Your thoughts on the SEOmoz SEO Checklist

[onepace]

I just recently watched a "Whiteboard Friday" video from SEOmoz and the one thing they talked about was linkbuilding for new sites.

Within the first 3-6-9 months they DID NOT recommend doing the following:

- reciprical links
- mass submitting to directories
- mass article marketing
- blog/forum commenting on irrelevant areas

I thought this was interesting because I know for a fact there a LOTS of people who do this right off the bat and are very successful. I personally am too new to give too much input, but I'm curious to hear what ya'll think.

Here's the link:
www[dot]seomoz.org/blog/an-seo-checklist-for-new-sites-whiteboard-friday

[onepace]

/bump because I'm really curious what people at WF have to say about this

[Rich Jackson]

Within the first 3-6-9 months they DID NOT recommend doing the following:

- reciprical links
- mass submitting to directories
- mass article marketing
- blog/forum commenting on irrelevant areas

If I was a big website such as SEOMoz...I wouldn't list those things either because the effectiveness of those techniques has declined to the point of nothing.
--reciprocal have sucked sense the dawn of men, they are worthless.
--mass submitting to directories leave you with tons of garbage low quality links that wont stick..a site with those links are no better than a site with 5 high quality links and very good on page seo.
--mass article marketing has always sucked as well. and ever since the panda update...well ****ty just got ****tier..lol (and by mass article marketing i believe the correct term is mass article directory marketing) it sucks.
--blog/forum commenting works if done right..if you think you are going to buy scrapebox and submit your site to thousands of sites and reach the #1 spot...guess again!

I thought this was interesting because I know for a fact there a LOTS of people who do this right off the bat and are very successful. I personally am too new to give too much input, but I'm curious to hear what ya'll think.

Well seeing that you actually "know" people who use these techniques and have had some success..I guess you met the rare few who have found a way to make treasure out of garbage..

Again there's a reason why major sites aren't pushing these techniques.

[onepace]

If that is the case, then why are there so many popular software that perform all of the above tasks? I also notice tons of WFers promoting the same strategies and even doing case studies on them.

[KingRosales]

Hey @onepace,

Building a massive amount of links to your site at its early stages can have a negative impact on your site for several reasons and there are many reasons why you don't want to do those things listed:

1. With reciprocal linking you're going to be giving away any link juice you'll get from building links to your site. You might as well create a directory site and link to everyone.
2. Mass directory submissions isn't a good way to build links to your site in the first place. Link building should be done gradually over time rather than having a build burst of backlinks (have a look at MajesticSEO) only to taper off. Build links over time from quality sites - hence the term, Quality backlinks. Rand talked about this on a WF episode.
3. Mass Article Marketing. In my opinion, you should be spending more time leaving the copy on your site. If you don't have a blog, add one and write your articles there. If you don't want a blog, build more pages with your content then create backlinks to your most important pages. Writing more copy and leaving it on your site is more beneficial for you. If you want a hundred article sites to host your content, the greater competition you're building for yourself in SERP. If you want people to notice your site and talk about it, tap into Social Media. Find the influencers and either get them to write about topics that people in your niche(s) are talking about or get the conversation started yourself.
4. Blog/Commenting link building the annoying way - so many people do this. The problem here is, most of the time people are more interested in building a link, rather than positively participating in the discussion. Sometimes a comment looks good to approve, but if you take just one more second to check it for what it is, you'll know what to do with it and expect that from other bloggers too. If you want to get some backlinks from comments, be a regular and write some good stuff back.

Do things the right way - build a quality site with quality backlinks and leverage social media.

[tjkirgin]

I know this is a thread for "new" websites, but mass article submission has worked for our clients that have older domains with limited to no seo work done. We use RankTracker at the beginning before starting and then after; we saw a 78 position jump to 7 in 3 weeks (semi competitive keyword).

Obviously we are talking about new websites, so definitely if you just got a domain yesterday and then send out 1000 article backlinks the next day, google is going to know that isn't real life. Definitely drip backlinks like drip email marketing does.