Dexter Never thought that I'll have to ask this question. I am consulting a company that already has an SEO team. The problem is that the SEO team believes blog commenting and forum posts are genuine backlinks. I've tried so many times to let them know that those "links" are rubbish. I've proposed a few value pages related to their niche but the SEO team thinks that's the "hardest" way to make backlinks. How can I prove it to them that they're idiots? 25 👍🏽16 🤭41 60 💬🗨📰👈
Zafar I think it's time to change your team. Blog comments & forum posts are just Okay to keep naturality but it's not good practice to focus on such links. Try to build backlinks from relevant, high authority & content-based sites. Building good links are not hard, we just need to approach relevant websites while offering them some value too. 🤔👍🏽2
Zafar You can share this screenshot too that building spammy links not going to help.
💟👍🏽 5 Zain » Dexter I believe you'll just waste your time trying to convince the team you're consulting that they're wrong. The image Adeel has shown above says everything. In my opinion, consult someone like Adeel who knows his shit. I can vouch for his work. Good luck. 🤔👍🏽6
Shumail There are hundreds of such teams who rely on such easy backlinks.Reason is lack of vision/budget and less frequent Google spam updates.I have faced this situation many time but I always train the team and show them how effectively they can build contextual links which are safe and better. Micha "How can I prove it to them that they're idiots?" Well, we've all been in your position but "prove it to them that they're idiots" is not the most productive mindset. I agree with Jerry in that you should set up an experiment with good controls to help them see what you see. Then let them decide for themselves what they want to do and live with their business decision.
Dexter ✍️ » Micha I agree. My tone isn't right. It's just that the people who believe they know everything are the true definition of idiots and they drive me crazy. A person should be a life long learner. None of us know everything, and we should happily accept that.
Kolleen It's an old tactic that used to work a decade or more ago. Even Quora stopped giving juice to links. I would find some articles that talk about it being old. Some people get caught up in their ways and don't work on keeping up with industry standards.
Dexter ✍️ » Kolleen I forgot to mention, they're getting links from Quora too. 😃😂
Natasha If you are in charge of the SEO team remodelling….tell them its a business management decision that no more client time is wasted on low value practices and that only tangible links that drive measured results are acceptable moving forwards and as experts in their field they need to refresh their skillset and produce 2-3 options they can achieve by obtaining authority links which are from industry relevant sources because they are working harder not smarter and SEO has evolved.
Dexter ✍️ » Natasha I am not in charge of their modelling. Am just here to help them make a better strategy. LOL those guys genuinely believe Quora and Medium backlinks are very high quality. I told them they may help in terms of referral traffic in a certain cases, but those backlinks don't have any value. They refuse to believe me.
Clint I assume since you're calling the other team "idiots" you've got test results that you've done that prove that those links have no value? If you don't, then you need to test as Jerry said and prove or disprove that they work. Then you tell the client that yes, the other links are harder, but they should also be INCLUDED with the links their SEO team is building in order to diversify their link profile.
George B. Johnson Yeah, link diversity is a real thing. No reason to stop the "easy" links. I suppose as long as they aren't on tricky p0rn forums.
Petter Guessing you were brought in by someone who works above the team, you should look into what they report on as success – and along with management, define better PI's and Key Performance Indicator (KPI)'s. For example, stop measuring in links acquired, start measuring on traffic generated (and the leads/revenue from that).
Dexter ✍️ » Petter How exactly can you measure the impact of each backlink? I really don't want them to think that the needle started moving up because they got a backlink from Quora. Petter » Dexter If you need to ask that, then you're perhaps not ready for this task, – ranking improvements for keywords on linked to pages – referral traffic from the link itself – improved metrics (in tools like ahrefs) Thing is, if there's no agreed upon way to consider effort as valuable – then the business is immature
Morgan I value Blog Comments as part of the process. I don't know how to function with indecisive methodologies like that though, to be honest. This is a good time to improve the strategy to move that needle. Rienzi Check the stats and what they've yield. These are not rubbish if they know what they are doing. Truslow 🎓 The two of you are arguing two different points, so you'll never find the middle ground. You're saying that their kind of links are "garbage". They are saying that your kind of links are "hard" to get. When you're starting from those positions, both of you are correct. They are wanting to go for the easy garbage and you are wanting to go for the harder, more valuable ones. Now… when we do link building, we might spend 2-3 months trying to get one link. But that's not to say that other link building efforts aren't going on. It's not an "all or nothing" proposition. Maybe… Agree to split the effort and see how it works. Spend a portion of the time grabbing the low hanging fruit that they love to get – but also spend some time working on those "hard" ones. And I can say that not ALL links from blog comments and forum posts are rubbish. Those from well curated sites that have relevant posts and helpful information absolutely help.
Trenton » Truslow This. Patricia Thank you!
Zohair Ask them to show you the proof if these links worked on any previous website they worked on… I also once thought they are idiots but once I saw bunch of sites in few niches only ranking on such crappy links and Private Blog Networks (PBN)s, I had to rethink, you can do mix and match and every niche is different, for some local sites these garbage links work like charm.. Phil There was a time where I had a decent sized supplement website and we got a lot of links from people talking about products that we were selling and linking to them or articles we had on our website and people linking to them from forums. We even had links from forums on bodybuilding(dot)com coming to our site lol Scott There are websites in non-competitive niches that can get a big boost with junk links. I just looked at a bunch of geo pages for a local business today that had nothing but crap PBN links. Those links have been powering their pages for many years. My client has much better content, but no junk links and is consequently getting outranked. Asim Yes you r right, these kind of links are not useful for your site. But most of the agencies to these kind of links due to lack.of knowledge and don't know the correct idea of Google Algorithm. Now a days Google is more advanced on technical side. So build strong technical foundation and get a link from niche relevent website. Chris I had a similar discussion with a client yesterday that has a current SEO agency helping them. This SEO agency hasn't done any link building for the client yet, only content, and doesn't seem to have a link building plan in place. It also sounds like they have convinced the client that back links are the devil and not a sound SEO technique. For your situation I would explain to your client that blog comments and forum posts are just one type of link building, but the drawbacks to those are that the links generally don't have much authority/link power and they run the risk of being seen as spammy links in the eyes of Google. Explain to them how other types of links like outreach, guest posting etc are a much more powerful and safer link building option which gets quality links on real sites with real traffic. If you have examples of sites that have done well with your link building tactics, show those off so the client can see you know what you're talking about.
