Backlinking, What is the truth?

I posted a similar thread to this last week, I have also been struggling with seeing any results from my backlinking efforts. As a result of the replies, I have a different mindset. Keep doing what you're doing(steadily building links at high PR sites) but don't have any expectations. You can't control the search engines, you can only try and leverage the odds of your sites appearing high in them in your favour. I'm not an expert on google by any means, but it seems to me that it rewards steady, consistent link building. Keep doing that, and you'll eventually see results. You're doing the right things, and when you do the right things you get the results you deserve

The truth? Hard to say cause things change quite often and very fast. What works today, may not work tomorrow.

BUT...

All sites NEED links. Lot's of them. PERIOD.

Everything else is just... techniques, i guess.

Fernando

It all rides on which keywords you're targeting in your backlinking. 3 weeks is nothing unless you're targeting a very low competition phrase. 3 months is nothing if it's a really competitive phrase.

John

I'm not an SEO expert, but I think the truth is you need backlinks from RELATED sites to have any substantial effect on your ranking.

If you have a golf ebook site for example, then you need backlinks from golf sites which don't have nofollow.

I don't think you can fool google by having backlinks from unrelated sites with high PR rank.

I could be wrong as I am not a SEO expert as I say, but that is what I have observed.

I have used backlinks from Angela and Paul from way back. This is my experiencne: Most of the backlinks I used took a long time to show up or never showed up. There are certain links however that have showed up right away. I experimented on many sites using these links and saw the same thing again and again. Honestly, I have had much better success with Angela's then Paul's links but again this is just my experience.

When you are using these links, I would be sure to ping them each time you complete a backlink. Also, I would not rely solely on these links to rank for competitive keywords. There are other off page factors as well as all the other on page stuff.

You will need Time, in month 1 you will see traffics coming from long tail keywords, keep build backlinks but don't over optimize.

In month 3 you will get steady traffic and grow slowly but sure if you add content.

What I've done are:
Submit articles using Ezine, Squidoo and Free Traffic System
Get link from blogs (my own blogs)
Dofollow Commenting
Rarely submit to social bookmarking

My advice is go for some other backlinks methods with Angela's backlinks, that will help you for fast improvment..... Say a combination of Angla's backlinks + forums postings or blog commentings etc...

I guess it just takes time. I've had a website get to page one within 2 days of creating it, but this was for a very low competition keyword. I've also had a website I created/built up (but sold it earlier this year) take two or more years* to get to the top for a very, very competitive one-word keyword which also has more than one popular meanings/usages.

* NB: I didn't know much about SEO at the time, so the rise up the SERPs was 100% purely natural. Due to real backlinks, good quality content, etc. This may also be why it took two+ years. But also it was due to it being a very competitive keyword/niche. I didn't mind/think of this though, since I built the website before getting into IM/SEO.

Backlinks are only a part of SEO. And creating your own creates a potential for a ratio of links that looks artificial. Google is constantly figuring out ways to assign authority to links.

Anchor text is a tricky business. Because you want to appear "natural". But do you even know what natural is... and who does really? Natural is whatever Google programs it's software to do.

Make a mistake in your anchor text and all your work will be pretty useless.

Here is a TIP: Marketing is NOT about placing links on high ranking sites. Marketing is about finding your Markets, figuring out who your customers is, what they do, what they want, where they go. And then when you know that you can work on SELLING.

It's not surprising however that people can make money off of people selling link packets. The people selling the link packets are not SEO Experts, they are people who have found a niche and a market (People buying the packets are the market). They are fulfilling a need... the desire to rank. If they could make more money doing something else they would.

So what you are doing wrong is you are believing all you have to do to rank is place links. It's simply not true. And yes for low competition keywords it can work. But that is because the other factors don't matter in low competition niches. Google will return some kind of result for any search.

So if you are the only site on the net actively linking with "Butterscotch tastes great on vanilla ice cream"... it's logical that they will return your site for that phrase. But if suddenly there are 100,000 site trying to rank for that term... Google now has to determine what is the most relevant site. And how do they do that? Age, Business Name, Domain Name, other related links? That's what you need to figure out.