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Which link building methods are most effective in 2016? (Ahrefs survey)

by davidmcsweeney
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey Warriors!

We (Ahrefs) are currently conducting a survey to find out which link building methods are: most widely used considered most effective in 2016.

We would like to get as much feedback as we can from the industry, so if you are involved in SEO, we would really appreciate if you have a few minutes (well probably 5-10!) to take part.

You can find the survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ahrefs-warrior

Defining the actual link building methods for the survey was a bit of a challenge. We could easily have had 100+ or on the flip side could have condensed them all down to 2! But after lots of coffee and consideration, we settled on 29 individual link building tactics:

Link Bait (creating linkworthy assets + outreach)
Side Projects (creating free tools etc)
Ego Bait
Broken Link Building
Link Reclamation
Newsjacking
Guest Blogging
Interviews (inc. podcasts, roundups etc)
Infographics
Embeddable Widgets
Content Syndication
Content Repurposing
Link Building With Images (memes, photos etc)
Video Submissions
Directory Submissions
Press Release Distribution
Local Citations
Blog Commenting
Contributing In Niche Forums
Participating In Niche Community Sites (inc. Reddit)
Answering Questions (Quora/Yahoo etc)
Sponsorships (charity, events etc)
Sponsored Content
Other Paid Links
Tiered Link Building
PBN Links
Scaled Social Bookmarking
Web 2.0 Creation
High PR Forum Profiles

If you think we've missed any you can let us know in the survey (there's a box for that!) or feel free to leave a comment right here on Warrior Forum :-)

Thanks in advance for your help! Link to the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ahrefs-warrior
#2016 #ahrefs #building #effective #link #methods #survey
  • Profile picture of the author Dano101
    In all honesty; I know nothing about backlinks and do follow and 3rd party tools that show you what sites that someone's page is linked to.

    But I do know that getting a site to become reputable via linking to other similar niched sites takes alot of work.

    Now someone sold me 1 gazillion backlinks and told me to sign up for AHrefs to see my number of backlinks that I now have.

    But in all honesty. Google webmaster has not updated anything for my site in regards to the backlinks that I bought from someone on the Internet.

    Google is still simply showing me the 40 sites that I personally interacted with in put links on in the last 2 years.

    So I'm definitely still confused about how 1000 backlinks work for $5 while Google still isn't showing that my site has links from these 1000 sites.

    But once again. I know nothing about how backlinks work. I just know that I gave a guy a keyword that will get me the page 1 ranking for that word. But when I google the keyword; I still don't see my site within the first 20 pages. Lol. So I just gave up and chalked it up as a $5 lost.

    But if someone can explain more to me about real backlinks and how they are actually done and actually work from Google Webmaster point of view, Then I will pay attention.
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Originally Posted by Dano101 View Post

      In all honesty; I know nothing about backlinks and do follow and 3rd party tools that show you what sites that someone's page is linked to.

      But I do know that getting a site to become reputable via linking to other similar niched sites takes alot of work.

      Now someone sold me 1 gazillion backlinks and told me to sign up for AHrefs to see my number of backlinks that I now have.

      But in all honesty. Google webmaster has not updated anything for my site in regards to the backlinks that I bought from someone on the Internet.

      Google is still simply showing me the 40 sites that I personally interacted with in put links on in the last 2 years.

      So I'm definitely still confused about how 1000 backlinks work for $5 while Google still isn't showing that my site has links from these 1000 sites.

      But once again. I know nothing about how backlinks work. I just know that I gave a guy a keyword that will get me the page 1 ranking for that word. But when I google the keyword; I still don't see my site within the first 20 pages. Lol. So I just gave up and chalked it up as a $5 lost.

      But if someone can explain more to me about real backlinks and how they are actually done and actually work from Google Webmaster point of view, Then I will pay attention.
      Sure.

      Ok what you're not understanding is that not all links are created equal.

      Lets say a page has an authority score of 1000.

      That page has 20 links on it.

      So each link gets 1000/20 of the authority that page has.

      Plus the authority of all other links coming to it.

      A brand new site with zero links has a score of zero.

      whitehouse.gov has a score of like 50 trillion.

      When you buy fiverr link gigs, those links have a score of like .1 to 1 because there's barely any links going to those pages and the pages have tons of links on them.

      Google probably feels those links are so worthless that it doesn't count many of them. So you would need an astronomical amount of low quality links to really rank your page on competitive terms. The problem is that this creates a massive footprint that can be analyzed and you will just get penalized instead.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dano101
    Thank you so much. Now I see that it's not how many backlinks that you have. But it's about the reputable quality of those links.

    So I guess a quick keyword link on 20000 sites will not bring google to feel that your site is reputable to place #1.

    So I guess that the best links to your site should be manually done on other reputable like sites with great content and interaction.

    Thanks.
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Originally Posted by Dano101 View Post

      Thank you so much. Now I see that it's not how many backlinks that you have. But it's about the reputable quality of those links.

      So I guess a quick keyword link on 20000 sites will not bring google to feel that your site is reputable to place #1.

      So I guess that the best links to your site should be manually done on other reputable like sites with great content and interaction.

      Thanks.
      Links from authority sites rank sites. Think about it, big authority sites have not only thousands of links, but each of those links has thousands of links to it. And so on.

      A quality link (in the body of the content, not a comment) from a site like tomshardware.com is probably worth a million junk links.
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