Angel's Backlinks - explain something, please

Wow, it's really getting deep in here now, lol. Where's mah boots?

Ah, I was wrong about 10 minutes. It took me a whole two day to dominate my niche!
tetragrammatonic woodchucks - Google Search

I think you misread their post. They were talking about one specific keyword. Wikipedia was in the first spot for this mortgage-related keyword. As long as they were tracking that particular keyword, Wiki was number one. Thus, they were the first to rank for that keyword above Wiki. Or are you being deliberately obtuse?

Also, I did Google Tetragrammatonic Woodchucks. Yes this post is number one, but Wikipedia doesn't appear in the listing results. If you are going to do a pointless and silly experiment, you should at least do the same thing the other poster did, which is take a number one spot that was previously occupied by Wikipedia. Shouldn't be hard, actually.

Actually, on the vast majority of forums it does not. Lots of people seem to fail to grasp that around these parts lately. For obvious reasons I understand that the mods here at WF don't have the time nor inclination to go site by site to check TOS, so it is much, much easier to simply create these bright-line rules.

Last time I checked, Paul was not the definitive guide on what actually violates a site's TOS. Obviously here at WF they can implement any policy they want, but that doesn't change the fact that it doesn't violate the TOS on the vast majority of these forums. They can say the Sun is really purple, but that doesn't make it so. When the whole WSO shakeup occurred, they thought SENuke was just some simple article spinner/distributor. Even if you don't have SENuke, if you do any sort of decent SEO you sure as heck know what it is. Then again, they do like to quote Klingon law or some crazy made-up alien law for rulings though :-) I despise article marketing (on others' sites) like the plague, but I sure as heck know what the major article directories and related software are like.

Tom

I have benefited from Angela's backinks and while relevant links are the best, don't discount profile links especially when they are from high PR sites. I once asked an SEO strategist why so and he said "Well, when you talk about PR6 to PR9, even with lower value, there's still hell lot of link juice passing through. Even if a PR9 only valued at PR6-7 that's still bound to bring some value.

Profile links can form part of, and benefit a fully-rounded linkbuilding strategy. Nobody in this thread is claiming that you can rank well purely from using them, that was your assumption when you jumped in.

Basically you are as much of an SEO as I am a world class Chef if you think any sort of profile link is worthless.

Me? I love automating profile and blog comment link runs for my long tail sites, and they are doing very nicely in the SERP's thank you very much. Fit the strategy to the content.

Again, who in their right mind would disclose the keywords they are going after (for any sites they really care about) on a public forum. Maybe that is how you run my business, but I certainly don't run things that way.

Define "competitive." Personally, I generally don't see the point after going after keywords like "weight loss", as IMHO you'll get a better ROI going after easier keywords. For super competitive keywords, would I rely on just profile links? of course not. I add in links on the 200+ PR3+ domains that I own.


Not sure what you mean by "investing." I don't own any publicly traded stocks if that is what you mean, nor do I own any backlinks bonds.

Tom

Hardi, I am not going to address at length your allegation that I am bashing anyone here and your invocation of the mods and their awesome powers. I am a mod myself over at SEOchat and I have a pretty solid sense of what constitutes abuse and bashing. I am not interested in discussing specific persons or services, all I care about here is SEO fundamentals, which is what we are addressing. So let me turn to your "**** Berry" question instead.

This is not much of a challenge, Hardi, but it's instructive to address this in some detail. Your example merely confirms my point. The ranking to which you are referring sponges off the trust of an authoritative domain, vbstyles.com. Before the recent MayDay Update it was especially easy to obtain results like this: I used to do so by simply making forum posts on authoritative forums. The MayDay update has made it harder to pull this off when there are no backlinks (links from external sites) pointing to such pages. Your example shows that when there are such backlinks, even if they are of very low quality, such results are still achievable. Fine, I admit this is one of those special uses that low quality links can be put to. The problem is that such links cannot be used to rank sites. Without the authority of the domain on which this blog post appears, you would be nowhere with your links.

Proof? Sure!

The result you have cited is the fifth Google result for "**** berry". But let us consider result #6: panix.com/userdirs/blog/****-berry/ .This result is very similar to the one you gave, with the difference that it ranks lower while using a much larger number of low quality links (almost 7,000 as opposed to 50+ -- that's an astonishing number of profiles, either automated or someone's labor is really cheap). The lower ranking is explained by the lesser authority of the panix domain.

The relationship between these two results is clear from the fact that both URLs are co-referenced in a number of the same forum profiles. I am betting that these two pages are being promoted by the same SEO.

Now consider the fact that the whole point of the Panix page is to promote and drive traffic to the site acaiberrysite.com, which I am betting is also promoted by the same SEO. This main site uses some 17,000 (probably more) mostly low quality back links. The vast majority of those links use the anchor text "**** berry", but the site ranks only at #86 for "**** berry." (That's a truly mind-numbing number of profile links by the way, although all other kinds of low quality links also seem represented.)

Which clearly establishes my point that in and of themselves the low quality links of the sort that you are defending here are quite powerless.

QED.

I have never used Angela's Backlinks before, but are these mostly forum signature links?

Pat,

Machines are stupid for a time being. You get what you want to be ranked. Profile is still good for its purpose. What more can I say?

But human are not stupid. Do you know there's an ongoing movement to clear profile spamming?

And they do not mean just 'clear' literally. They collect data of spam profile. They show it to the forum owners. They teach them how to remove them, remove the cache in the search engine, and do some nasty things.

I'm not part of it. I just know that some people are doing this.

Presently, it looks like a losing war but as more people are spamming the profile, more forum owners will rally together to fight back. Who wins in the end? It's the same history during the days when people were fighting email spams.

Sure, you can ignore this at your own peril.

Hardi

P.S.

Check out the presumption on May update. This is just the beginning of the doom of irrelevant link.