Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Ok, Ok… So I lied about all the other stuff. What can I say… All of that social crap is BS. It’s all about the backlinks. LOL…
No seriously, the social stuff works ‘ok’ and is going to be super important in the future. Right now, however; it’s all about the backlinks, still. Depending on who you listen to and what blogs you visit, you may be surprised by what I’m about to tell you.
…You WILL FAIL at SEO if you play by the rules.
I know SEOmoz and the other authority SEO figureheads tell you to write wonderful content and sprinkle some fairy dust, and everything will be ok. But the reality is you have to take link building into your own hands and manufacture your own link profile. White-hat sites that just publish articles and hold out link bait still get penalized like black-hat sites.
If you try to rank for competitive keywords wearing a white hat, you can do that, but it’s going to take you a long time and a ton of cash. So ranking is all about the backlinks, and you DO have to build them yourself. Now there are two types of backlinks:
CONVENTIONAL BACKLINKS & HIGH PR BACKLINKS
High PR backlinks will account for about 70% or more of your rankings. Conventional backlinks will account for about 30% of your backlinks. Google has a PR (Page Rank) system, and they’ve had it for a very long time. Since its inception, it really hasn’t changed all that much.
While everyone else has been running around like headless chickens from link source to link source after Google has (weakened) each one (web2.0s/article directories), me and the other ‘cool kids’ have been dominating with high PR links.
It’s very simple. Google assigns a Page Rank score out of 10 to every domain and page on the Internet. The higher the PR, the better. Page Rank flows through all links. So if you have a link on a PR5 page, your page might become PR3 because of the ‘link juice’ that flows through the link from the PR5 page. Most link juice remains on the page, while some flows through outgoing links.
You have to get links from actual pages with Page Rank. If a domain like Blogger.com is PR8 and you create a backlink from a blogger blog like Blogger.com/my-awesome-blog/ — you won’t have a PR8 backlink. You’ll have a PR0 backlink. All pages start with no Page Rank. A link from a high PR domain does not mean it’s a high PR backlink; it has to be from the actual page with PR.
Even though a page might not have high PR, since PR flows through all links, the PR from the homepage might flow through to your new PR0 page and eventually turn it into a PR1 or 2 or 3. Which is why you should always get backlinks from high PR domains and pages when you can.
Getting backlinks from high PR pages can be very difficult or expensive. On top of getting high PR backlinks, you need RELEVANT backlinks. This means getting backlinks from pages with relevant content to your site. So if you run a colon cleanse site, get links from pages about colon cleansing.
Lastly, you need mostly contextual backlinks, which means links from within content.
CONVENTIONAL BACKLINKS
If you can’t buy high PR links, you can start with the next best thing: getting backlinks from high PR domains. You do this with:
- Web2.0s (like hubpages.com and blogger.com)
- Wikis
- Article Directories (like EzineArticles.com and Articlebase.com)
- Social Networks (like Facebook, Twitter)
- Social Bookmarking Sites (like Diigo & Delicious)
- Document Sharing Sites (like Scribd.com & Issuu.com)
These kinds of links are all PR0 to start with. However, they often obtain PR1 & 2 by themselves over time, especially when you build second-tier links to them. Even if they don’t gain any PR, they are great for diversifying your link profile and anchor text profile (to make your site look natural).
In 2013, anchor text has become extremely important. Google is watching anchor text like a hawk. If they see your links have an unnatural (15%+) level of exact keyword anchor text, they might penalize you. Penalties are being dished out to websites like they’ve never been before in the whole of SEO history.
So the first main element of link building in 2013 is to use conventional backlinks to diversify your link profile and keep a steady link velocity.
==> Click Here To Go To Part Two
Comments
Max
This guide is so on point! I’ve been following the advice here and my site’s ranking has already started to improve.
SarahT
I can’t believe this is still relevant. I’m so glad I found this post. I’ve been struggling with SEO, and this guide is a lifesaver!
John_34
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →Interesting insights, but I still wonder about the long-term effects of this strategy. Has anyone tried this in the last few years?
NickR
This is gold. Can’t wait to implement these tips and see how they work out for my website. Thanks for sharing!
Alejandro G.
Wow, this post is exactly what I needed to read today! I’ve been trying to improve my SEO game, and this detailed guide about link building strategies really clarifies things. Keep up the great work!
Samantha89
I’m a bit skeptical about the effectiveness of these strategies in today’s SEO environment. Do you have any case studies or updated examples of how this has worked for others recently? I’d love to see some proof.
Michael T.
This article is very informative! I do have a question about link diversity, though. How important is it to get backlinks from a variety of sources versus focusing on high PR sites only? Any advice would be appreciated!
Kimberly H.
I appreciate the insights, but I feel like this approach might be a bit outdated. Google has been cracking down on certain SEO practices, and I’m concerned this could lead to penalties. Do you have any updates?
RobertoZ
Hey! It’s been a while since we last caught up. Your post really got me thinking about my own SEO strategy. Let’s catch up soon—I’d love to hear how things are going with you!
Linda S.
This is such a great guide! I actually had a similar issue with one of my websites not ranking, and after implementing some of these techniques, I started to see an improvement in traffic. Thanks for the advice!
Yusuf A.
For anyone looking for tools that can help manage backlinks, I highly recommend using Ahrefs or SEMrush. They both offer great analytics to track link-building efforts. These tools have been really helpful in my experience.
Mariella B.
I’ve learned so much from this post! It really breaks down link-building strategies in a way that’s easy to understand. Thank you for sharing your expertise—I can’t wait to put this knowledge to good use.
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I spent eight years on the company side managing what independent reps were and weren’t allowed to do publicly, and this is the exact dynamic in a different costume. The system rewards people who game it faster than anyone rewrites the rules to catch them. I won’t pretend buying backlinks is smart engineering, since I don’t fully understand this corner of SEO, but the underlying incentive, do the thing before the ceiling comes down, I recognize completely.
Buy the domain, rent the rank, hope the landlord doesn’t notice. Seen this movie.
Renata’s point reminds me of the regulars who’d complain about the health inspector while quietly propping the back door for deliveries after hours. Everybody wants the rules bent just enough to help them and nobody else. Doesn’t matter if it’s a diner or a search engine, the instinct to get ahead of the enforcement is the same animal wearing a different apron.
Renata, this is helpful context. I am wondering, does this pattern of gaming a system before it gets corrected happen the same way outside the English-language search market? Buying expired domains in Turkish, for example, there are fewer of them and fewer people searching, so maybe the incentive is smaller, but I am not certain.
The whole article is really one process with two feedback loops, and Elif’s question sits right at the weak point of it. Input: a domain with existing Page Rank. Throughput: relevant content plus a contextual link. Output: transferred authority. That much is a clean diagram. But there’s a second loop layered on top, the anchor text ratio, and that one has no clear failure threshold given anywhere in the post, only percentages that sound precise: ten exact match, fifty relevant, and so on. A process without a stated tolerance for its own inputs isn’t really a process, it’s a guess with formatting. That’s the part I’d want tested market by market before trusting it anywhere outside the US.
Sorry if this is obvious, but does “watching anchor text like a hawk” mean every link gets checked, or just flagged patterns after the fact?
Reading this some years removed from when it was written, I find myself wondering less about whether it applies to a man of sixty-one and more about whether it applies to anyone any longer, given how frankly it invites the reader to manufacture what search engines are meant to discover naturally. Perhaps it worked for a season, as most engineered things do, before the engineers on the other side noticed.
What Arthur is describing has a name in the organisational literature, roughly Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure. Page Rank was designed as a proxy for trust, and this entire post is a manual for manufacturing the proxy directly. The research on this point is fairly settled; the surprising part is how long it takes an industry to notice.