a limited life span for your ranks? There are much better ways to accomplish the same thing.

Yea, I'd definitely agree that it's going social for sure. I've noticed personally that +1's carry more weight than tweets on my projects, and likes are right behind +1's. You can buy these too if you want to though.

And I agree that pure volume is not a great indicator of top rankings of course. My whole point was basically that a blend of white + other methods will always be better than pure white, and that moz knows this but basically can't admit it at this point. Stuff like 301ing a ton of links through a placeholder domain is a decent strategy right now which Google frowns on (if you use it specifically for that purpose). Still, it works and blended in with hundreds, thousands of other legitimate, quality links it's going to be near impossible for even a manual review to pick it up unless they have a personal vendetta against your site.

To buy links or not? I'm confused as hell on this one. Fwiw I have about 25 very small sites ( relatively speaking) and they're making some money (enough to keep me from working) so getting penalized or de indexed would be pretty painful given the work I've put in so far.

That said, it seems like everyone is buying links. Manual link building is a real pain in the ass and takes forever. Even with making an effort to build links over months I can go and buy more links than I have so far for essentially pennies. I understand spending a lot of money on link building is probably a waste but getting a couple thousand for some sites seems so easy and the cost is so cheap.

I do question what happens when you have a year old site with like 600 links that gets another 1k links over night.

I also have to think it's pretty hard for google to penalize you for link buying since you could just buy links for your competitors if it penalized them.

I guess I'm probably to the point of trying it on a few sites and seeing what happens. I would like to hear more opinions on the practice and any recommendations people have that are actually doing it. Such as strategies for # to buy, providers, etc..

Do people actually get direct traffic from buying 1k links as well or should I not expect any direct traffic and be doing it just to buy a jump in ranking?

Well the point about the manual review is the whole point. You are either small enough to not get noticed or you are big enough that a manual review is inevitable. If you rank enough competitive SERPs eventually someone important will reverse engineer why. Let me ask you this for the manipulation projects you have/work on if you got de-indexed would you:

A. Be seriously impacted either financially like having to layoff employees or have your client be extremely angry with you.
B. Shrug your shoulders and move on to your next project.

Unless you can answer "A" then it's just not the same situation but I deal almost exclusively in situations where being de-indexed is ever an acceptable outcome. I'm not saying every link I get makes the internet a better place but it is also quite a ways away from the kind of manipulation you are talking about. I'm not disagreeing about the SEOmoz bias but doesn't really seem relevant.

You could always hire an SEO firm to do high quality directory submission and guest posts / outreach for you. That way if it works you can scale it and never have to worry about losing your income. Buying 1k links is unlikely to get you links that will actually have an impact long term (if at all) as opposed to buying say a well placed link on a non-spamming site as Rand seems to have done with his experiment.

great post, thanks Chris.

Keep in mind most of what you read isn't worth the bandwith it costs .

I was like WTF is anybody peddling SEO in 2016, then saw OP was in 2011 .

Might have been back then, but lots of things changed.

Cwar. Any chance you can take a look at my AMA in BF&I? I tried making a website but the only visitors it got were from my Facebook pages. You might be interested in doing something together?

I reread it expecting to agree with you but most of the advice I wrote could be written today (not bad for 5 years):
-SEO is producing and using content effectively
-Results go to the winners
-Don't try and cheaply outsource, SEO is a long term investment

It's true this is simple stuff (even for when it was written) but for context in 2011 SEO was the #1 traffic acquisition source and I literally got these questions every day so I wrote a post to simplify explaining it.

Already read it, one of my favorite BFI posts . The type of SEO I did was more about leveraging assets and brand effectively, ie. I could make large Fortune 500 type companies several million dollars in profit at that time in 2011 by leveraging what they have effectively. At one time I probably could have claimed to be a top 50 technical expert globally, I decided to focus more on the corporate game of getting my changes live.

Of course there are ways to break the system but even in 2011 when things were significantly less sophisticated it was becoming less profitable and riskier. Projects I was familiar with would involve putting up $25k-$50k for a $150k-$300k pay off (and some failures) and these days Google is really fast and there are fewer gaps.

I did know a guy though who built a sophisticated link network that literally was Google proof at the time, he sold it for a couple million. It was a team of people, a different version of a small business.

Sent you a PM.

Awesome thread, thanks so much.

Anyone know a way to pay to be featured on blogs to circumvent this rather lengthy process?

Once I have a quality product, I'd much rather pay someone to blog about it than organically grow the stuff in that link. There's so much other organic stuff to worry about, I'm not entirely sure I've got it in me to do that much more.

The trick is paid sponsors feel different than someone organically doing a review, if you pay (and legally you have to disclose) but you do a good job integrating it with the content. When you see the blatantly sponsored Macbook on House, it feels normal because it makes sense. When you see the sharks on Sharktank make an awkward call on the new Nokia blah blah, you roll your eyes and throw up a little in your mouth.

When Joe Rogan talks about Onnit on his podcast which he has a direct financial stake in (and has disclosed) you can still feel his passion for quality performance enhancing products. Whether or not the products are effective his endorsement of them is genuine and you can tell.

Organic is trustworthy because you're leveraging a trusted source who you already engage with. It's human nature. The only reason it doesn't happen with paid is because people get lazy when they are paying, you can still do the same thing. A trusted source can't lend trust if you pay them to do something notably out of their character.

I've done scalable campaigns on both sides, if your cheap sponsorship is paying off, no reason to stop but also I would expect those gaps to close eventually. I made a large company several million setting up a very clever sponsorship campaign that was completely disingenuous, my entire team (including me) quit doing it when it got to a certain point and just stopped taking their money because we didn't want to be associated with it. The long term partnerships between quality content and good product are always the most sustainable however.

Interesting, thanks.

Next maybe super obvious question and the answer is probably in something I once read and forgot:

When I'm using mozbar and checking out the results of my google searches, why would a page with a much higher PA/DA result rank lower than one with a much lower one? The simple answer seems to be something like "Moz's results and Google's results can simply differ". I guess my question at that point then is what's the point of using the Mozbar to begin with? Thanks!

Lots of factors go into a SERP page now. They are very, very diverse reasons why something might rank higher I forget the exact number but I believe there's >200 potential ranking factors. First, it may just be a contextually better page, there may be better engagement metrics (when a user clicks through and immediately backs to the SERP page for another link or search Google will consider that a bad result for the page) and even sometimes Google will test results by promoting diversity so you could have been a split test for the SERP page.

Sometimes lower results get more clicks (tend to be related to indented results).

DA / PA is a key factor and will help you compare directly if you're able to take other factors into account.

Hey dudes have a new theory question. I registered a site like redshoes.ca because of the obvious SEO upside. I do have a slight concern over people getting confused with redshoes.com though since that's not a site I run. My actually company name is Rafikishuz and I own Rafikishuz.ca. So the question is:

Is there any SEO penalty that comes with redirecting Rafikishuz.ca to redshoes.ca, and then it allows me to put Rafikishuz.ca on my business cards and never run the risk of confusing my clients? I'm not looking for SEO advantage, I'm just trying to avoid any disadvantages. Thanks in advance!

Based on the information in your post, I could go point an unlimited amount of domains at those two domains and there would be nothing you could do about it.

So no, it does not impact SEO.

Wife wants me to learn SEO to help promote her fitness site. Guess this is a good place to start.

That makes sense. But by the same logic one of my competitors could just duplicate my site under another URL and hurt me that way, could he/she not?

1. join an MLM
2. spam all your friends on facebook
3. profit


Seriously tho, thanks cwar, this is awesome.

A competitor could also sign you up for a link farm without you having any idea.

If you have a regional based business operating across multiple cities/states is it smart to localize that brand into many sub domains.

EX: TotallyCleanCarpet.com becomes

tampabay.totallycleancarpet.com
miami.totallycleancarpet.com
atlanta.totallycleancarpet.com

Basically this strategy is what is in front of me right now for a business I own in which a company we want to work with has the ability to easily implement branding across many many sites such as the example above, and diversify each site to that market, but as far as I know it will basically be the same website, more or less.

Their strategy is doing the same thing across Facebook and having pages for each city/market. Seems like a franchising strategy, although we are not a franchise. They have a dashboard and proprietary software apparently that allows them to easily disperse facebook posts, blog posts, tweets, etc. across all the multiple sites very easily and create tons of landing and touch pages etc.

Anyways, this is whats in front of me right now and obviously it makes sense but if anyone has any thoughts on this strategy, much appreciated-

Google takes into account .com, .ca, etc. into rankings it's contextually based on the search, for example the Chinese value .cn highly so .cn ranks better for Chinese searches. This is generally a minor factor though. You could potentially run into a trademark issue.

Any time you redirect a website to a new location there is usually a small loss in link value you already had. It also takes time to reindex the site. Relocating a site is usually done incorrectly (without someone like me) and so most site moves I see involve a big cost or significant loss in Domain Authority. A tiny 5 page site could be pretty easy to do though by Googling it yourself.

If you're site was already established at redshoes, there's no SEO disadvantage to redirecting people although it could cause your intended audience some apprehension when your business card URL redirects (the default assumption is many domains are purchased for spam / marketing redirects if they expire).

This is what trademarks are for.

You can actually disavow links to your site now because this was such a common negative SEO strategy.

The most important thing you'll want to do is just manage all your local citations correctly (your own webpage for each location / area of operation, Yext, Yelp, Google Maps, etc.). I'm not current on the best way to do this so you'll definitely want to research a bit. If you had these correct and accurate you'd be ahead of 99% multi-location businesses I've seen.

I'd be pretty skeptical that mass posting across a bunch of social media would create much business. For a carpet cleaning business, social media is generally going to be more of a customer service medium than marketing in my experience. The marketing benefit is really just a credible looking online presence so having all of corporate social media centralized would be better.

Thanks for taking the time. In my case I'm launching a brand new site. I'd like people to be able to reach it two different ways. One way is the URL I've chosen that is the most SEO friendly. The other way is just companyname.ca and I figure it's what I want to put on business cards. companyname.ca would redirect to the URL that has better chances of ranking. Does that make sense?