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PIN’s: The Future of Private Link Building1116 CommentsWordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need528 CommentsUnmasking the Biggest Tyrant in Blogging445 Comments
201 Comments 
17 minutes
In 1865, Fredik Idestam built a pulp mill on the banks of the Tammerkoski River in southwestern Finland. He soon added a papermaking machine. As with any papermaking company at the time, much of what the company produced was used for stationery, newsprint, and books – the primary means of communication before the age of television, radio, and telephone. So in a way, it was in the communications business.
By 1900, it was already one of the biggest paper producers in Finland and was looking for growth opportunities. Electricity was a rapidly growing source of energy at the time. So in 1902 it decided to build its own electric generators and sell the current to local businesses. By the end of the 1920s, however, the company was struggling financially so it decided to join forces with Finnish Rubber Works.
Rubber (being a natural insulator for electricity) offered obvious synergies for the combined companies. By the early 1920s, telephone service was a rapidly growing business and cables were still being laid from city to city. In 1922, the Finish Cable company was wisely added to this growing conglomerate. Over the next several decades, it continued to expand smartly into adjacent industries and around the world.
By 2010, it had become a $40 billion company, with operations in 120 countries around the world, and a market leader in its main business line, which is still communications.
You know the company by the same name it had a hundred years ago when it was producing paper in Finland–Nokia.
I really love this story because it shows a company reacting to a changing landscape and thriving because of it. Often, I feel like we have to do the exact same thing when it comes to SEO. Whether or not an idea fits perfectly within Google’s guidelines.
I Never Wanted to Build a (Bigger) Link Network
The reason I say bigger link network is because I’ve built them before and honestly believe everyone should try building one. Every single person who is active in SEO – especially those who do it for clients – should have built at least one link network for testing purposes. It’s not like anyone is forcing you to actually use the links for your authority sites; there’s very little to lose by testing them out in a new industry.
To be honest with you, I’ve never wanted to have to build a bigger link network. Or I should really say lots of small ones around different industries. To give you an idea of scale, my own network will probably be well past 1,000 domains before the end of this year. I’m not looking forward to the renewal fees, but they have more than paid for themselves already.
I’m aware that admitting and even talking about building a link network probably doesn’t put this brand in a very good light. Please spare the jokes about this brand already having a bad reputation ;). Put simply, my motto for this blog is, and always has been, “write what I would want to read.” That’s where 100% of my material comes from–topics I wish other people were writing about in such detail.
This may seem like quite a strange topic for someone who, for eight years, has been highly focused on the Google “right way”. Not too much has changed there because I still believe in the Google way. If you could overly-simplify the Google algorithm and say that they just want “great resources for end users which pick up links naturally” then I think that’s a great model. It’s obviously an ideal in the perfect world.
The problem, of course, is that it just doesn’t work. Building a search engine to correctly order billions of web pages for billions of queries has to be one of the greatest computational challenges in human history. I genuinely believe that. But the challenge really shows and the end result is something I can only describe as Google search results not being fair based on the guidelines they set.
Not everyone gets the same treatment, so why should we all act the same?
GoDaddy Makes Google Their Bitch (Again)
Over two years ago now, back in December 2011, Joost de Valk a.k.a Yoast wrote a interesting blog post about Godaddy performing spammy link building techniques. Yoast higlighted that Godaddy we’re using widgets on their website builder and linking back to their own website with anchor-text rich backlinks. He also revealed that it was working really well, having a huge impact on their search traffic in recent months.
Two years later, this practice is still happily going on. Instead of just focusing on their website builder, Godaddy have also employed this tactic for people using their SSL certificates as well. If you do a Google search for SSL Certificate, I see Godaddy in first position (I removed the ads at the top for clarity purposes).
It’s not a hugely surprising search result on the surface of things. After all, Godaddy are the biggest web hosting company in the world (based on number of customers) and a well-known brand in the industry, whether you like them or not.
Keep in mind his is a highly popular search term, with 40,500 exact searches per month and a recommended Adwords bid price of $14.58. I found the ranking as I was actually looking to purchase an SSL certificate, which is no-doubt a phrase where a lot of searches convert into buyers.
If you look at the anchor text profile before you look at the actual links to the page, you can just tell something unnatural is going on:
All of these perfect anchor-text links are of course coming from the widgets that GoDaddy are putting on client websites. Notice that under each graphic there is a text link there. Even more amazing is that some of these links are white text on a white background so you don’t see them unless you try to copy some text on the page. I assume webmasters have done this to try and hide the link without knowing how to modify the code GoDaddy gave them:
That picture should give you an idea of how they’re alternating the links, surely a practice not to look too unnatural (hah!) and rank for more terms.
And just look at how well it’s working:
- “Secure servers” — Google Rank: #1
- “Secure website” — Google Rank: #1
- “about ssl certificate” — Google Rank: #5
And because some of you are super-smart you may be thinking that these are all very old and not a practice that Godaddy still gets involved in. I did purchase their SSL certificate and I was not given the link code but in both Ahrefs and MajesticSEO, a lot of these links have only been discovered in the last couple of months. I’ve included a screenshot of a few sample links in Ahrefs below:
I also emailed Godaddy SSL support about this practice regarding site seals. It took a few emails for them to understand what I was talking about so I sent them the screenshot you see in this post of all the widgets with the links underneath. There was zero-denial in their reply:
It’s a practice that Yoast outed for their free site builder and it’s a practice they’ve also employed across other services they offer, such as SSL certificates. And because they have such a huge brand and user base already, even if you wanted to compete with them using this exact same tactic – which Google don’t like – you would stand little chance. The irony is that you would probably get penalised.
These links are not no-followed either which is Google’s recommendation for widget links; check the websites in that Ahrefs screenshot for examples (thanks to Mr. Floate for helping me with that). Is Google going to make Godaddy go and disavow these links and contact webmasters to take them down? Yeah right.
Cnet With More Brand Favoring
“We actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side.” – Google’s Matt Cutts
Cnet are one of the best tech resources out there online. There are very few people who would question that statement. Google obviously think the same, because CNET manage to rank for an awful lot of web hosting related queries.
The problem? Their page has no reviews, no more than 100 unique words and is simply just pushing affiliate links.
This is the page that is ranking 3rd in Google for “web hosting reviews” with over 12,000 searches per month and a suggested Adwords bid price of $14.65 per click. Yet, there are no reviews. The only thing I’ve missed from that screenshot is their Google ads at the bottom of the page. Don’t think those links on the sidebar will take you to anything substantial either. They have some forums, but even the hosting section I could only see one recent thread on actual hosting companies, which has 2 posts.
That page is ranking for a lot of alternatives on this term as well.
Another page on the CNET website is actually competing with us in our XXX Niche Case Study and is very similar to what they have here (though obviously a different niche). A thin page, getting undeserved rankings purely because of their brand name.
Go and check out the backlinks to that page in Ahrefs. You’ll probably get a laugh out of it like I did.
The Rap Genius Drama Was a Joke
There have been many blog posts around the web on the controversy surrounding the Rap Genius drama so I’m not going to cover it in a lot of detail here. The short version of the tale is that Rap Genius, a lyrics website, were asking affiliates to place a number of links back to certain pages on their website to get higher search rankings for those terms.
Here’s what happened, in bullet-point form:
- Rap Genius tried to throw all of their competitors under a bus by saying they were all doing it
- Rap Genius failed to show any examples and ignored repeated emails asking for this information
- Rap Genius were given special treatment by Google, getting to speak directly with their web spam team
- Rap Genius were back in Google within 10 days (tell me when that’s ever happened to a site you know about)
- One of the Rap Genius co-founders is a former product manager at Google
- Rap Genius now have 20% more backlinks than they did before thanks to all of the press
- Google got to reinforce their “don’t try to manipulate us” PR message
- Google had zero idea about these backlinks until a blogger who previously had zero readers wrote about it
Next.
One Story in Millions of Being Unfairly Outranked
I was recently reading this article on Branded 3 about doing link removals. In the article they say they’ve had 60 manual penalties removed by not actually removing any links and just using the disavow tool. This is interesting, albeit strange, since in posts just a few months ago they said they do perform link removals.
What really caught my attention though was the comments section. There were quite a few angry webmasters there, with one example being Stephen. Here’s what he had to say:
Now, when I first read this comment I thought “I bet if I look at his website I can see where he’s going wrong very easily“. That’s probably a cynical approach, but I’ve came across many webmasters who can’t believe they’re not ranking well yet they have very few backlinks, they’re in a really difficult niche or some other fairly obvious reason.
That wasn’t the case for Stephen. I see no reason why he should have lost his rankings.
And more importantly, I see no reason why it’s his job to go and manually process every link he has when a new update around the corner may make all of that time and effort spent pointless.
With a bit of online detective work I managed to find Stephen’s tapas website (his comment username wasn’t linked) and pretty quickly found that the search term he was referring to was “spanish tapas”. This is part of the title tag of his Proper Spanish Tapas website and sure enough, I saw him in 15th too. He doesn’t have the most attractive website design, but it’s clearly an authority website on this topic:
The first obvious thing I can see is that the structure of the search results have not turned in Stephen’s favour. I have visited this search result page from many different IP addresses and each time I was presented with 6-7 results (across page 1 and 2) which are recommending restaurants. It’s odd that Australian websites come up when I’m using a Texas (USA) based IP but there you go. I change the IP and these recommendations of restaurants change.
It’s definitely not a typical, local based Google search result, but if anything it is probably the main cause of the rankings slip for Stephen. I don’t really have any qualms with that; this is Google’s search engine and it’s up to them which kind of results they want to display.
My problem is why About.com have two listings on the first page, the BBC are ranking and so are WholeFoods Market.
This is not a dumb SEO question. The obvious answer to that website is that they’re “authority domains” or “authority websites”. That may be the case, but they are not authorities on this niche and I’m sure they will never try to be or claim to be.
Whole Foods basic page on this topic is killing Stephen’s 50+ pages of information on a website that is 8 years old. The Whole Foods page has 2 backlinks. The BBC page has links from 12 different domains.
Yet his website has been unfairly shut out and replaced in a Google algorithm which puts so much weight on brands, that people who love and are passionate about a topic have a really hard time getting noticed. Surely they should be the people ranking?
And I did look into his backlinks. The funny thing is that some of them aren’t from the best sources but he attained them in a really credible way. For example, he has links from article directories, but they’re the best articles I’ve ever seen published on such directories. And it’s not like he’s trying to build them now, he published them back in 2006 and 2007. Again showing how long he has been building a website on this topic. He even authored a book on the subject, if you need more convincing there is no need to question this sites authority.
He has plenty of natural links that come from simply creating a great resource:
Sadly, when a brand like WholeFoods or About.com can whip up a simple page on this topic that is barely useful to a searcher, those links just aren’t good enough when an update comes. Stephen is not alone. There are without a doubt millions of webmasters struggling because of this kind of thing. I’ve spoken to plenty of them when I do phone consultations.
The Concept of Building a Link Network
To oversimplify the concept of building a link network for those who aren’t familiar with the idea, it goes like this: You build other websites around similar topics to a website that you want to rank – usually on powerful expired domains – and then link back to your original website.
If we’re using a whitehat to blackhat scale then this probably sits bang in the middle at being a grey hat tactic. Definitely not the kind of links Google want you to be getting, but also not hacking peoples websites and injecting your viagra links into them either.
I do believe there is a right way to do things when it comes to building a network, like actually making the sites you build attractive and useful, meaning no default WordPress theme and no-spun content. Just human written content that actually has some value in it if anyone were to ever come across them (although that is not the aim).
One thing you have to be careful of when you build a link network – we’re ridiculously over-paranoid about ours – is privacy. If you don’t set things up properly then you could easily create a footprint which links all of your websites together and could possibly get all of the sites linked from those domains penalised. Some of the obvious steps to take when protecting yourself are:
- Using numerous different hosting companies and IP addresses
- Mixing up your WHOIS data (legally, but never the same) for each stack of domains
- Never keeping a list of all your websites in one place
- Not using automated software to put together your websites. Set them up manually
- Block the sites from link checking tools (like Ahrefs & Majestic SEO) so competitors can’t report you
- Don’t put analytics code on any of the websites. You don’t need it.
And so on. There are about 10 more steps that we take with our network but I’ll save those for another day. That’s not to say we’re totally safe – not even guest posting is totally safe these days – but myself and Diggy will take our chances.
I’ve happily outed my own link networks before when we built really terrible ones such as for our Penguin2.com case study.
We have a very slow, expensive process, but I believe it’s worth it for the long run.
Originally, as I’ve said in this post, this was all primarily for testing. I have seen link networks, freshness abusers and plain spammer-owned sites outranking me and others in far too many industries to ignore trying this. I’ve simply decided to ramp up my efforts in the wake of all the drama surrounding Google and how they operate in the industries I follow, not limited to the examples I’ve posted above. And not to mention the over reliance of Google on ranking “brands” highly, even if they aren’t the best result on a subject.
This is not a post trying to convince others to build their own network – think of it more as an interesting opinion piece – but to help weigh any options you may have I’ve structured the rest of the post in a Good vs. Evil format with what I see a networks benefits and weaknesses are.
Positive: A Network Can Get You “Natural” Links
Something interesting that has happened in a number of the niches I’m involved in is that a link network has helped me to get a lot more natural links to my website. That may seem a little odd, until you hear why.
Whenever people are doing round-up posts for things like “Here’s what X amount of experts in X niche say about X” – which are all over the web – then they will often go to Google and look at the top sites ranking in those industries. I see at least 5 of these blog posts in the internet marketing niche every week, and I promise you they are common in other large industries as well. I’ve gained a lot of natural backlinks just by answering a quick email because someone already found me in Google.
I guess you could say this about any tactic that takes you to the top of Google but my point is that you don’t only need to rely on a network just because you’ve used it. They can be excellent platforms to build from.
Of course, this is only going to happen if you’ve done a good job with keyword research and know how to use network links to get you good rankings.
Negative: A Link Network is Not Risk-Free
One of the most recent takedowns of a private blog network was that of Anglo Rank. Some of the biggest search blogs on the web covered the news of their demise.
What amazes me is not that they were caught and lost rankings but that Anglo Rank is nothing more than a service being promoted on BlackHatWorld. If you read the thread then you’ll see they’ve still been making plenty of sales in January, so it didn’t even deter people from that exact network. You really think Google would have better things to focus on to get some PR, scaring webmasters into any type of off-site SEO *cough*Godaddy*cough*.
Just after that, came Backlinks.com:
If you’re not building your own link network then you have to be very careful about link networks that you use from other people. Every single day on my Facebook ads I see people promoting link networks. They scrape the fans of popular facebook pages – ViperChill, Smart Passive Income, etc – then try to sell you on the network dream.
These are the same sites that tell you there are only 18 days left to opt-in, yet a week later they’ll say there’s 18 days left. I would stay very clear of anything like this. A network that is open to anyone with a Facebook account is not going to have customers promoting the best websites or be very secretive about where the links are coming from.
Ironically, I believe the people in question that Pat are talking about are aligned perfectly there on the right hand side of Facebook with his status update. I’ve saw them running ads with his face on and many other internet marketers.
Positive: A Network Can Keep You Ahead of the Curve
One of the great side-benefits of running a network has been being able to keep ahead of the latest SEO changes. There was literally an update two weeks ago, yet not a single person reported it. At least not until a few days after we noticed something. Being totally honest here, I didn’t even notice it myself until members of our private community started sharing their experiences:
At first I kind of dismissed this blog post. Everything looked fine for the sites using our network (and the thread OP said PBN links looked fine), and when I checked sites like MozCast – which monitor Google fluctuations – everything seemed pretty normal.
I decided to reach out to Dr. Pete who handles MozCast (as far as I know) but he hadn’t noticed anything either:
I decided to post a question on Inbound.org to make sure we weren’t crazy and other people must be noticing something as well.
Crickets. There’s one person discussing the update.
Me.
Then one week after I asked about it, a better worded title makes the homepage of Inbound.org about that exact same topic.
I deserve absolutely no credit for this discovery, and owe it all to people in our community who were happy to discuss these effects on their own sites which I hadn’t noticed, and it seems like the entire SEO community didn’t notice either (for at least a week).
This gave me a lot of data to work with, well in advance of the “SEO world” and I’ll be updating all of our users in the next few days about what I think the update addressed.
Negative: You Can’t Always Use Them for Clients
I recently had the opportunity to work on an SEO campaign for LG. Unfortunately, since it was a country-specific product and they were hiring multiple freelancers, their budget was a lot smaller than I was expecting and thus I didn’t end up working with them.
Even if I had got to work with them, the last strategy on my list for building links with them would be building links from a blog network. That’s not say I don’t think they would work, but some brands are simply not going to be okay with you building those types of links, and I’m not really surprised.
If you are going to be focusing on creating great content that gets people talking though – which isn’t always easy in the air-conditioning industry – the budget would have to be bigger than someone who is happy with network links that you can build for them.
Positive: A Network Is Easy to Backtrack From
There’s one thing that’s quite clear when looking into the drama around Google’s Disavow tool is that they simply do not know which links you’ve created yourself and which links someone else has built for you. As far as I know, it would be impossible for any search engine to ever know this. What has seemingly happened in thousands of cases (if not more) is that you will receive some kind of penalty for unnatural links and get a warning about this in Google Webmaster tools.
You will be shown a sample of the links you have to take-down and then it’s up to you to manually contact webmasters to get those links taken down. Don’t expect that because you do this though you’ll be guaranteed to rank where you did previously or even just get back in the Google index for your brand name.
Just this month, the message Google are giving webmasters has changed.
The latest reports from this month are that you may be asked to remove more links and then you’ll have to wait a few weeks for them to get back to your new request:
Keeping in mind that once again it’s your responsibility to go and find these links; Google are not going to tell you about all of them. It’s a ridiculous move on their part because they’ve now opened up a totally new SEO industry where companies are charging businesses to help them find the links to remove. Not everyone has the money to pay $79/m to Ahrefs or similar to get a better idea of their link profile.
I’ve actually been giving free reports to some people because they simply have no idea what links are pointing to their website that Gogle may not like.
With a link network, you can take down any links in minutes. No worrying about contacting webmasters whatsoever.
Negative: They Won’t Work in Every Niche
Recently, a client of mine – let’s call him Stan – invited me to meet up with one of his friends who was interested in my services. I met up with him for lunch a few days later and he was a great guy, already ready to start paying me after seeing what I had done for Stan.
He asked me to never tell anyone his industry as he really thinks he has a hot corner in a popular category – which I would mostly agree with – and wanted me on board.
I checked out his site, saw there were quite a few improvements to be made, but thought the terms he wanted to target sounded long-tail enough before I did any proper research. When I got home I was sad to see sites like the NHS (The UK’s National Health Service), Wikipedia, About.com, .Gov and .Edu authority sites on the topic.
Even for long-term phrases which were sometimes very-specific product names, big recognisable organisations were showing up in the search results. I sent him a pretty simple email, “I don’t think I can make a good impact on this search term for you and it wouldn’t be fair to accept your money”.
It wasn’t his budget, it was more about the links I could build for him. Network links would simply not penetrate those search results baring a stranger than normal Google results page.
Positive: They’re Amazing in New Industries
It should be no secret to regular readers of this blog that I love making money by targeting new industries, which I’m fortunate to have been successful with. I’m finding good new niche ideas on a regular basis, but they’re so new it’s almost impossible to get “proper links”.
One example I gave a few months ago was Neverwet. At the time, an affiliate website was ranking 1st in Google.
What are my options here, really, if I want to make money from that niche?
- Broken link building? My site is new so nobody is linking to me or others anyway.
- Writing blog comments? Mostly nofollow and those that are dofollow are spammed to hell. Seeing an affiliate site in a comment URL also looks suspicious.
- Getting links from high-quality press sites? Why wouldn’t they just link to the main product website
- Writing guest posts? You can’t deny they would be primarily for SEO. Nobody really wants to read about that product, but instead watch that product.
I could go on, but you’re starting to get the idea. In a new niche when I’m breaking through a new market, network links work amazingly well. They work just as well for local SEO as well, but I don’t want everyone knowing that. A little reward for those of you who read every word of this post ;).
Why ViperChill Will Always Have Porn Backlinks
Something I noticed a few months ago after my blog posts on Google freshness was that someone started a Negative SEO campaign for this website, essentially sending links from erotica style websites with similar terms as the anchor text.
I have to admit I laughed when I first saw this:
The other funny thing is that I am 99% certain I know who did this — someone I know personally. Fortunately it has not affected the rankings of my WordPress SEO page, but even if it did I wouldn’t do anything about it.
Why? Because I believe Google can do the job just fine on their own. I think the disavow tool really gives them fantastic PR in terms of scaring webmasters to do anything external that even hints at being done to get better search rankings. I refuse to have to spend days or even weeks of my time trying to get these links manually removed; especially when someone can click a button and build them all back up again.
If only we were all ex-Google product managers like one of the founders of Rap Genius.
I know Google isn’t the only marketing option. I know there are millions if not billions of search results where most people would agree they’re great results with the sites on them being great resources. I also have no desire to start using Bing. But I have zero doubt that the game we are playing here is just not fair. There are times when the individual just has no chance against big brands, and the ‘rules’ just aren’t able to be enforced.
I know many people who would never consider doing anything but writing great content and trying to get ‘natural’ links. I think that’s great. I would never perform an unnatural link building campaign for this website, mostly because I don’t need to or have the desire to rank for much.
The irony though is that focusing on content can even land you in trouble, as Rae recently put it:
“Iโm sorry, but I live in reality. In reality, creating good content guarantees you nothing.
Thereโs no guarantee good content will magically be shared.
If it does get shared, and gets shared so much that a larger site republishes it, it could screw me.
If people like it, and link to it with too much anchor, it could screw me.
If not enough quality sites link to it in proportion to the overall inbound links, it could screw me.
If multiple bloggers with a good audience who can give me good exposure, but that also blatantly sell links or publish a lot of guest posts links to it, it could screw me.
If I include a nifty graphic in it and enough people repost that graphic and give me a link credit for being the source, it could screw me.”
There are industries and cases where utilising a link network would not be a very effective option, but there are other markets where – with these links – you’ll actually have a fighting thriving chance at getting your quality resource noticed.
Just my $0.02. Hello, 2014.
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Copyright ยฉ 2016 ViperChill, a Marketing Inc. Company : Contact / Privacy Policy / Earnings Disclaimer / More: Gaps / Glen Allsopp.com
Thank you Glen, you really have cleared up all the fuss over link networks. There will always be a right and wrong time to use them. Google seem like they can be very hypocritical at times.
Thanks Tyler!
Indeed they can ๐
Glen, incredible insight here and you make some amazing points. Fascinating to see that even after all of these updates, Link Networks are still working for local and niche style sites. I haven’t tried link networks for my own sites but that’s because I didn’t want to do something that would hurt the longterm success of these sites. From what I gathered you must know what you’re doing with your link networks (not connecting sites etc) so you’re not getting caught here. I’m not confident I could do the same which is why I’ve stayed away.
Another awesome post!
Cheers,
Jordan
Btw, I’m in Thailand for two months. If you’re around would love to meetup. Shoot me an email. Drinks on me.
Hey Jordan,
Hope you’re not in Bangkok? Lots of crazyness going down there at the moment. Where are you at?
We’ve made mistakes, no doubt about that, and it does feel a bit worse the more private and careful you have to be about it. As I said, not a tactic for every one or every niche, I’m just fighting industries where there doesn’t seem to be many other options.
Thanks bud!
Was in Bangkok last week but now I’m living in Phuket for the next month (beautiful here) and then will bounce around to Chiang Mai and possibly checkout Cambodia / Vietnam / Singapore. If you’re near any of those areas let me know. Hoping to network with other online people while I’m here. Would be cool to meet up after reading your blog for the past couple years.
Cheers man!
Jordan
I too have avoided using link networks for the same reason. Unless implemented really well I’m not sure it is worth the risk. Think of the potential issues it could cause!
If you want an even more ridiculous example of Google ranking a site using flat out black hat tactics try the term “web hosting reviews” in the US. You’ll find webhostshield.com top 3, if not #1…
They had no backlinks before late Nov 2013, and now have c.6000 linking domains. Starting at the top of the list, every single one of the links I looked at was hidden and anchor rich, and they were all on Joomla powered sites…yep, it appears they have hacked and injected links on all those Joomla installs.
Do some more digging and you can actually find out exactly who is behind it.
Yep, I see them sitting at number 1 my end.
Not exactly the epitome of a quality search result. That whole niche is pretty messed up to be honest with you.
2.4 million backlinks..holy shit.
Yeah, loads of crap in that space. I’m just amazed that something so obvious would work that well.
Checked it out as well, insane that is #1, but I am sure they are raking in the commissions while it lasts.
Think that’s bad? Do a search for “Hostgator Coupons” and be astounded at page 1, as well as 2-5.
Wow I just sat here and read the entire post and was entertained the whole time! Fantastic insight!
Thank you Brett,
Appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment ๐
Awesome post Glen as usual.
It makes me wonder whether the things most of these ‘authority’ SEOs say actually believe in their own BS. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was designed to lead people on in a wild goose chase while they went out and profited.
It’s awesome that you shed light on this in an honest and open way. Keep up with the great work!
Thanks Onder!
Sometimes, to be honest, I think we’re just wrong. You may be right though
Good post! It really is sad to see Google dropping the ball so often and make webmasters do their work for them. By the way, you should look into getting a mobile version of your blog ๐
Ain’t nobody got time fo dat!
You’re right though, I should. I used to have one but never really liked how it looked. Maybe they’ve improved ๐
First post in 2014, it was worth waiting for it.
Thanks for bringing up this topic, though I disagree to some extent about outing companies who are benefiting from SERPs loopholes (it’s harmful for all the SEO industry).
I’ve also been investing heavily on private blog networks and have seen many people succeeding with them some even creating new products and services about. Some SEOs putting sexy pictures on Facebook campaign ads to get clients.
The thing is that Google can’t do nothing about it at least until now, managing millions of serps is beyond their control. That’s why there is ranking disparity (Hello Stephen).
I thought you were also covering Matt’s last post regarding the “fall and decay” of guest posting, any thoughts?
Cheers
Kelvon Roy
I don’t think you’re disagreeing. I don’t like outing them but it’s hard to make a point without examples. Here is what I said in a recent post in the topic:
“Iโm probably starting to sound like a broken record here but I do not like sharing the results and tactics of other websites. However, without giving any examples at all itโs very hard to make points that backup what Iโm saying to you. For the following two examples Iโve chosen very large companies both worth a few million, rather than highlighting some webmaster who relies on the internet income to save up for his dream car. I have those as well, but these two examples should be enough.”
I’ll have a post on guest blogging in about two weeks I think. Taking my time as I really want to cover it in-depth.
Appreciate the comment!
No lie, the entire time I had my credit card out when I saw this blog post…was hoping you were offering services somewhere…but anyways, nicely done as always…lemme know if those private blog spots open up
I guess you missed the two links in the blog post ๐
Thanks Jeremy!
Hey Glen,
Great post as always.
Must have missed the two links as well, suppose I’ll have to read it again for the third time, lol.
Look for the blue text. There isn’t that much ๐
Awesome artilce, Glen. Had me hooked the whole post (and it’s a long post!!) I guess Google has an impossible job fairly ranking every site in existence, but it’s horrible to see big brands employing dodgey tactics and getting away with it!!
Thanks Josh!
Great article Glen!
Cheers Felix!
Thanks for an awesome look into the small business/big business fallacy of google. As someone with just a small blog, I’ve kind of given up on seo.
I was expecting to do a little seo work for a new site I’m launching, but now I don’t now if it’s worth it.
Oh and the trouble in Thailand is only in Bangkok. It’s business as usual here in Hua Hin
Here’s hoping that the BKK situation doesn’t have any more casualties.
Great article, well worth the read, thank you! The GoDaddy spam kills me, YellowPages seems to do the same exact thing. You’ve convinced me to try out building up a link network to use as a sandbox. Have you written a guide on the topic by any chance or can you recommend a legit one? I don’t want to risk doing anything wrong and tanking my current sites.
Thanks again!
– Paul
I’m quite desperate as well. I wrote about my case on Rae’s post http://sugarrae.com/rants-in-bitchland/google-propaganda-marketers-wake-up/#comment-844333
I invested into a high quality website, soon got manual action from Google “Unnatural links to your siteโimpacts links”.
I thought how nice of them, discontinuing links I have no control over. In very short time 97% of traffic was gone. They could at least tell me: You have won our f*ck you lottery, move on
Hi Glen,
I have been trying to legally rank some affiliate product keywords since months, I did mange to reach top for couple of days; but then spammers took over!
I think I should join hands with some friends to build small link-network!
Thanks for inspiration! ๐
It’s interesting that you used the word “legally”. Google have done a good job of people thinking it’s actually illegal to violate Google guidelines.
Sadly yours is a pretty common story.
Yup Glenn that is why its soooo Fu–ked up because they actually want people to thinks its illegal…Its only against their TOS -which I seriously don’t give shit about. I’m all about taking from G as much as I possibly can because they don’t give a crap about any of us for even a millisecond.
Glen!
Killin it as usual. Damn.
Thanks Sean,
Hope the podcast is going well ๐
This article gives me hope…
Interesting stuff, Glen. I’m in a similar(ish) situation but almost by accident. Specialising in the music industry, i’ve naturally ended up with quite a long list of music sites that I own / write for, and so in some ways it acts like a link network (albeit an extremely clean one), but it’s interesting how it’s effectively ended up that way naturally. In other words, there’s clearly a spectrum of link networks – and the more you can get over to the hard to detect / natural occurring end of the spectrum, the more sustainable it’ll be over the long run.
Where in the World are you these days? It’d be great to jump on Skype sometime.
Marcus Taylor
Hi Glen,
Nice post, yet again. It clears up a few things about my position in some SERP’s. A blog network just seems to make your strategy a lot more agile than most white hat strategies Google wants you to use.
Looking forward to posts about the January update and also on how you further guard your blog network.
Thanks for the insights!
Can’t disagree with the agility part. That’s a better way of putting it than I did ๐
Thanks for the comment, Maarten! Fijne dag
Hey Glen- SEO sounds awesome and I would love to give it a try, but the more I read about it on your blog- I notice that you really have to love your industry and provide tons of value. My problem is: I know that I’m passionate about Internet Marketing and cooking, but I don’t really have value to provide. If I was to create a website and rank it- I would be a scammer if you know what I mean #Lol-
Basically my question is: when you first got started with SEO, want did you do to gain value and in return be able to write about your passion and earn a good living doing what you love.
That’s my question- Awesome post by the way, even though I still have to google some SEO terms here in order to really understand this post a little bit better. Thanks(!)
I can’t remember who said it but I’ve often been fond of the quote “It takes 3 books to be an expert on a subject” where expert is defined as something like knowing more than 99% of people.
I disagree that you don’t have value to add. Even the process of showing as your learning could be super valuable in both industries I think. People starting out can follow your journey. Especially if you’re really passionate about them then surely your knowledge and skill is only going to grow anyway, giving you more value to share.
Just an idea.
To answer your question, it’s no secret that the majority of my income has always been through affiliate sites getting SEO traffic. It hasn’t been the most consistent thing to rely on in recent years but I’ve mostly been able to replace anything that stopped working. I simply wanted to test my Google strategies in more and more industries. Though some were industries I loved, not all of them were. I still believe you can build value in a niche you’re new to though.
You don’t have to be the person providing the content…
Better then ever, Glen. Good post.
Thanks Geld ๐
Hey Glen,
Really awesome post, I am also building my own network, so really would like to learn more from you. So, where and how can I join your closed member-community?
Hi Lia,
There are two links in the post. I would have posted a link in this comment reply but Would rather just keep it closed to those who read the whole way through
Great Post Glen
had my authority site for 8 years and was on page 1 for Google search results then got whacked by penguin and have lost 70% of my traffic and income to date. Still trying to get the algorithm penalty removed from my site. Trying to get webmasters to remove articles I wrote from years back is ridiculously time consuming and I end up having to disavow so many of them anyway.
A few years back I started to build a quality link network around my main site but then pulled it apart after Penguin. Now that the Google Search results are so screwed up and favoring the big brands I can see I need to go back and start rebuilding my network.
The way things are always changing drives me crazy at times but I love reading your posts- they keep things clear and motivate me to keep going. Thanks a ton
I lived in Bangkok for 20 years and left last October to come home to Australia. Sure glad I’m not there now- the possibility for civil war is high I believe.
Social Media all the way it is then.
SEO has never been my strong suit. And now, this has made up my mind in making the decision to only use social media for my blog, which I am about to start.
Thank you!
Hey George,
Don’t get me wrong, this definitely isn’t an “SEO is dead” blog post. Just trying to explain why I’m relying more heavily on a network than I ever thought I would, based on the industries I watch and participate in.
Millions if not billions of results are surely “fair” and right out there.
So here’s my thoughts on this.
I think Google has this weird belief that links are a natural extension a majority of the time. Links are a marketing currency more or less.
Outside the Internet, you talk about the things you like. The thing is, that’s you, a person.
Google is a program and that means it will always be flawed. It can be refined, but how many times do you have to search for the real answer to a specific question.
I think most of the legit link building strategies out there are going to work and keep working (for the most part, yeah, I think they’ll keep working). It’s all marketing and pushing for attention so what’s not natural to try and get your product/site listed a million places. Heck, if you can get a webhosting co. out there in just a few months, then it just comes down to having enough money or knowing the right person.
Sorry for the rant, but as a new guy getting into all this for the last year, it does get depressing hearing about Google acting like a vicious volcano god that decided to randomly terrorize people regardless of how many villagers and tourists get thrown into the fire.
Hey Clayton,
Can you expand on what you mean with this: “Heck, if you can get a webhosting co. out there in just a few months, then it just comes down to having enough money or knowing the right person.”
Thanks for the comment ๐
Glen—
Best wishes for this wonderful 2014 Happy New Year present of—– facts & inspirational clarity
for your countless friends/customers. Your clues will recharge the creative juices of 1000’s to flow forth and make cyberspace
effective for eventually millions of domains. Thank you with the sincere “attitude of gratitude”
for the research and the dynamics available in this blog which I will share with friends/family/organizations worldwide.
THANKS.
Jim
I don’t know how it happened ? was looking to do some backlinking stuff for my blog and stumbled upon your article from some where…
Saved tons of time for me… I rearly read long article but I kind of stuck with it. great article
Hey Glen,
that was a fantastic post. I’m thinking about an own network now but I’m not sure how to do it properly. Maybe you can give me some advices.
How do you mix up your WHOIS data (legaly)? How much do they have to diverse?
And you also said, not to use Analytics – what else do you recommend?
I have talked about the WHOIS stuff quite a bit on our forums ๐
As for the analytics, why would you need it?
Where do I find your forum? :O
Just came from the newsletter you sent me.
there are quite a lot reasons to use:
gives me a hint:
-whether the page ranks (for longtail-keywords I don’t monitor)
-whether the page got some visitors
-how much visitors (%) convert
To the second point: I don’t plan to monetarise the page from the start. It’s easier to build links with ad-free pages ๐ and when I think there are “enough” visitors on, I insert my Ad/affiliate things..
Thanks Glen for taking the time to write such in-depth articles. Those are very helpful to better understand what’s going on within the SERPs.
I can vouch for your services and PBNs in general, they do work. It’s the best way these days for SMBs or small affiliates to get results when they aren’t a big name or can not afford an SEO agency doing RCS for them.
Awesome post Glenn. Opened my eyes to link networks. Tried to stay away and just get natural links slowly but can see you need to help yourself sometimes.
Glenn
I also want to ask about Backlinxxx, are the methods still working for Google now?
C
Absolutely. It’s closed for new customers now though (if you’re not in already).
Oh that is too bad, was looking to get on board for 2014
๐
Craig, I can vouch for Glen’s methods on backlinksxxx.com. I have been experimenting with hundreds of keywords and multiple websites. Overall, no other method is simpler and effective as his is. It is not 100% perfect nor is it working all the time. The method is slow, sometimes too slow, for my liking. But they have so far never hurt. I can tell you this after trying every technique of his for the past four months. I think you could listen to the sound of doors opening if you got on to his list at http://www.viperchill.com/steal-our-links/
More proof that authority sites (big brand) trump Google’s algorithm updates and continue to be rewarded for shady, spammy, outdated link building strategies that penalize every other site. Talk about a search engine that is just not fair and completely biased. Where’s the level playing field for the little guys in this situation?
Here are some facts: Google is a computer algorithm and as such will never be perfect, prone to error, and always flawed. There is no such thing as “white hat” SEO, any attempt to manipulate the search engine rankings of a website violates Google’s guidelines. What Google says will improve the search engine performance of a website and what actually does are two completely different things.
I believe that having control over your backlinks is essential for long term results in Google. Think about the poor webmaster who does everything “by the Google book” and creates a great site with incredible content but is suddenly penalized because the links they “earned” naturally were over optimized, or from low quality sites? In this game knowledge really is power and it’s the webmasters that understand this that will always have the most success with their websites rankings. Having a “let the chips fall where they may” attitude, or simply believing that great content is all it takes to succeed in this SEO game will continue to get poor results!
Great comment, Nate ๐
I wish Google implemented an option to “reverse” the disavow process. All the new links would be displayed in webmaster tools, but you would have the option to approve, reject, approve all, reject all. Now, it seems you are first found guilty (regardless of who did the crime) and then given the incredibly time-consuming option to crawl back out of that whole.
I do online marketing in my day job, much more Adwords rather than SEO, and speak to Google almost every day.
As far as I am concerned both their ad network, their cash cow, and their organic search algorithm are broken.
I think they are incredibly vulnerable to a new entrant coming into the space and doing a better job, just like they did back in the day. Amazon, eBay, Facebook and LinkedIn are probably the frontrunners but pretty much anybody with a talent for maths and a love of writing algorithms could take them on.
You can only hope.
You do raise a good point though, they have such limited competition compared to companies in other spaces. Especially companies doing billions of dollars every quarter.
Appreciate a different perspective.
Interesting article which I read this morning before seing this You Tube Video from Google Webmasters! ๐
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvR_8aGEc98&list=UUWf2ZlNsCGDS89VBF_awNvA&feature=share&index=47
Yep ๐
Had to laugh at the top comment “Google + widget doesn’t use nofollow”
Glen
Awesome post as ever.
One thing I’d like to ask is about what you said here:
“Block the sites from link checking tools (like Ahrefs & Majestic SEO) so competitors canโt report you”
How can this be done? Is this some kind of hack in the .htaccess file or something more complex?
Cheers
Ade
Thanks Ade ๐
You can use robots.txt or an htaccess file. We have a custom plugin that one member kindly submitted in our forums.
The code isn’t too complex though: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=cr&ei=JJrnUqKNOouRigeZm4GADg#q=block+ahrefs+bots
Can you please share the custom plugin here or email to me?
Thanks for your time!
Great post Glen.
Well, I think Google wants to make SEO as hard as possible, so that people use AdWords more and give them more money. With all these updates it reminds me on this post: http://www.iloveseo.net/dear-google-why-do-you-want-me-to-hate-you/ when Google advertised AdWords on keyword “seo”.
P.s. Read whole post, but I liked: “but also not hacking peoples websites and injecting your viagra links into them either.” part the most! ๐
Good post. Saying it as it is
Loved the detail research! great for this morning coffee. Just tweeted it ๐ keep it up
Thanks Miki,
Will do!
I tweeted about a Google update on the 14th, and also no one seemed to notice;
https://twitter.com/dan_shure/status/423210707157385216
You’re one of the few people I know who is almost always on top of things, if not always ๐
Good to see you here, Dan
After reading this article of yours, I will leave focussing all my attention towards Google. After the September 2013 updates, I lost ranking for almost all my keywords. I was really dis-heartened. But in November some of the articles got some of the keywords back. But not upto where they were earlier. I will not focus on SEO and Google anymore. Thanks for clearing every bullshit the search engine giant is throwing on us.
Fantastic post, Glen. It was worth the wait. I’ll be re-reading this a couple times today. Cheers!
Thanks Doug,
Appreciate the comment!
Great article as always.
Just spent 2 hours reading and thinking what you are talking about here.
Building a blog network is time consuming and pricey, for personal bloggers as myself.
Maybe I’ll get into this year.
Thank you again for your great sharing
Ahh Nokia. I see you appreciate how to lead with a story, Glen. Great post by the way ๐
Great book! Gonna be writing about it soon ๐
Glen, You are someone whom I respect a lot in SEO space. Blog like this one here is simply worth paying to read. You are an amazing man. May your tribe grow in leaps and bounds. Google may ask us to disavow links. You are certainly a wow to link up to.
Thank you so much Krish,
I know you haven’t been a reader for the longest time but you always have something positive to say on Facebook and here in the comments.
Appreciate your enthusiasm and have no doubt your SEO ventures are going to rock!
Fantastic blog piece. As I read through the posting, I found a nugget that particularly intrigued me. You had mentioned GoDaddy’s and Yoast’s practices, so I decided to look through some of the old emails I get for stuff and found a very interesting example: I noticed on the bottom of one of the landing page websites a little link.
Powered by Themify WordPress Themes.
I then looked up their web page and they are a PR 7 site with External Backlinks 8,361,143 Referring Domains 15,439 Referring IPs 8,355 TF 59 CF 74 a real power house, or so it would seem….
Then if you look at their anchor text profile, most of those links came from the anchor text listed above. Hmm, that got me thinking. I really don’t want to state the obvious next point and the direction I am taking, but I think you get my point.
Thanks for the heads up and for giving me a different perspective, Scott
Spot on, Glen. Good content does not guarantee anything, and Google gives some brands an ‘unfair’ advantage. If you have something you want to rank for, you have to give the algo what it wants.
Good to see you here, Richard ๐
Amazing post, Glenn.
I am getting really tired of Google and trying to find what works and what doesn’t. In 2013 I decided to forget about link building and concentrate on good content. I have seen improvement however the site did drop a few pages on 10-12th of January.
Hi Glen great post. Someone actually doing some tests and presenting the results is quite rare.
Anyway, I have a question also. How much content do you publish on each blog? And how many different sites do you dare to link from these? Seen others linking out 20-25 different affiliate sites from each network site and that can’t work in the long run I think.
Every blog post should be at least 300 words. My guideline is 500 words though and I really don’t like to accept anything less than that (sometimes staff get don’t follow through on this so I have to make sure it happens).
The maximum outbound links I would place on any page is 12. I would prefer a lower number, but costs go up exponentially as you reduce that.
That should be *any site.
Not just a page.
Sounds fair. But how much text in total on each site?
Maybe I should share a bit too, I do too own a big network. And I can say I think the size of each blog has been getting more important, 2-3 blogs posts per site doesn’t seem to be enough anymore.
Btw, send an email if you want to hear more. I’m open to sharing my experiments over the last 2 years.
As much useful, readable content as you can…
Glenn, I enjoy your posts, but I have to admit they make me more paranoid than I already am, lol. But I think being paranoid in this game is a good thing because it keeps you on your toes. I would be lying though if I said I wasn’t concerned about where my SEO business will be in 5 years. I’ve been able to adapt to the changes the best I can and keep my clients happy, but these flaws in Google and their bias towards big brands with big budgets is scary as hell.
So I read every word and maybe I’m an idiot but I didn’t see anything about networks and how they help local seo. Ahh well there’s plenty of good info here without that anyways. Thanks for taking the time to explain this stuff to idiots like me. You’re the shiznat!
I did not really intend to write a follow-up article on my “What’s Wrong with SEO” article http://makemoneyblogging.net/whats-wrong-with-seo-search-engine-optimization/2013/ but this post brought up several things that I had not considered.
Brilliant article, although for someone with limited time and budget, the only way to win the Google ranking game is not to play it. There are other money-making strategies that don’t depend on Google ranking, and, as a result, are much easier to implement.
I am glad that there are people like you who *do* have the time and resources to play the Google game, if for no other reason than to give people like me a good understanding of why it’s not worth my time.
Hi Glen,
I’m quite a newbie to SEO. I’ve been reading your posts for quite some time but have never really jumped in to using the info. Just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to write this incredibly thoughtful and info-rich post!
As a newbie, is there a post you can point me to, to get started using SEO for my site? (which I’m re-designing at the moment).
Thanks again,
Matt
Hey Matt,
This should still be very relevant if you’re using WordPress: http://www.viperchill.com/wordpress-seo/
If you’re not using WordPress, most things should still apply though. I hope that helps!
Thanks so much! Really appreciate this!
Glen,
Besides building our own, which links networks do you recommend?
Jimmy
Nothing to be honest with you that I’ve seen. Anyone who accepts anyone can not be linking to very good websites.
I was a fan of the Hoth but I don’t know who took over after they sold their service in the middle of last year. They weren’t really a network either so that probably doesn’t help.
There’s a good one mentioned twice in this post though ๐
Glen,
As always some great stuff about the reality of the Google Guidelines and unfair favoritism practices to some and not others. Being fairly new to the web and feeling as confused today as we were two years ago. We are going to do what we want and not blink every time Google burps! Thanks as always for the insight..
Glen,
Your insights and advice were foundational after I built my site in 2013 when I didn’t know how to spell SEO. Then I SEO’d it in Oct/Nov of 2013 after finding you.
I’ve gotten crazy high rankings for super-competitive keywords in the “acne” niche of all things using your direction and building upon it with basic SEO that you discuss so well.
In fact I just got a message from someone baffled on how one of my posts is number one outranking The Huffington Post and others. It’s all basic SEO which is actually mufti-facteted and somewhat complicated.
I also know how much effort it takes to create a post like this – thank you for your time and effort.
Extremely well done – and thanks for the link.
Brendon
Great post, Glen. 1,000 domains is insane! You’re more like a registrar than a blog network at this stage! How are you guys finding some many domains at reasonable prices!?
Hi Glen,
Great post, especially for someone like myself who is not the most well versed in these more advanced SEO tactics.
Anyways, I’ve been using your optin skin for a year now and just had to say it is a brilliant piece of work.
Thanks for all the generous help you are sharing without asking anything in return.
Bryce
Damn this was an amazing article.
I have to say I don’t think you should have been worried about the Wikipedia and About.com ages being on the first SERP. I’ve outranked such websites in no time (with your link network actually!).
What do you think about startups that take advantage of one-word search terms by naming their company things like “coin”. I think that is an even greater Google shitstorm.
Dang, dude. You only need to post a few times a year, your posts are so jam-packed with enough helpful information to make up three or four posts.
Keep it gangsta.
I hereby deem this “Best SEO post of 2014”
Great read, Thanks, dude.
Great post Glen! Looks like building brandable authority sites with a PBN is the way to go in 2014. Thanks for keep us update on what is working and not.
Thanks for the article. Google never ceases to amaze me, I have seen sites with absolutely zero links outrank but better sites with good quality links. GoDaddy simply using their power to get links and by the looks of it getting away with it.
As novel critics used to say in the past: this post was “unputdownable!” Especially for an SEO junkie.
My question perhaps reflects the limits of my insight (as well as my low budget!) , but: is there any evidence to suggest that Big G penalizes links from free website builders (Weebly, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc)? What about sites built on free hosting services?
I do appreciate that you are offering your own product in this post. I’m just curious why nobody is talking seriously about Web 2.0 sites anymore. They used to be in vogue not too long ago.
*I hope I’m not bringing down the general tone of the comments lol*
thank you yet again Glenn.
I’ll have to study more on this, i work a lot with local seo and if it’s effective as you say…
It seems like you have to be very careful, but it’s to be expected.
if you ever want to impart you wisdom for strategies on local seo, you’ll have at least an enthusiastic reader.
I’ve been reading your blog for some time, first comment ๐
Hey Glen,
Great insights. Cheers for the post!
Made it great insight glen and very well explained to the fact that google will fuck you either way I fell bad for that guy with his site I would definatly prefer getting slaped by google for doing anything other than what happened to him .
Really great post and it should be a warning to all who think great content is untouchable.
Hi Glen,
A truly marvelous, epic post.
I think this is the first time I’ve commented here.
Thanks for being so real with us. I should drop by more often.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Matthew.
Yes, you should ๐
Awesome and in-depth post Glen.
Thanks Stuart ๐
Hey Glen,
Awesome post as always. I have used that Godaddy tactic before and it works like a charm. Very easy to spread the love. I have a widget and my only concern was repeating the anchor text. It works with an iframe and it creates a link back to the website. To solve the anchor text issue, what I did was found a way to give each website an ID, then use the last digit of that ID (A number from 0 to 9) and associate them with a different anchor text. Since not all the users had the widget, the anchor text percentages are great very diversified and effective.
PS:
I’m sure the CTR of that sidebar image is of the chart. ๐
Sent you an email btw.
Amazingly insightful article Glen. As you mentioned I think Google is giving too much emphasis for brands and I think brands are taking full advantage of this as well. I have seen Forbes, Inc etc articles rank for fairly competitive searches buy publishing articles with very little content. Hopefully Google will sort this out. In the meantime off to build a network ๐ .
Hi Glen!
Just recently i’ve been talking to some white hat guys as well, and it sure seems like the Google scare tactics are working pretty well for some folks.
Oh well, more for the rest of us, I guess.
Great post! ๐
Arto
Nice post Glen. But for me social is doing all the Link-Job ๐
For how long? ๐
See man. Private blog or site network is working for many. Even I am tempted to experiment it but if it works than it implies that big firms can just buy 100’s of old authority domains, use plugins like spyderspanker, never get caught and damn– 1st on all the money keywords. So social is something where more relationship is required. So a SME can compete with the big bitches.
And I don’t think that people are buying old authority profiles (can’t say this for pages) ๐
Hi Glen,
great read, written from an expert with authority! I am too lazy to write such a long article and we both know it could be packed with even more details and examples. Everybody should pay attention to such facts and I think with a bit less jealousy in the seo community and a bit more of cooperation, a bit less of nerds destoying a lot performing their so called seo applying stupid methods, there could be a chance beating the big brands in their own game.
I am observing the forum scene, for example, since more than a decade and it’s horrifying to read the the advice given there to newbies. But even more horrifying is to see how everyone who still does not know much about the “game” is being “abused” by unscrupulous experts. No wonder, things are going wild and many try to find a solution, no matter what it is, as long as it works at least long enough to charge a client. The seo market should search for regulations and general accepted certifications for those working on the field.
Hi Glen,
Great article as usual but i was curious about one thing:
You say that you block links from sites like Ahref en Majestic. Brilliant idea at first sight but then I was wondering… Google can also read your htaccess.
Wouldn’t this be a signal for them to start snooping around? I don’t think it must be hard to make an algorithm that finds out where the links go to. If your site has 20 backlinks from websites that all block Ahref i would call that suspicious.
Would love to hear your input.
We actually use a plugin for this as I mentioned in a previous comment.
Not sure how Google could see an .htaccess file though? I Google’d just to make sure I wasn’t being stupid, and seemed to come to the same conclusion…
I know they can see the results that are set to them, since they have to process something, but nothing else in the file?
They can use a fake UA (e.g. AhrefsBot).
You shouldn’t tell anything about what you block or not ๐
Excellent post G!
Cheers Ally!
Thanks so much for the post really enjoyed it. They are always so detailed.
Glen, nice post. Hoping next post about negative SEO.
Glen thanks for a briliant post (as always).
How do I block my sites from link checking tools ?
Answered above, Einat.
Do a CTRL + F and you’ll find it ๐
Great post, Glen. I totally agree with you about Google’s hypocrisy and, pretty much all of the above. But the changes in the last two years have had the effect of putting me off SEO and I rarely enjoy reading about it. Only your stuff. For me, Google favouring brands, displaying worse results and wiping out thousands (millions) of hard-working bloggers on a whim took all the fun out of it.
I’m happy to say I lost half of my Google traffic last year and it didn’t make any difference to my business.
Good on you for creating link networks. It’s beyond me why some people slavishly contend that Google’s “rules” are necessarily “right” but I guess it’s in our nature to side with the biggest beast in the jungle.
Maybe one day I’ll make a success of a niche site after (ahem) 8-9 years of trying! ๐
All the best for 2014 and every year after. ๐
Hi Glen, Awesome post, it’s my first time commenting here.
I have to say that I have been extremely successful with building PR Sites and Ranking my clients sites with them. I have not come across any industries that they have not worked with, but I am sure you are correct. Most Local Service Industries they work for, ( locksmiths, tint shops, computer repair, etc.) You know the deal.
Wanted to get your opinion:
I keep preaching that if you leave your SEO in the hands of Social SEO, you will probably never see any results. I can’t see how likes, plus 1’s, or tweets will ever get you page 1 results, at least not for something with Medium Competition. your thoughts?
Truly excellent post, Glen.
Riding the Google rollercoaster is unquestionably painful at times. My wife has a site where she truly is the authority and has more content than any brand or other blogger on the niche.
She built it up to receive 300,000+ organic visitors from Google per month with a over a million page views. Through her ebook and social media efforts, she has 25,000 Facebook fans, 25,000 Twitter followers, more than 50,000 email subscribers and is a twice published author (published, not self published) with book number 3 contracted and in production who’s been featured in The Washington Post and a number of other magazines (Saveur this month).
Yet, amazingly, she got hammered by Penguin and lost all Google traffic and doesn’t even appear in the index anymore even with longtails, presumably because of Build My Rank.
Fortunately, when the traffic was there, we built the email list and social media following so she was able to maintain income and profitability despite the complete loss of organic traffic.
Today i just do random keyword research and Google the phrase “random weight loss now”, and this guy dominate first 5 pages of Google. Random sites all rated 5 star redirecting to the same site. How he did it?
Typo, i mean not “random weight loss now”, it is “rapid weight loss now”
Hi Glen
First off, happy new year
Secondly, thanks for taking the time to write another epic
Now you know from our emails that I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And you also know that I have tried my best to stay away from Google SEO because I hate a game where the other side gets to change the rules at a moment’s notice and usually when someone else plays the game better than them. Now we also know that Google SEO offers a massive advantage of delivering people who are looking for something you offer, so they’re half sold and this is a tempting prize. So it won’t surprise you to find out that I have a problem with your article.
I thought Google was broken long before your articles started pointing to their madness and the reason was that Google only matters for people searching for new things. Once someone has found what they are looking, Google is redundant. Now that I know about Viperchill I don’t bother using Google to find it, I just go to it. That must mean that everyday, more and more internet activity is going on without them. That’s not incuding facebook and Twitter and the rest of the social activity which offers an alternative to Google. Nor does it include any questions about the quality of searching that people are doing using Google. So I see their updates as acts of desperation as they watch their lucrative advertising model sliding away.
So here’s my problem: is ranking number 1 on Google actually worth the effort? Yes you get traffic, but do you get as much as you once did for that position and is the traffic worth having? You are in a position to answer that: you have this large network of your own and multiple clients. So: are you finding that nowadays you’re having to do more work for less returns than you doing were when you started? Is there a downward trend or are you getting the same level of reward for your hard work?
Awesome post Glen. About the negative point you made regarding blog networks not working in some niches due to authority sites being unfairly favored and taking up the top spots…
There are a ton of physical products that are dominated by Amazon and Ebay on the first page of search results for product names. Would you stay clear of competing with these?
And also, what about piggybacking on an authority site like Facebook or Youtube to compete? And firing your blog network links to a page or video you built on one of those, would that not be a work around for that obstacle?
Cheers,
James
Really interesting article. Just one question about the suggestion to block link checking bots with robots.txt.
Isn’t this also potentially telling Google, “hey Googlebot, I’m an SEO who must be doing something kinda shady to go out of my way to block link checking tools. Flag me for human review.”?
I get the argument that site owners could be blocking these sorts of bots to prevent them from needlessly using up server resources, but I’d imagine most wouldn’t bother unless they read this post.
I’m surprised nobody else asked this, or am I just completely missing the basics of robots.txt? It’s a static file hosted in a publicly-accessible directory, surely Google can incorporate this metric into their bot and (of course) manual reviews?
Someone did mention this above. Read the replies ๐
I’ve always been interested in link networks for the same reasons you laid out above, not to use for commercial purposes but to prove to myself that Google’s search engine isn’t a fair game. It sucks to see spammy/brand websites dominate for terms they have no reason to rank for. Definitely worth the read!
Sooooo….maybe I missed it, but are you saying it’s good to have a private link network or it’s bad to have a private link network?…I’ll read it again…
Have one, but don’t use it for everything.
Finally a no-bullshit post about SEO. Being in the SEO game, most understand that you have your MOZ, SearchEngineLand, etc blogs that constantly say the same thing and oh yea don’t forget to buy their product. This is one of the best reads in the SEO game I’ve read in the past couple of years. Well done.
Hey Glen!
Awesome post! I have a quick question:
Apart from people who publicly sell network links in forums and other places, do you know anyone or did have one or more domains from your private network deindexed by Google?
I’m asking this because people are all so afraid of being caught by Google (even those with a couple of domains, which is nothing compared to the big boys), but the reality is that if the network is kept private and you only use to rank your sites or your clients sites, it’s very very hard to expect that Google will find you instead of those nasty link networks from Russia or China.
No I don’t know of a single instance. Fingers crossed.
I’ve had some domains deindexed in the past. Got I friend also who got like 5 blogs deindexed over a night. So it’s possible
Hey Glen, Another great post with great ideas to chew on. I love reading through the comments so much as well! I learn a ton.
Great read.
I just took the time to read all this after a colleague had shared it earlier today, and it gave a voice to some powerful feeling I’ve had recently regarding Google’s behavior.
Their primary concern is revenue, of course–they’re a business, not a public service! But reading this helped put some issues I’ve been experiencing, from Disavow, to algorithm fluctuations, to reconsideration requests, in perspective.
Just wanted to thank you for taking the time to write a comprehensive post about this. I think the point is it’s never going to be perfect, there will always be small ways to exploit algorithms, and ultimately Google can do what they want and play favorites (like Rap Genius or any other brand they like).
For the most part, I don’t think they want to get into the business of dealing with the small guys from an SEO perspective. And I don’t really blame them. There’d be no turning back. But at the same time, I also think the webspam team should stop treating everyone in the industry like they’re morons.
Definitely one of the best SEO related entries I’ve read in quite some time.
First time reading your blog and am definitely a fan now. Thanks for the detailed post – I completely agree with you, there’s a good and bad time for them
Wow what a long article lol . . . I was already about to purchase services from a link network provider and now im entirely convinced. I have spent a couple of months looking at different companies whom most I didnt trust enough having seen them as you mention on sponsored posts in facebook etc! I have since found out an interesting provider whom I have seen used by someone who uses aged domain auction purchases built into networks. However I am going to check back over that blue text I spotted earlier in this post ๐ (our network) $$$
Epic ass post! Glad I took the time to read it, and I did spot your two links ๐
Thanks for a very informative post. I have considered building a link network and your comments might just spur me on to do it!
Some interesting stuff in the comments as well.
I was brought here after reading a post from rand of moz fame. I just started a site that was quite broad for terms but hoping to get some longtail traffic. I must admit I don’t really have the basics down yet and am just trying to gleam as much from reading posts.
After reading this post, I have to say I’m disappointed, not in the post of course, it’s fantastic! Disappointed in the fact that it appears that I’ll probably be wasting much of my time after reading this. I see about.com, ranking for a bunch of long tail keywords I though I might rank for if I try and get relevant backlinks. I also see a bunch of other high brand names ranking for obscure terms I was hoping to rank for too.
About and the other sites ranking for these terms have just about zero backlinks for these keywords. But reading other guides I found, i was pretty much told not to worry, write better content get better backlinks and prevail. I don’t think that’s going to be the case now.
I’m doing this site all myself, literally a one man army. I have no budget for expired domains or links, only dedication. I’ll still try and get backlinks from audio and infographics etc.. then just see how the chips fall.
I can see I’m really going have to dig deeper to find the best links now. I’ll also have to really dig deeper and find keywords that hopefully aren’t even mentioned by the big sites.
Anyway, great read and I’m off to read more. Thanks for the article.
You’re a beast, Glen.
I had to at least let you know that I appreciated this post and totally devoured the entire thing. The time, research and insight going into this post is insane to think about. ๐
I got some nice resources and quite a bit of things to think about and write about. which is always a good thing.
More power to you, and like you already know, brush them haters off. Peace.
When was this posted? I want to know if this still applies. Sorry about the stupid question, but the is no “posted date”
Two days ago ๐
Thanks for the insighful article Glen.
Think I’m now on all your list.
Looking forward to you email tomorrow.
Best Regards,
Dave
‘Iโve structured the rest of the post in a Good vs. Evil format with what I see a networks benefits and weaknesses are.’ — Where have I heard this E-word before? …..Ah such a dark wit you have Glen! Brilliant post, again.
Glen,
I am going to take your advice and start a network. Two questions about images and videos in the posts:
1. Do you create and use your own videos or just embed relevant youtube videos?
2. Do you hotlink to relevant images, or import them into the blog an insert into the post?
Thanks for the insight and help!
1. You can embed videos if you like and it’s relevant.
2. I definitely wouldn’t hotlink any images from other sites. Use your own or royalty free websites ๐
Glen thanks for the reply. That helps alot.
Also do you use social profiles (with keywords/phrases in the name) like all those on knowem.com?
If so, do you point links back to money sites or blog network?
Thanks again for your wisdom.
Google is trying relentlessly to kill “SEO”. But you know what they’re really doing? Making themselves irrelevant.
Now, how can an 800-pound gorilla EVER be irrelevant (especially if he’s standing in the corner of your living room with a white elephant)?
Because, sooner or later, people won’t even use Google. Not saying that Google Search will go away (it won’t but it will wane in popularity)…but I think people will grow tired of “finding” sites in Google Search that they already know about.
For example, if I’m looking for blenders, I may as well just type in target.com or amazon.com or walmart.com and search their sites. Why even go to GS? Because Target, Amazon, and Wal-Mart are what they’re going to tell you!
So, at the end of the day, SCREW Google (Scroogle? hehe) and just go for traffic. How? Make your own rain.
Bill, Google will never be irrelevant. People don’t use Google to find content that they already know about. They use it to find sites or content that they wouldn’t be able to directly access. Not many people Google search for Fortune 500 companies (they just add .com to the company name). It’s mostly more obscure sites like blogs, smaller online stores, online services, etc. that people need search engines for. Google is the best because it has a clean and simple look and good search results (more or less). It seems that Yahoo and Myspace took a dive when their sites started to look too busy. As long as Google stays away from that they should be fine.
Hi Glen,
I was doing a search for, believe it or not, tapas images and came across this post. I had no idea of its existence. I just wanted to say thank you.
Thank you for noticing my comment.
Thank you for being interested enough to check out my website and its SEO structure.
Thank you for your comments about my website (I’m going to be changing the design to a responsive one soon-ish. It’s just the thought of 50-odd pages… ;o)).
Thank you for confirming that I’ve not done much wrong and I’ve just been slapped by Google’s broken algorithm.
And thank you most of all for a bit of moral support and vindication.
Your blog is now in my feed reader and you have a new fan.
Best regards,
Steve
Thank you Stephen,
I did actually email you when the article went live but I guess you don’t check that email address anymore?
You’re very welcome. Glad you finally found this ๐
I do check it occasionally, usually about once a week – when I remember! I just did, and found your email. Thanks again.
Just thought I’d do another check on google.com. Today I am on the 3rd page at #30, with all sorts of irrelevant rubbish and nonsense above me. Maybe Google have been reading this post and decided to teach me a lesson?!
I have been researching about link networks and this clears things up for me. Thank you very much for sharing quality info. Just followed your blog Glen.
Great article about Private Blog Network
I have a big plan with PBN, first I think it is simple buy some high PR domain, setup a website on SEO hosting, buy some unique content and public article with link back to my money site.
But after read this post, I think I am a stupid, it is not easy and Google is not an idiot.
I will have to read all your experience on this blog before start a new project.
Thanks
I Don’t Know Why Google Doing it. But Google Should not do it. Thank you very much for Sharing.
Thanks Glen! I learned two things today, GoDaddy has linking issues and the history of Nokia which was really fascinating! I will look into my GoDaddy enabled sites and keep watch but I do have a question. Is the GoDaddy linking good for my site short term or is bad all around?
Thanks Glen!
Building a blog network does seem on the black side of things when it comes to getting rankings. I’ve had but doubts about it but and tried it and it really works. Not really something I would see myself get into but after seeing the various case studies, I figured it really gives me control over my links.
Really great content for everyone out there and I appreciate your honesty on this. Thanks for it! Will keep expecting great content from you!
Cheers!
Well I think while creating backlinks, if we focus on quality then Google can’t push back to our website because natural and white hat SEO is the key to success and Google gives high priority to such websites that contain natural backlinks.
If only that were the case, I wouldn’t have written this blog post.
Hello,
Glen watching you the very time ! Congralutions!
Glen, thanks for this post man.
I loved the way you are being true to your self.
You’re amazing. ๐
That was an awakening post glen, I always wonder about the big brands that pop on the 1st page of Google for most of the money making keywords, even though the pages on the brand sites aren’t that relevant. This clearly shows that Google is being hypocritical. I don’t know how things are gonna change in the coming algo updates. Already many webmasters have taken the heat from panda and penguin.
Right On Master Glen! Google becoming more of a hypocrite and now they are selling domains! Seems like what they really want to happen is to own the entire state of search! Everything you said here is true to the bone! ^_^
I’ve been building my own network for a while , very inspired reading your post though. But i would like to ask how can you host your very big network. If you have HostNine , it’s probably give you 20-25 different C Blocks which you can host securely 20-25 Blogs there, the rest if you host with different hosting companies, it would be a nightmare managing them all. If the solution is using free CDN like cloudflare, is it a footprint in google eyes? Till now it’s my biggest concern building a network, not buying expired domains or the outsourced content , just how to manage it effectively without losing too much time.
Hope you can give me a solution for this. (i’m making 100-200 sites btw).
Very appreciate your shares!
Hi Bin,
Check out http://marketinginc.com where I talk about this in more detail ๐
Great post here, thanks for being transparent Glen.
Great article Glen, really helpful article for SEO’s at time when all the scary stories are going on the web trying to fear out from building networks that helps rankings.
Great Post Glen, Your all post contain full and detailed information about the topic. Well backlinking is one of the important factor in off page seo and this post had resolve all issues related to blog netowork or link network.
But Now I saw that some blogs or site with have only few 2-3 line also getting 1st page of google. Confused now. share your views Glen.
Thanks for this post again.
EPIC article you wrote, Glen!
it take me time to read, but this was awesome!
Thnaks man!
This is an epic post and the best one I’ve seen on B networks. I have never built one before, and I’m not convinced that Google could out them. Rather be safe than sorry. That being said, I do use a tactic where I create a microsite for a client (lets say a software review site) where it does a comparison of my client against their competitors and puts my client in the best light. I then spend time promoting the site/piece and the client’s love it.
Well, that’s my 2 cents.
Hi Glen,
Great post firstly. I was just wondering how you can manage the whois information of +1000 domain names without leaving any footprint?
Hi Glen,
Great post. I was just wondering how you can manage the whois information of +1000 domain names without leaving any footprint?
Excellent. I have a question, how do I know about the changes in Google algorithms? Feedburn only one would suffice
Nanda
Thanks for sharing! its quite useful for my website ๐
Awesome stuff!
Thanks for sharing.
This information was very valuable to me.
Hey, very good your post.
Thank you for that.
Is it really working today?