Why Not To Use Automated Link Building?

You make a few good points. (This coming from someone who does a lot of automation.

One thing to keep in mind is Google does not know how links were created. All they see is the link itself they have no way of knowing whether it was made by hand or created by a bot. Done properly quality links can be made by automation. Maybe not quite as good as manually but pretty close and depending on where the link is being placed that is going to be good enough.



It is not just all about a total number of links.

1. Link age is important
2. The text surrounding your links is important
3. The PR of both the site and page where your links are is important
4. Link velocity is important.

Lets take link velocity first as that is where most people make the biggest mistake when it comes to automating their backlinks.

Look at it from Google's perspective.

Think about those sites/pages that go viral for one reason or another, they get a lot of links all at one time and shoot up to the top of the rankings. Google sees all of those incoming links and decides that the site is important so ranks it well.

After the site has had its 15 minutes of fame people stop linking to it and even start to remove the existing links because they realize that the site is really not that cool/funny/etc anymore. Google notices this and decides that the site is not important any longer and its rankings drop.

When you build a huge amount of links and then stop this is the scenario you are emulating. It is not the huge number of links that hurt you but the negative link velocity when you stopped.

How about link age? Everything I have seen tells me that Google gives a link more credit the longer it exists. If you think about it it makes sense. A link solid link that has been around awhile should be worth more than a fly by night link that has only existed for a week. That link you have now that is only a week old will be worth more in six months or a year.

Links that are included in text seem to work better as well. It does not seem to have to be a lot to make a difference. Even profile links will do you more good if you bury the link in 3 or 4 sentences rather than having just your link without any surrounding text.

This one seems even more important after the last couple of updates. Google seems to be looking for and giving more weight to links in content than they were in the past.

PR is important as well. Think of PR as a measure of trust from Google. Think about if you were looking for advice on whether or not to buy something. You get advice from your neighbor that you have known for years and some advice from some stranger you have never met before. Which one are you gong to give more weight? In Google's eyes that PR 5 is the next door neighbor and the PR0 is the stranger. When you get a link from a page it is the same as that page telling Google that it thinks your site is worth looking at and it gives more weight to the PR 5 because it knows and trusts it more than the stranger down the road.

As far as OBL's go I do not think it is really a numbers game as much as what kinds of links are on the page. I would rather have a link on a page with 200 OBL's going to decent sites instead of having my link on a page with 50 links going to porn and spammy sites.

Automation is your friend if you use it well. Think about it we use automation in almost every facet of our lives. We drive cars, use washing machines, dishwashers, power tools etc. Link building is no different and if you use the tools properly they will help you a lot.

You only have so much time in a day so you want to get the most ROI on your as you can. This means you need to spend it doing thing that are going to make the most difference. You basically can do things three ways, you can do manual, you can automate, or you can outsource. Personally I believe that mixing all three of them together gives the best results.

Lets take blog commenting for instance. Lets say I have a large list of PR1 -PR7 blogs that I want to put comments on. I would break into three sections

PR6 and PR7--These I would do manually
PR2 -PR5--These I would outsource
PR1--These I would automate.

This would allow me to get the best ROI on my time and that is the name of the game. You can do all those PR1 links by hand but the amount of good you get from each one will not make it worth doing. Only proper automation puts the ROI on those links in the black.

But here's the thing...

If any type of backlinking can damage your credibility with Google, regardless if it comes as the result of a depreciation in quantity or otherwise, then why the hell can't we all just use these tactics AGAINST our competition?

This seems to me to be a question which is deeply rooted in just plain old common sense. I've seen it posed numerous times by multiple IMs and I have yet to see a convincing answer that would compel me to think it can do much, if any damage.

In other words, if what you have suggested truly is the way it goes down, then I should be able to build hundreds of thousands of crap links to my competitors' sites, knowing full-well that the majority of these links will either disappear or lose significant value, and laugh heartily as my competition plummets from Grace and does a nosedive into search engine oblivion.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing a point here... rather, I'm asking a question based on an argument I have heard from other marketers who are much smarter than myself. I am just curious how you would refute this argument. It seems like air-tight logic to me, but I've not yet adopted it as an absolute belief.

Yet.

Im sorry but you say it will raise a red flag to google and that you can lose your trust with google, what does this actually mean? The very worse that could happen is that I would lose the value of all those automated links. Woaaahhh!!! Now, that is scary isnt it?

Who cares. People that do automated link building know this. Your argument seems like a bunch of hear say. Google will not drop your site out of the index. It just devalues your links.