Are you inundated by ads for “backlink building packages”? You can’t surf the net anymore without relevant ads hitting you. If you are a blogger, or someone that’s trying to make money online – you’re going to see all kinds of things that seem like they are too good to be true (and they usually are).
In the past I hadn’t paid attention to most of these ads or web sites, but lately I’ve been asked by a few clients whether or not “this” or “that” was a good deal. Every now and then I see something cool – but usually it’s the same old thing.
I’m not going to give you the URL, but I want to show you this web site I saw yesterday. They seem to be spamming a lot of sites with a big graphic through adsense saying you can “Get 1,000 Backlinks for only $9.99”. Once again, sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
Take a look at this picture from a web site selling only one service: backlink building
Now first of all, wouldn’t you be a little suspect of a web site offering no other service but backlinks? I would, especially if it didn’t have any personal or business name, country, or address on it at all. So, I’m already suspicious, and then I see the content on the homepage in the image above. See how these are all “profile backlinks”? See in the green text where it says “permanent forum profile links”?
What they’re doing is taking automated software and creating 1,000 accounts for you in web site forums all over the world. You get 1,000 for $9.99 because they aren’t doing anything more than entering your profile name, web site URL, and maybe a keyword or two – and clicking “submit” to spam forums with new accounts.
Now the green text says “Permanent forum profile links”. What they don’t tell you is, nearly all modern forums have tools to remove unused accounts. Most profile owners are used to spammers creating profiles just for links – and the regularly deleted unused accounts.
Now, they have a package where you can get 10,000 backlinks for 49.99. Check out what it says on their FAQ page:
Your site will NOT be penalized for getting so many links? What!? Are they insane?
I’ve been working online for 15 years now, and I think I’ve had about every single penalty google has to offer at one time or another. You most likely WILL get penalized, and I’ll tell you why.
RELEVANCY
Of all the STUPID things that you could do with a web site, getting 1,000 or more non-relevant links to your web site is probably the worst. Google is pretty smart – and the biggest tell tale sign that you’re trying to “game the system” is getting a bunch of unnatural links QUICKLY. Not only do I know this for a fact, I saw it in action this very year.
Back in Jan / Feb 2010 I had an intern building links for a brand new web site and he just went nuts. He did some awesome work, building links by blog commenting, on forums, many high pagerank places, social media – the majority were just average links. He built many looking for dofollow blogs with top commenter blocks in the sidebar, places where if you comment enough you get a sidebar link sitewide.
This paid off in spades, because within a month he had 5,000 backlinks built to the site. In two months that increased to 12,000 backlinks, and after about 3 months it went all the way to 26,000 backlinks+. Sounds awesome doesn’t it? Guess what, the site was never sandboxed, but during the ENTIRE 3 months of backlink building the site average about 10-20 pageviews per day. The backlinks were USELESS, because they were built too quickly, and because nearly all of them weren’t relevant to the web site. They weren’t permanent either, and dropped down to only 426 as of today – only 4-5 months later. To this day google only shows “3” backlinks.
Check this out from further down the homepage of that same backlink building web site:
They want 25 bucks to build 5 permanent relevant links. Wait a minute – you could get 1,000 permanent forum links for $9.95 – what gives? Well, first of all – that was automated, and people have to manually get these links. Also, as I just pointed out – RELEVANT backlinks are worth about 5,000% MORE than useless ones. I mean, my gosh – they want $2,499 for 500 permanent relevant links.
My advice to you is, learn how to build backlinks slowly and methodically. Build 20-25 per week, and take your time. If you’re not sure how to do this, you could always hire or consult with someone who does: JTPratt Media
Like you, I always look behind the scenes to try to figure out what their angle is and how they are going to get these links. In my experience, even the services that look legit end up getting you nothing but spam links. And I mean bad spam links.
I tried a seemingly legit link building service recently to see if they would be a legitimate outsourcing asset. Their sales material was very convincing. They said that their links were all manually built one at a time. They took way longer than advertised. When the links did come, they never pinged any of them, they were all super spammy links that would set any spam filter flag off in a heartbeat. I think I was pretty smart in having them do it for a worthless website of mine first so that I could judge the quality.
Had I not done that, I probably would have nuked a good website.
These link builders are shmucks. Don’t fall for their sales pitches. Every single one of them that I have tried so far (which is a bunch) has underachieved in my opinion. They just plain suck.
Google is very suspicious with these kind of spammy and low-quality backlink building software these days, and you will never like it once you get penalized. it’s obviously not worth it, and the quantity of links doesn’t really matter if it’s compared to a few high-quality links.
Just to share an equation, 1 high quality backlink (dofollow attribute, PR 3 – 10 and topically relevant) is equals to 555 links from PR 0 – 2 pages. which means your $9 is only worth 2 high quality backlinks, which is not that hard to find. Perhaps it will just take you minutes to search for these high quality pages to link from, right? 🙂
By the way, cool call to action, I personally liked it.
Regards,
Jason
@Jason – thanks. I can’t write a post without selfishly building a backlink for myself, now can I?
It is so hard to get traffic these days that people will try anything. Very interesing about your intern, that’s a lot of work on their behalf for such little return. Well worth knowing that Google checks relevance and how quickly the lionks were built. Thanks for your post.
Very reasonable post. Just as you said, relevancy is something many people (and companies) tend to miss. They seem to be so desperate in getting traffic, that ‘the easiest solution’ they think is ‘the best’.
I have seen these ads popping up everywhere too, underneath one of their packages it states that WE will never remove your links. Maybe they should tell the gullible that there is a very real possibility that someone else just might remove them. It is hard to gain a competitive advantage these days with all the IMers trying to make a buck, but I figure the more of them that try these tactics the less competition there will be for me in the long run. =|8 Appreciate you confirming my suspicions about these ads tho.
I worked in an SEO agency and they would charge clients $300 dollars a month for “link building”. In fact all they did was buy a $25 dollar 1000 links package from one of these companies each month and send the client the URL list.
The client never saw an improvment in rankings unless there was very little competition and hence zero traffic.
I didn’t stay working there for long but the agency is still trading and still using the same tactics.
I see this kind of stuff all the time. I even downloaded some software that creates these profiles, but I haven’t used it and I don’t think I ever will. It just seems so wrong.
In the long term this kind of link building is pointless. It is better to spend time creating great content and link building in a respectable manner.
Outsourcing link building is a risky strategy – you just don’t know what could happen.
Top commentator is only useful if you are a fan of that site, I comment on some top commentator sites and comment frequently but my best link building strategy is to write unique content that is valuable in niche markets. People build links to my sites faster than I can comment on sites. Normally the only time I go around commenting is when I am launching a new site.
I would never pay for these 9.99 services because I get those jerks to sign up for my forums all the time and I hate them, they are waisting their time and my time.