Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 16 years 11 months 27 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
No. This post is dangerously outdated
There is no single magic bullet for search engine visibility. However, there is a process that acts as an entire arsenal of magic bullets, and those are structure, content and links.
- Search engine friendly structure and fundamentally sound SEO principals.
- Fresh content appropriately added on a regular basis commensurate to the level of your competitions activity.
- Inbound links from relevant sites with appropriate anchor text to targeted areas of your website appropriately balanced to the level of your competition.
Anything else that I can think of pretty much falls within those three bullets, and assuming you understand them all, I’ll proceed.
*Updated 12/31 – I’m sticking with the Linkvana test but I’m adding to the reader comment area below – Be sure to read them – Is Linkvana black hat, grey hat, white hat or what? I guess that’s going to be controversial, but I can assuredly say it “definitely aint squeaky clean”!
Structure
If you have a well optimized site structure, (like a properly configured WordPress site) that will take care of bullet number one, the structure..Content
Well-written content designed for the readers to provide some value is all it takes. Between your friends, your kids, your employees, ghostwriters, and even content spinners, that takes care of bullet two.
Links
When it comes to inbound links, you already understand that above all else you need quantity, but you also need diversity, and you need quantity.
Quality Link Building
Quality link building is a skill unto itself, and for competitive phrases there is simply no substitute.
This is not the place to get into great detail, but it shouldn’t be news to you that some links are better than others. The best quality inbound links are ones that are relevant to your business, ones that come from domains and pages that have Google page rank, and have limited numbers of outbound links.
I’d rather have an inbound link from a related PR3 page with only five other outbound links, than a link on a PR7 page with a couple of hundred other links. I wish I could tell you I had a solution to get the most authoritative and relevant websites on the web to link to you but I don’t, and anyone who tells you that is lying.
Inbound Link Diversity
To add to your diversity, Web directories and article directories can be worked to death. Additionally, your own participation in blogs and social media will bring you incredible value, and you’re only limited by your available time in the day.
Perhaps you’ve purchased links from foreign countries, or you’ve tried some of the link networks that require that a script get added to your site to slowly build links through other participants sites over time.These may still be fine for affiliate sites, but you can’t risk having an important domain dropped from the index, and simply change domain names on the fly if one gets caught violating Google’s terms of service.
To add your diversity, you also may have found networks of blogs both small and large, perhaps through someone you know, or even a commercial service that allow you to post content on their blogs which are on a wide array of C class IP addresses, choosing your own link text.
This has proven to be one of the most effective methods of gathering links in volume, but can still require a Herculean effort on your part (i.e. work), and eventually, you’ll exhaust the supply of available domains, and you’re left with nothing but those 10, 20 or even 50 domains to build links to your sites.
Even More Diversity
If you’re lazy, or you’ve been in the game for a while, then perhaps you’ve used, or at least you understand, about things like content scrapers and trackback and comment spam.
While both used to work, (and perhaps still do to a point), they can really leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, and definitely constitute a big black hat.
Inbound Link Quantity
Unlike trying to rank for “Las Vegas real estate”, many second and third tier phrases still really don’t need a whole lot of effort to dominate the search rankings.
If you’re selling “decorative blue locking widgets” and have a well optimized page for them, then just a few inbound text links can rocket you to the top of the search engines, and that’s where Linkvana comes in.
Here are the steps to using Linkvana:
- Add a new project
- Add your domain
- Choose your target URLs
- Choose your anchor text
- Make 100 word posts with those phrases
- You’re off to the races…
The Linkvana network will then add your articles (posts) with your backlink to trickle in daily over time. It’s as close as you can get to a “set it and forget it” system.
They insist on quality original content, and limit the number of posts yoy can make each day PER DOMAIN. However, there’s no limit to the number of domains, and that’s huge.
They do offer about 40 minutes of video training on the site, and I’ve watched it all, boiling it down to a 3 1/2 minute demonstration , which I started immediately after creating a new project in their system – Linkvana Demo Video.
After a couple of weeks, I’ll follow up with the results too, as I’ve begun testing with multiple domains that currently have no backlinks, and no ranking of any kind. Some of my first links just went live yesterday, so have not yet been discovered by the search engines.
The only “downside” that I’ve encountered so far is that since it’s a closed network, there is no way of knowing where your post and links are going to end up.
However, that same fact is what prevents this network from being easily discoverable, and ultimately penalized somehow. I just don’t see it happening. I suppose it’s technically possible that someone could research all the backlinks manually as they trickle in, and then be able to determine what blogs are participating in this network, but that seems to me to be an incredible amount of work for such a small number of users (300), and highly unlikely.
There’s a certain amount of trust involved on my part too, that the links will really happen as they claim. However, the names that are involved with this venture and those of participants are well known, and I’m comfortable giving it a try.
Again, let me stress that this is NOT going to be a complete substitute for true authoritative link building, and enable you to instantly rank for the highest competition phrases.
However, in my opinion (*ed. – see latest comments below), when added to your arsenal, Linkvana is definitely going to be a big gun to use for ranking many of your medium and longer tail phrases in a snap, assuming all of your other bullets are in place too.
They’re currently running a $50 off promotion, but I don’t know how long that will be good, and they claim that the cutoff for membership is 300 people. I was number 188.
If you decide to check it out, I hope you’ll use my (of course) affliate link and leave me some feedback about how it goes.
I was affiliate #189 – see my review at this Squidoo lens: http://www.squidoo.com/linkvana-reviewed
Hi James –
Are you impressed so far? I guess I am, but not many links gone live yet. I haven’t worked it too hard, and it’s only been a few days since initial setup… I did just get my first couple of pingbacks yesterday, so I know the links are beginning to go live, but none are particuilarly good, and they’re not from decent domains as advertised.
I’m also starting to have second thoughts, and I probably shouldn’t have blogged it –
this may not be black hat, but definitely on the grey side – Anything this easy can’t last that long, and is going to be short lived. If people don’t take advantage of it, it might last a year, but there are going to be too many spammers that will likely spoil it for everyone.
I’ll keep this thread going with status though…
Hi Scott,
I’ve been posting static HTML sites so need to check out their links to see how they are doing.
It seems pretty good to me however when you pointed out the domains aren’t as good as advertised, maybe I should inspect that further?
I don’t think it could ever be a haven for spammers because each site, each post and each link is reviewed by the Linkvana staff. Considering that he’s only allowing 300 into the program, too – this should make it even harder for spammers.
I’m still confident in it – it’s a rock-solid program that should give you a bunch of quality backlinks.
Thanks James, for continuing to write here –
When I say “spammers” I just mean people that just try to abuse the Linkvana system, and end up posting nothing but crappy paragraphs to crappy sites.
Don’t forget that while Linkvana does claim to review your posts, as well as the sites you’re linking to, the end result is STILL that a duplicate post ends up being placed on these blogs, so how “good” can it really be? –
(* update 1/7/08 – each article only goes onto ONE blog – there is no duplicate posting)
I’ve tried to make all my posts so far have some value, but inevitably, for me to use Linkvana widely, the quality is naturally going to deteriorate.
Checking your backlinks to those URL’s as they happen will give us a good idea of whether or not we think it’s going to last, and we can then see what other people are posting too.
So far, I’m honestly just not knocked out by the domains where my links are showing up, and that’s disappointing.
That doesn’t mean is still may not work fine for getting new sites spidered, and for improving some long rankings, but my initial euphoria has worn off.
Being a primarily “white hat” guy I guess I’m wondering why I posted this in the first place. Was it just the excitement over the ease of the system and potential affiliate income? Yeah, I guess it was.
In retrospect, it was probably a stupid thing to write about, but I’m sticking with my rule of never removing a post, and hopefully, others will chime in here with their experiences too.
Scott,
First I wanted to let you know I think your new website looks great. Hope all is going well in the great Northwest.
Regarding Linkvana, my guess is the quality of the blogs will never be that good. Ultimately you always get what you pay for and no way can quality blogs accept such low payment per post.
My other problem is that they are basically renting links. What happens to all your posts when you decided to stop paying the fee? I looked on the site but could not find an answer to this.
I know this will seem self-serving because we have our own blog network, but why wouldn’t you take the $1800 it will cost for one year on Linkvana and invest in 60 really good posts that will give you 180 quality links forever? (or as long as the blogs stay online 😉
Just my 2 cents. I’d give it a try myself if I knew my links would stay live if I quit the service in a few months.
Thanks Arnie, I appreciate it.
I think you’re right – the quality just can’t possibly be that good – I don’t see any way.
(That said, I got a few more PR2 and PR3 popping in this morning, but still not what I’d call “top quality links”)
Regarding the longevity of your links, I asked before joining and received an answer, that every post with link is really on a blog, so it’s going to remain “forever”. The membership to add new domains and content is a monthly fee, but there’s no charge for maintaining the links.
Also, that annual $1800 has no cap on the number of domains, so if the quality WERE good, it would be a bargain and a half!
Of course, your use of the phrase “…we have our own blog network” means I’ve bitten, and am looking at your site now 😉
Scott,
I checked with Linkvana’s support, and they said the links stay once they are posted. So maybe not a bad deal for those interested in quantity.
Wasn’t really trying to sell our blog network, just thought I would provide full disclosure. Thanks for looking though.
FYI, I’ve been seeing the links continuing to happen, although there was a misconception on my part that one post would get added to multiple blogs.
That’s not true, and each post is only appearing in one place – no dup content is taking place, which is good.
Ok –
We’re now starting to keep a record of each domain where the links are appearing, and tracking the number of pages in the Google and Yahoo indexes, and checking their number of backlinks in both too.
Doing this will give us a good snapshot of the link quality. So far? I’m not knocked out, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised too.
I’ll post findings (WITHOUT domain names of course)…
Hasn’t anyone got any input here yet? I can tell there have been a few signups that came from this post, so please post feedback!
Question: Google hates this stuff…end the end we are talking about paid links, right?
Networks always claim no footprint, but what stops a Google spy from opening an account, getting his linkbacks…and delisting all the blogs and banning all those site getting backlinks from the banned blogs?
After all it’s not like Google doesn’t have a spare $147 laying around to keep their index from paid link manipulation…lol!
Don’t get me wrong Scott I’d be initially as excited as you were at the thought of quality backlinks so easily…but that’s the point. Networks want you excited so you’ll make an emotional decision to part with your money.
But hopefully the rush subsides and one realizes this is a “quick fix” and dangers of flushing all your SEO, content, social interactions, down the drain once you get banned comes racing back into your brain…the decision is clear.
Short cuts never work long-term….what do you think?
Thanks Rob –
Well, yes and no. It’s exactly not a “paid link” in the sense that you’re meaning it, but yeah, definitely not squeaky clean.
The links really are undetectable too, because there’s nothing to detect. It’s a real post on a real site with a real text link, and they’re really sort of like mini-press releases.
That said, yes, I’ve certainly been able to pin down several domains taking place in LinkVana, so I’m sure Google can spring for the time and treasure to detect them if they wanted to.
As far as flushing anything down the toilet goes, I’d argue that it can’t hurt you unless you’re the one SELLING the links on your site.
Google can’t possibly penalize people (IMO) that it thinks are BUYING links because otherwise there’d be a cottage industry spring up of buying links for your competitors.
At the worst case, links like this can just “do no good” but I’m not seeing that to be the case yet with LV in fact, the opposite is true.
Concerning “quick fixes” in general? – Yes we do dabble with a lot of this stuff to test for our affiliate sites, and I’ve found that many quick fixes DO work, as long as you are willing to keep chasing your tail when one quits!
To be 100% clean I’d agree that there is simply no substitute for good content and quality natural links, but that’s just not realistic any more.
Unfortunately, it’s often just too competitive (or not cost effective) to ALWAYS play by the rules.
I can point to dozens of 100% squeaky clean properly “SEO’d” websites that have good content, with new stuff added regularly etc. but their field is so crowded that they just don’t get the link love.
Networks like LinkVana are just another tool to supplement the arsenal, and have become a necessary evil.
Hi again Scott,
I’m member #189 and I’ve commented a few times on here.
After finding some of the blogs myself I too have to say I am not bewildered with the domains themselves as far as “PR” is concerend, but I am very pleased with the service because of what Dave (the owner) told me about and the fact I have been noticing a profound effect from the sites I am pushing through Linkvana. Because of the gradual build-up of quality links. These links are in their own little piece of relevant content and are one way.
It’s doing wonders for my bottom line already!
Of the domains I found, only 50% appear to have “real” PR meaning that half don’t have the back link structure to give them such a high PR. I emailed Dave, the creator of the service about this issue and he gave me this response:
“Here’s my honest take on PR..
It’s BS.. whatever the toolbar shows doesn’t matter, it only matters to peoples perception that what it shows is important..
There is simply no tool out there that can accurately predict that stuff, it’s all pure garbage..
Google has updated the toolbar PR exactly once in about the last 10 months..
the only reason we even concern ourselves with PR is because people perceive it as important.. when in reality it isn’t.
What we really concern ourselves more with is the age and spiderability of a domain.. That to me right now shows far more relevancy to the value of a site than does PR. .if a site is getting spidered frequently, and the deeper the better, then the more importance google gives that site IMO..
I’ve seen absolutely no differnce in acquiring links from so called PR 0 sites or PR 4 sites.. as long as those sites are indexed and getting spidered.. I’m not saying that PR isn’t internally important at Google..
but I don’t believe what we see has any bearing on reality. it is a data gathering tool for them, nothing more which is why they update it so infrequently..
Also expired domains no longer have their PR reset.. by default.. it’s based on the linking..
and while some of the blogs have expired at some point.. and were purchased.. many have not.. and some of those that did I have had for awhile and have gone though a few PR updates.. some went up, some went down, but the one thing I noticed was that tyhe spiderability and indexing patterns did not change..
I Hope I’ve given you something close to an answer 🙂
Dave”
Now, I’ve never ever thought of PR in that way before but I can definitely see where he is coming from. The only reason why I am a little “miffed” is because he actually advertises the service as if the blogs are all top quality power-houses of PR with thousands of back links. I guess it’s more of a perception thing but it’s borderlining on deception.
As for Google…
Do you think they would honestly give a flying crap about this thing? There’s sites like TLA floating around that openly advertise the fact they SELL links. This service sells a mini piece of the Internet.
It’s like paying for a press release with a link in it. Most businesses do it not to get SEO but for market exposure and userbility. It’s just like advertising which as a knock-on effect in Google’s rankings.
Now think of the likes of “Pay Per Post”. That “Contextual Ad Network” is like 10,000 X bigger than LinkVana and openly advertises who sells and buys links.
You must remember that Google is a big robot which finds links and indexes them. Unless LV got as big as PPP or TLA, then I don’t think Google would be too concerned with what it does. They don’t have 10,000 Matt Cutts’s sitting there looking for the domains in this network.
Hope this sheds some light on it all…
So? Scott? whaddaya think?
Scott,
We build natural links for our clients the same way you guys do. We carefully build a link development & site marketing plan for every engagement, ID potential sites for links, and use our client’s content in every way possible to build links to their site. Easier said than done. Like you stated above, measures like this definitely make things easier.
Historically, we haven’t ever used paid link services (buying links, outsourcing development, etc), and I never really considered it. However, you definitely get into diminishing returns for the time spent, especially if the client isn’t necessarily turning out link-worthy content all the time. New sites are equally tough, and some link diversity helps – so I don’t really see anything wrong with placing relevant links into relevant content, even if they’re paid. Like they say – you can’t bring a knife to a gunfight unless you want to lose.
We’ll always focus our efforts on building the high-quality stuff, but we’ve started experimenting with a few different ideas & services for getting our clients those “bulk” type links that lend to the overall profile. Linkvana is still on my list. I’ll let you know what I think. Any other advice or thoughts or referrals for specific link development services (link networks to check out, companies we could outsource ‘bulk’ link development to, etc) greatly appreciated.
Check this out – Use only for good, never for evil, and the free version works ok too.
You need a license per each PC, but it can save your “white hat ethical subject relevant blog comment linkbuilder” a TON of time, (and I mean a TON)
Feb 20 update on LinkVana info.
– Closing Comments and moving discussion here.
For your information.
I’ve been seeing the links continuing to happen, although there was a misconception on my part that one post would get added to multiple blogs.
That’s not true, and each post is only appearing in one place – no dup content is taking place, which is good.
Backlink Solutions entire network got banned a few days ago… that network was full of spam and too small to support the number of users.
I dont think that “hundreds” of blogs is enough to support 300 users… that would be my concern with linkvana
I have looked at 20linksaday, they claim to have thousands of blogs which will be limited to 100 users, though its more money, and they make few claims about the PR of the sites…
Also, they all go on about IP distribution… cos that easy peasy to solve isn’t it… but what about WHOIS???
Will use your aff link if I sign up… subject to few questions being answered by linkvana…
Hi Jez, and thanks for commenting.
I agree that the networks size could be larger for the number of users, but remember, it’s only another tool.
You can’t rely on any one service, and this is just another tool in the arsenal. It would be nice if there was one place to go, but diversity is the key to good link building.
So far, I’ve been real satisfied with what I’ve seen, and the results prove themselves month after month It’s also especially good for quickly getting new sites indexed.
Thanks again for commenting!
Re: 20 links a day – that seems totally legitimate and white hat to me too, as it is simply a content distribution method, that happens to build links, in the same way Link-vana.com is, but on a larger scale.
They even specify no Markov (spun) content, no duplicate content etc. and if their network is as good as they say, it could really be something
It seems like it would be great if someone actually had the time to put 600 unique articles with the anchor text of your choice in each and every month, while the biggest appeal to me in Link-Vana is the outsourcing.
Hi Scott,
I was searching for info on Linkvana and found your blog. Thanks for the good info!
Now, what I was wondering is, what is the difference between submitting an article to hundreds over article directories and Linkvana? I mean, it’s the same isn’t it in term of links. If an article get posted to a blog, it will be on a new page with no PR. If an article is posted on an article directory, it will also be on a page with no PR. Link strength would be the same but at least on the article directory side, we have ezinearticles, which has a strong PR6 main page. I doubt LV has any domain with this kind of authority. As for submitting to a few hundred directories, you can always pay someone to do it and it’s a lot cheaper than LV. Was just wondering, maybe I’m wrong. 🙂
thanks for commenting Sean, and no you’re not “wrong”, but there are a few things you may not have thought of…
1. When you submit an article to a bunch of directories, that content in many cases is duplicated and ignored by the search engines.
2. Individual link text can point to individual landing pages, whereas in an author biography it tends to remain consistent from site to site.
3. Each linkvana post is unique, pointed to the landing page you wish, with the anchor text you wish, and surrounded by relevant text both before and after the link (assuming you do it correctly).
This is certainly not something you can do with the article directories, (but if you know of directories that allow this please tell me!).
4.Typical blogs display recent entries on their front page, so new posts will get exposure on a page with PR, typically for a least a couple of weeks.
5. The value of article directory marketing has been diminished greatly over the past 18 months or so, but I do personally still use it as a link building tactic. However, most experts agree that you need to diversify your inbound Link profile and that building links from any one place alone is foolish. Linkvana is just another tool, (although a very effective one).
Did somebody say that the Linkvana staff would write the blog entry for you for just $2 a post! How many lines of text do they write for $2? Does anybody know? I can’t believe you get much for $2!
Yes, $2 outsourced authors, and their posts have to be 100 words or more minimum.
Hey Scott,
Thanks for the review. Right now I’m with a cheaper service called Neurolinker, which is only 19.95. However, the pages that you get links from have 100s of links and your site also has to give away 100s of links in exchange for those. However they say these are one way links….I never bothered to check if it is true. I recently read an article and realized that should I one day decide to quit using their service, or should they decide to quit providing service, what will happen to my links? I asked them this question and the answer was that I will lose all those links should I decide to unsubscribe one day.
Do you know what happens in the case of LinkVana, if and when you decide to unsubcribe?
Say you’re going to be with them for 100 days, and you’ve gotten 300 links altogether during those 100 days to each site of yours and for some reason you had to unsubscribe from them? If these links are not permenant, and then suddenly these 300 links are taken away from your site, I don’t think that’s going to be a pretty picture with Google.
What’s your take on this? Please let me know. Thanks and if I buy linkvana, I’ll be sure to use your link 🙂
Since it would actually be MORE work to remove them, I’m confident in saying that they would remain in place whether or not you kept your subscription to Linkvana.
Neurolinker, huh? It looks interesting, although, the fact that you have to put code on your site, and it posts links on your site automatically, would make it a bit riskier… looks interesting though!
So, what’s the end result? Is LinkVana worth it’s price and efforts or… not?
Did your sites get more traffic,earn more money, or was it a bust?
Thanks.
Yes to all of the above John, and here are some more current LinkVana comments thann what’s here on this post. I’ll close comments here…