Tim Backink question… Over the past year I've had an SEO guy who I'm just now learning has been backlinking from very, very poorly written articles on absolutely no-name blogs. I sell a type of medical device and these articles make absolutely zero sense when you read them. After expressing my disappointment in learning this, he is trying to suggest that it essentially doesn't matter, that the main thing is that backlinks are there. Article/blog quality don't matter much. I have a very hard time believing this. My SEO has greatly improved, but I am personally creating video content on my YouTube channel, and it does provide quality traffic. Any thoughts on this? Is it true what he's saying, or is he just (as I suspect) trying to cover his a••)? 8 👍🏽8 42 💬🗨📰👈
Brandon Honestly, I've analyzed HUNDREDS of backlink profiles of law firm and legal websites that rank on the first page of Google, and have high traffic. 90% of them have the majority of their back links coming from low caliber sites with poor to awful content quality. And they pay hundreds/thousands for those links much of the time. So while it's not what you want to hear, your SEO guy may be telling you the ugly truth
Josh Are they ranking because of them or in-spite of them? Brandon » Josh Sometimes it's CLEAR that they are ranking because of them. In other cases, they also have excellent content. Take a look yourself. It's mind boggling. I have a theory that Google turns a blind eye to the legal niche, so long as the site owner has links from a few reputable directories. After that, seems like EVERYTHING (i.e., white hat, black hat, no hat 😂) is fair game. 🤯👍🏽2 Tim ✍️ » Josh That's my take on it. We were slowly chugging along for the first 6 months. Then I started creating YouTube content and I started ranking first page, then top 3. Marco » Josh Finally someone that gets it Richard Hearne 👑 » Josh it's a relative world. You're not competing with the entire web, but with your peer group who target the same keywords. What you mention for legal niche – multiply it by 100 for the gambling, pills, p0rn niches.
Micha 👑 If you cannot find the articles indexed in Google then they are NOT helping with Google's search results in any way whatsoever. Beyond that, there is no other way to determine if a link affects your search results in any way That said, you don't need a lot of low-quality backlinks to build search referral traffic in either Bing or Google. You can certainly create a content-based campaign without the links, where you publish articles about your medical devices on other sites. Teach people to search for your brand. 🤭💟👍🏽10
Odowa » Martinez "if you cannot find the articles indexed in Google then they are not helping…". Hey sir, I need some clarification, my Google console shows very few backlinks (less than 50) however when i check my backlinks using Ahrefs, it shows 300 backlinks and this really confuse me. How can I know my exact number of backlinks? Trenton » Odowa You can't really know unless you check all 300 links and see if they are actually linking to you. Ahrefs shows links that are no longer linking to you. Micha 👑 » Odowa You need to copy and paste the URLs into Google's search box to see if they're currently indexed. And keep in mind that it's normal for pages to be indexed, drop out, get back into the index, drop out, etc. Odowa » Trenton I check the links manually and they are linking to me, however they are not showing up in Google search console, does this mean that these links were ignored by Google and they completely have no effect on my rankings? Trenton » Odowa Most likely yes.
Tricia The quality of the articles from which you receive the link will not reflect on your site or your site quality, they will just signal to Google that the site that is hosting the backlink is full of sh*t and therefore you won't be gaining any benefit. Think of it as receiving a recommendation for a vegetarian restaurant from someone who has never been there and isn't a vegetarian. – You won't see that as a reflection of the restaurant, you just wouldn't consider the recommendation a valid one. and The links are unlikely to hurt you unless any of the links are from dodgy link farm-type sites, in which case I would disavow them. Review your links and ensure this is not the case. Your SEO needs a boot up the but and a termination letter. They haven't harmed you, but you've paid them for a service you have not received. I'm always careful to sit with clients and layout what I'll be doing, why, and what results it is reasonable to expect. This is written into my contracts – do you have anything similar written down for your SEO
Tim ✍️ » Tricia With this particular guy, I don't think I signed a formal contract. FWIW, he's a nice enough guy and I think he has good intentions, but has gone about doing everything very old school, "cookbook" SEO recipe method, if that makes any sense. When I started to make a fuss about it, he was polite enough in listening but essentially told me that the backlinking is almost like an "extra" he's been doing, but that he's more focused on sitemapping, submitting changes to Google, monitoring, etc. It's probably more annoying to me than any real harm/damage. He's been helping me for a year now and dumb me, I'm just now discovering how s***y the articles are. And he has helped me with Google ads, too. It's not like he's an expert in the field, I get that, but at no time did he even ask me for clarification about the accuracy of any of these articles. I actually think he himself has done little to nothing with the articles himself. I'd almost guarantee he just subbed that out to someone else, who then ran them through an Artificial Intelligence (AI) app and posted them. But yeah, I do kind of hope he learns from this. I know I have. Tricia I think it's more difficult when a nice person does shitty work – it feels horrible complaining.
Aamir He is total wrong and. you will waste hard money and time. Quality of links depends on many factors and its art to evaluate quality links. Toxic, low quality and no traffic link will definitely effect your site. For temporary maybe you will get results but when Google spiders will crawl your site then those toxic links will damage in upcoming time. I will suggest you to make link strategy and. then go for this. Richard Hearne 👑 There's a lot of opinion/theory in here, some of which is being presented as fact. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a very grey subject. Remember – Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV) It's also super to see so much interest in this topic. If you wish to share your site Tim please feel free to do so. Examples of the content mentioned might also be useful for everyone.
Tim ✍️ » Richard Hearne I'd thought about it, but based on past experiences decided against it, as it tends to attract aggressive sales pitches. I've already received several PMs from this post alone, unfortunately. Richard Hearne 👑 This is why we cant have nice things 🙁 Such a shame, as it would be very interesting to research this further.
