Precious Hours Wasted on Backlinking? Or Not?

I am just sitting here wondering the same thing. I finally got round to making 10 quality web 2.0s with a link to my main site in each plus links to each other. I then bookmarked them, submitted articles to directories with links to them, etc - when I put the 10 of them into hrefs to check the backlinks, they all show as having zero. This can't be right, as each one contains one link to one of the others - so they all have at least one backlink.

I finished the work a week ago - I am sure in the past links have shown sooner. I hope someone else can chime in and give us answers!

Links are supposed to be natural.

Any links that are not natural are in my opinion, a waste of time.

They may not penalize your site today, they may not do it tomorrow, but they are getting better and better at getting rid of all these artificial links... update after update.

Your time is better spent creating sites and content that people want to share naturally.

Yes, you may have guessed I don't believe in link building. It's a dying art. Why waste all that time on something that will eventually be discounted?

I agree with Will 100% on this. I spent a considerable amount of my time and resources building backlinks to my sites/articles/hubs/lenses etc. in my first years of IM. Guess what, almost all those sites, pages and backlinks are either dead or devalued now.

I quit building backlinks artificially like two years ago and since then I focused on building websites that people would actually like to visit and recommend to others.

1. Don't expect any significant improvement in ranking from using PR0 links..

2. It's too early to see any back links from those stuff you did because not all links show up on those tool.

It takes few days to get your backlinks crawled and then indexed. But basically using tools for ''few hours'' isn't enough anymore.

I agree 100% with the "non-natural" links being a waste of time. I always thought of those links as being the ones you'd purchase on Fiverr. Links placed on a bunch of sites that are all written in arabic and farsi, sites that have nothing to do with mine.

But, links placed on social bookmarking sites, that's a whole different thing. They're not artificial. I have an account at each one of the sites and I am posting them myself.

To be 100% honest, how often do you place a link to someone else's site on yours just because you like it? I've written posts and referred to other's articles within the post, and included a link, but that is very, very rare.

Who sees a site, thinks "what a great site, I think I'll add a link to it from MY site?" How often does anyone REALLY do that?

they are getting better and better in this indeed, and probably within some time normal contextual links wont matter anymore it will be all about social signals like twitter,facebook,g+ etc, because thats how normal organic votes/shares are suposed to be working right? And ofcourse indepth content will be judged a lot when it comes to serp rankings.

so perhaps try to slowly dripfeeding your sites with social signals, normal seo at this moment still matters tho but try to do it in very little portions because they tend to flag anything as spam thats slightly suspicious. except if you are blasting a youtube video or a high authority web2.0 platform, dont bother creating too many links to a regular site the old ways.

Well, since you're mentioning QUALITY links, then you won't be too surprised to discover that simply dumping a link on to a quality site isn't enough. To wit: if you use Onlywire to blast your link to 50 bookmarking sites, don't expect them to show up unless you're ACTIVE on those sites.

So, make sure to visit and bookmark at least one other thing there, so that their admins and their algorithm can see you're not just there to self-promote.

After you post your links there, immediately go to your account and see if they show up. They'll sometimes take a bit. Once they do, ping them.

Having to do this for 50-or-so sites can become a bit of a job, that's for sure. But, you can spread your workload and with time it will take less time. Either that, or limit the number of sites you're blasting to.

If you don't do that, then your Onlywire subscription won't serve you very well. In the past, just blasting links worked. Not, usually, it doesn't.

Also, don't forget to post (manually!) on forums, blogs, etc. Your signature can give you lots of visits if your posts make sense to people.

That's why Google values manual, intelligent links MUCH higher than any automated ones.