Everywhere I go online, someone is talking about buying links. And every time I have the same questions:
If its so risky, why do so many people do it? Why does it seem to work for some but not for others?
Why hasn’t Google done more to fight it?
All of these questions kept coming up, and I knew exactly who to go to.
Ian Howells is one of the smartest SEOs I know. You may know him as the co-founder of one of the biggest and best SEO online communities, Traffic Think Tank.
I had a chance to work with him briefly when I was at The Grit Group where he’s the Executive in Residence of SEO.
Now, I got to sit down and pick his brain about the business of buying links.
You don’t want to miss this one.
- Most buy links because it’s easier than building a brand.
- In specific industries, like crypto, building links naturally is challenging; many rely on buying links.
- Link buying is risky; if you’re loud enough about it, Google will find you out.
- Building links costs either time or money.
- The success of link buying largely depends on the established authority and natural link profile of the site.
- Thorough due diligence is key. Evaluate traffic history, link profiles, and their anchor text diversity.
- In most cases, a few high-quality links are more valuable than many low-quality ones.
Transcript
Vince: So Ian let’s start with a Kind of broad topic because this is very top of mind and I’m going to set the stage here I was at Brighton SEO two months ago the October conference and They had a Q& A booth with John Mueller and He was there Situated right across from a link marketplace. I won’t name who they are And we just found that to be, yeah, it was laughable.
It was like a nice microcosm of where I think the state of the SEO landscape is with this kind of thing. Google is in clear view of. Link buying and what is going on. And yet they don’t really seem to be doing much since then. I have done this big study on SAS link building method did see what looks like a pretty big link spam update in 2024, the June link spam update.
I hadn’t really dug much into that, but I do think they’ve actually done something to devalue some of these types of links nevertheless, with. All the stuff going on, helpful content, AI overviews. There’s, there, there’s so much going on with Google these days. To me, buying links is a risk.
Why do you think people still buy links?
Ian Howells: So I think there are, there’s obviously a lot of different reasons, right? Some people don’t comprehend the risk of what they’re doing, right?
So they’re buying them just because they think like there isn’t or they’re unaware of the risk in it which is unfortunate because if you’re going to do a thing you should know like the potential upside of the potential downside but I think in general like lots of folks still buy links because it works and because it’s a hell of a lot easier than building a real brand.
So a lot of folks take the “easier” way.
I think that’s gotten dicier over the last year and a half or so. But short answer is people do it and spend money on it because it’s effective still and still works.
Vince: So if I were to talk to pretty much every digital PR guest that’s come on here. Obviously, they are very anti link buying.
I have never really done it.
Which is ironic, but Yeah, you understand why SEO people, and for the most part, people are into it.
Or open to it, I should say, but I think there’s probably a rnage, right?
There are, like you say, the people that are just doing it, not really paying close attention to what they’re doing.
There are other people who are maybe working with an agency that’s doing it.
So again, they don’t really have too much insight and there’s. SEO is smart people like you who are, or maybe doing it the quote, unquote, the right way. So somebody came to you and asked you if they should buy links, this is my setup.
Should I be buying links or should I be going to an agency to scale this?
When should they be buying?
Ian Howells: Yeah, I think there’s so there’s a couple like cohorts of sites where it tends to be really effective.
I think the folks that have a legitimate brand, right? So like your base portfolio is sizable and strong, right?
Like you have some major media links, like you have brand search volume. And what you’re really missing is links to very specific pages, right? Like you’re getting very targeted. We’re worried about these 10 pages for these 30 or so SERPs.
Like we’ve got very specific stuff in mind. We rank pretty well, but we’re stuck in like the five or something, right?
Like you’re not way back on page five.
It’s good for those situations, right? Because you’re not you’re not building into a barren profile. It’s not like the domain just launched and there’s nothing there to not mask, but if the first links you build to a site are links that are obviously paid guest post links, like you’re probably going to have a bad time at some point in the near future.
So I think when there’s a good baseline and you’re getting very surgical on, like these particular pages, these keywords, that’s our scope of concern and we need extra assistance getting over in the last hump to get to where we want to be. I think otherwise, folks who are in spaces where it’s just the norm.
If you try and go into crypto without purchasing links that’s going to be very difficult task because there are competitors that are spending tens of thousands of dollars a month doing like purchasing, right?
So like just omitting yourself from a scalable tactic that all your competitors are doing and it’s working from them is going to be a hard pill to swallow, right?
That’s gonna be a difficult thing for you to try and fight against without doing the same thing.
And then I think on the like extreme opposite end ironically like small, truly local like brick and mortar service area businesses might need 20 links total, and they’re in good shape, right?
Like you don’t have to overdo it and be like, Oh, if I’m buying links, like I’ve got to buy 10 links a month from now until eternity, like you can get far in a lot of local markets with a dozen or so links and then you’re in good shape which kind of is more useful for folks who are trying to like uphill battle if, which is less true now than it was a year ago for sure.
But if a SERP you’re in is full of aggregators, so like the Yelp type sites of the world, and you’re a truly local business, it can be hard to just accept that “oh, I’m just going to sit behind these five massive aggregator sites,” even though I’m actually here and they’re not.
In fairness Google’s actually gotten way, way better.
Better depends on your perspective.
I guess way more likely to rank truly local businesses than aggregators in a lot of areas.
So I think there’s pockets where it makes sense.
But I think the underlying piece for everybody is a little bit of what I talked about before, where yeah, You just have to understand the risks of what you’re doing, right?
And for the most part, especially if you have an established site, and you’re not trying to like, have every link to a property be a paid link, generally, the worst case scenario is you waste your money, right?
That you put your budget towards this thing, you purchase the links, and there’s either no effect ever.
Or you get a good effect for a while, and then at some point, those sites get torched and they start work, stop working.
Manual actions for purchased links, you have to be like, pretty aggressive to trigger a manual action on it.
So in general the biggest negative seems to be like, at some point they stop working and the benefit goes away—which is not a huge disincentive.
Like that’s not a big stick anymore, but, yeah, I think that’s generally where things are at right now.
I think as long as you understand what you’re doing and like what the potential downside is that to me feels like a situation where okay, this is a decent avenue to explore, especially in combination with other initiatives that are going on.
Vince: Do you need other initiatives for this to work? I talk about this link building as pouring fuel into a fire, right?
But you mentioned the local dentist or something. They probably don’t have a blog or maybe they have a couple of pages going on and that they’re trying to rank for those.
Is it the kind of thing where you can just spin up a site from scratch by building links?
You alluded to this no, that’s probably not the case if it’s from scratch, but talk to me a little bit about that.
Can you/should you start buying links if you’re starting from scratch?
Ian Howells: So it’s like, as anything in SEO, right? It’s highly dependent on what industry for local, what location, right?
Like a dentist in Philadelphia versus a dentist in Poughkeepsie are going to be like completely different scenarios, right?
So even within a site type and an industry. It’s not the same.
Basically, it’s still a game of I need to do more than what the people in those spots today have done.
So if you’re in a small town, and the other dentists aren’t building links, right?
A clean, easy to understand site, a Google Maps listing, a dozen good reviews from customers. You can be good to go.
But if you’re Manhattan, Philly, Miami, like probably not.
As ever, it’s very just, it depends on who the competitors are and what they’re doing. Because the kind of foundational answer is like, you’re going to have to match and exceed whatever those folks have done.
Vince: One thing I’m realizing should have probably done at the start of this is maybe define paid links and like the placements.
Because when I think of paid links and tell me if you agree here for the most part, like it falls into a couple of different buckets. And again, I saw this on that, like SAS link building analysis thing I did where it’s like the guest posting sites that purely exist, it’s like a random news site, like tech news about everything like that’s probably the most prevalent type and then there’s the agency or maybe, it is a company, usually in the tech sector.
It’s like a SaaS company. They have a blog they, they get it. I feel like that’s maybe like a step up.
There are some publications who are like better versions of those tech sites, right? There’s niche sites where I think that’s probably getting the most value where it’s, you can hone in.
If you have a site or something, you can find Joe’s pet blog. That’s looks good. And they’re putting out good content and you can hone in on those very niche relevant links. What am I missing? Do you pay you, do you ever reach out to people who aren’t part of these link marketplaces and you’re just like, Hey, it would be awesome if I get a link from this person here.
Would you consider me writing a guest post on your site or inserting a link for 200 bucks or something?
Do you ever do is that part of it as well?
Is there link purchasing that happens outside of link marketplaces?
Ian Howells: Yeah, so I think folks certainly do like net new outreach trying to do link purchasing. I think I’m completely going off of gut feel on this point.
My assumption is that is a minority of the link buying market.
I think most people are using a service or an agency.
My, my presumption is that is the strong majority of the total purchasing that’s going on. Marketplaces do a ton of that, right? Because they’re trying to keep their inventory fresh and growing.
So they’re doing outreach to publishers. So it’ll, it, it will likely stem from that somewhere, right?
But a lot of times it’s a marketplace doing that. Cause if they get one more site in their inventory that can sell a link or two links a month, the more they can stack those up, the better they are.
And they have a more compelling pitch when the pitch is, Hey, we want to buy placements saying we’re a marketplace that connects publishers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
There’ll be consistent deal flow rather than if I email somebody cold, it’s this is probably a 1 time or a 2 time thing.
So, I think in terms of what people would respond to, I would presume response rates from marketplaces are better than one-offs.
But folks that have the patience to go through the operations of warming and then standing up solid email delivery to do the like size and scope of cold email that you need to do to make that work, that absolutely happens.
I just think even just from a technical standpoint of being able to do that without torching an email.
Most people aren’t in that bucket so it does happen for sure.
But I think the much more common is like you go to a service or you go to a marketplace and you do your link purchasing through one of those.
And are the two biggest kinds of purchases link insertions and guest posts?
Ian Howells: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Those are generally the two big buckets. It’s like slide my link in like a new sentence or two sentences or something in an existing page or net new article. So that the topic is a perfect match for the thing that I’m trying to place a link to.
Vince: Right. Okay, let’s get to the biggest question I’ve had. And the reason that I don’t do it, we talk about the risk, is, they may just devalue these links. For the most part, you’re not going to get fully penalized, because, yeah there’s not an easy way for them to tell, usually, Google.
It’s obviously against Google’s guidelines, right? How do you think they check, if at all, for this type of leak manipulation, we’ll call it?
How do you think Google checks for link buying?
Ian Howells: So they’ve done run throughs of networks in the past.
So this is a little bit different, because it’s more like buying into a PBN, which is hilarious that these were ever called PBNs, because the first P is supposed to stand for private, and once you start selling spots in it, it’s no longer private, but blog networks.
So I’m thinking like the big examples are from a long time ago —ike I’m dating myself here—but like stuff like build my rank and authority link network, like over the course of 24 to 48 hours, just hundreds of sites in those networks just got torched.
So when something becomes a big enough problem generally, when somebody is publicly complaining about a thing and making Google look stupid, they will give individual attention to a network of things happening, and you’ll see just the entire thing get torched.
We’ve seen at least claims over the last couple of years from folks who were very visibly public in the kind of black hat SEO Twitter or YouTube space Claiming that everything in their Search Console got torched, right?
So like when the manual action eye turns on you, they will certainly follow the breadcrumb trail to anything that they can find, and things will go very poorly from that point on.
I have not seen them do that same thing, which is why the story you started with of John being right across from the marketplace is so funny of sites going into of like a Google employee joining a marketplace and just like exporting the publisher list and being like, okay, all of these.
Why? I don’t know.
I guess it’s deemed to not be worth the time to do it.
And I know the strong preference, and they’ve stated this themselves, is always to fix things via the algorithm.
They don’t want to be like just manually playing whack a mole forever, which I understand. But it does seem a little strange.
Yeah, you don’t want to empower one person to be like the person that can get anything torched in Google, but like 20 FTS in this, in a company, the size of Google is nothing. And then you just blind. Who like you send everybody in that group of 20 the same sites and you blind like what ones were marked as spam and they don’t know who the other 19 people are and like you get consensus out of a small group and if everybody says oh, this Forbes folder is spam, you torch the thing like why that doesn’t happen.
I don’t know, but it doesn’t.
And then same thing with link buying, right?
Presumably, it’s an easy problem to fix with manual actions, but that hasn’t been a thing that’s really been the go to in quite a while anyway.
Like I said, it has in the past with those big link networks that existed, but I don’t know of.
A guest post marketplace that’s had that happen to them like the old link networks did.
Vince: Yeah, that’s the biggest thing for me is why I’ve seen John Mueller on LinkedIn. I point to this experience a lot because I think it’s telling. Although I don’t know how much if it has any credence at all, but somebody on I think I had done my list of guest posts sites, right?
On a BuzzStream.
And I was sharing it on LinkedIn and somebody sent me a spreadsheet as a comment. It was like, here’s another bunch of guest posts sites. And it was a spreadsheet just fully straight up there. It’s just linked in the comments. And John, who wasn’t even part of this conversation at all, responded thanks to the thing.
And to me, it’s okay, so he’s going to go do something with these sites, right?
That’s at least what I assumed. I don’t know, what’s actually coming back. But yeah, that, that does.
To me, it makes it more inherently risky too, is it to be part of, and I forget who said this exactly, but one of my podcast guests was like, yeah, I would never want to be a site on one of those databases Like I don’t want to be specifically like on the other side of it, right?
Like I would never want my site publicly associated or selling links. But do you really think it is that risky at this point?
If they haven’t done anything?
Do you really think buying links is risky if they still haven’t done anything to stop it?
Ian Howells: Yeah. Things can change very quickly as we’ve seen many times.
But so I, I don’t know if part of it is a hesitancy because there’s no actual verification.
So, like a bunch of link marketplaces, you’ll go in and see Forbes, Hubspot, and Wallstreet Journal.
And it is generally unclear if they can actually publish anything on those domains, or if those are added to make the marketplace look better.
And then it has like a 3,000 price tag, like it attaches a price tag that makes it unlikely that most people are ever going to even consider ordering, right?
There’s a weird feeling. You don’t really know. Is this site actually in there?
And then you have the problem of HubSpot being legitimately in there because HubSpot could be using a contract writer who publishes frequently without the knowledge of. I’m just picking HubSpot as a random example here.
This could happen anywhere without the knowledge of HubSpot or whoever the actual company and publisher is.
It could be one of your freelancers or either one of your staff writers is making some cash on the side selling a link or two a month for multiple hundreds, if not 1000 plus dollars, right?
So should you torch Hubspots rankings because a rogue employee or contractor is accepting money to put links into articles? Like probably not.
Yeah.
Like your point earlier, how do you know? You never really know how something is happening.
So I don’t know if that’s part of the hesitancy is, eh, you don’t know with a smaller site, the likelihood that’s what’s happening goes down a lot, but I don’t know if that possibility has kept Google away from even bothering with these lists.
Vince: Yeah, I alluded to this earlier. I do think, so you also brought this up, this idea of solving things algorithmically that’s how you should probably think about these risks, right? In my case, when I was looking at the June link Spam Update, it almost seemed like Google might be devaluing any of the links that appear in these listicle type posts.
Because what I’ve seen more and more happening is, especially in the technology space, I’ll just call it technology, it’s maybe software, but not specifically that, but like these listicles where it’s like the best X for Y the best software for HR companies. What I’ve seen and I’ve experienced firsthand is people be like, I’m going to write this article.
I’ll include you if you also link back to me in some other post, right?
So it’s like a link exchange, but also some you’re providing some value to their site or something. It’s just been exploited, and I’m sure there are real listicles out there. Not all of them are bad, but there just seem to be a lot of them.
It seems to just be this tactic now that has been exploited to death and potentially, since Google is devaluing.
And so let’s think about this. I’d love your thoughts on, if we do think that Google would want to solve for this algorithmically, what are some things that you avoid, because I know we, you and I have talked about this in the past.
Like these, this, these are the signals you should avoid on the site.
And to me, that’s probably the reason you’d want to avoid most of them.
So what are some of those signals that you want to avoid on a website that would make link buying more risky?
Ian Howells: So I think the most logical to me way to fight it at the algorithm level is probably much of what they’re doing already, where like, when you run afoul of the existing algorithms in terms of what sites do we trust to rank highly and send a lot of traffic to.
If you, short version, if you can’t rank for anything, the links out from your site probably don’t pass much value, right?
There’s some threshold that you surpass where you used to rank for a bunch of stuff, but now you do not, my strong presumption is that the outbound links from your site no longer pass much of any value anyway.
And Google’s stance is probably if we get these sites out of the SERPs, which we want to do anyway, and when that happens, the outbound links don’t pass much authority to begin with.
Who cares if people waste their money buying links that then don’t help them?
So we don’t need to do anything. This problem will solve itself. People can waste their own budget if they’re trying to buy links.
Who cares?
Is my guess at what’s actually going on.
It’s easy to avoid sites that have gotten torched.
You just have to pay attention, right?
Just pop into the tool of choice and look at their two year traffic history and if they’ve lost 40 plus percent of their traffic, that’s probably a really bad sign, and you should think twice about spending part of your, I’m sure, limited budget on buying a link from that publisher.
It’s harder to check every potential leading indicator for is this a site that a year from now will have lost 40 plus percent of their traffic, right?
The stuff that folks will commonly look at is what does the outbound link profile look like?
If you look at external links and again, tool of choice, and you look at the anchor text for the outbound links, does it read like a highly valuable keyword list?
Are they using anchor text? That’s like best XYZ, legal lawyers throw a lot of budget around. So agencies on behalf of lawyers end up buying a bunch of links, whether the attorneys know that or not.
(It seems questionable to buy links for an attorney as an aside without them knowing about it. It seems like a very stupid thing to do, but here we are.)
So, there is a heavy presence of legal terms, casino CBD, and high-dollar affiliate industries.
If you scroll through the external links and it looks like a keyword list from those niches, that’s probably a good sign that this site is selling a whole lot of links.
And that just ups the likelihood that something goes wrong in the future.
Especially on the casino front. Cause those sites will offer a lot of money for a placement.
So that’s usually the dam-bursting moment when a site may say no to offers to sell a link, but if a casino site offers you a thousand dollars to put a link into one article and it’s going to take you five minutes, it’s hard for a site owner to turn that down.
And then once you do it once, it’s screw it. Like, I sold one, like I may as well keep going.
So watching the external links is a biggie.
And then I think the other. The other telltale signs you can check drop history, right?
Because a lot of folks will recover a dropped domain with decent stats, relaunch content, and try to cobble some traffic together, right?
You may end up being able to avoid networks of sites that explicitly exist to sell links now, even if they were legitimate sites in the past.
So that’s one to watch out for as well.
And then the other biggie is looking for patterns of sites trying to artificially inflate their Traffic on stuff that isn’t actually core to what their topic is about, right?
So you’ll see a lot of finance sites do this a lot where they’ll be trying to sell a link for two, three, 400.
And then you look and it’s Oh, they get 12,000 visits a month.
Okay, decent sign. And then you go into their top pages or their top keywords report, and it’s all like X, Y, Z person that works.
It’s like, all right.
Okay.
So you’re not really ranking for like any of them.
Suppose I’m pushing a credit card affiliate site, like none of your credit card contents ranking. In that case, all your estimated visits and tools come from this net worth section or conversions, like they’ll launch a programmatic SEO thing about converting pounds to dollars or whatever.
So being on the lookout for like tangential topics that seem to serve the primary purpose of check the box of the domain has traffic in all the third party tools.
So when it gets listed in the marketplace, it’s a DR 50 and it’s got 12,000 visits a month that like, you’re just massaging the data to get to the point where you’ll pass the initial sniff check and folks will buy a placement.
Digging in deeper on that to see where their traffic comes from, and the interesting one on there, too, is when folks use the default WordPress URL pattern. If you see all their top pages are from 2021 and 2022, and then magically, nothing they’ve published in the last two years is getting even 20 visits a month.
That’s a good sign that there’s a problem and you probably don’t want to buy a new link because none of the new stuff is able to rank for anything. There’s just some legacy stuff that’s still alive and kicking.
Vince: Yeah, those are great tips. The idea of the inflated traffic was one that was recently pointed out to me that you’ll even see, brought up the fact that like they will be nonsense keywords to some of them are just like strings of letters and stuff that they use because that’s all people look at.
It’s just the search traffic and the D. R.
Ian Howells: Or non U. S. Countries is another one.
So if you, so a lot of marketplaces will show worldwide traffic.
But then if you start delineating by country, U.S. traffic will be nothing and traffic from like India or Pakistan will be 10,000 visits a month.
But like the total looks fine until you start like peeling back the layers a little bit, right?
Vince: Yeah, it’s funny. I want to get back to one of the things you said in the beginning about helpful content.
You mentioned, I think you said, it’s getting dicier, right? To work with the link marketplaces, especially after helpful content. And one of the analyses I recently did, I mentioned these guest posting sites blog posts that I have.
I essentially went through, this was almost a year ago. I went through about 800.
I basically went through all the top ranking posts for guest hosting sites and export all their lists, put them all together.
Deduplicated them and I was left with 800 or something and then I cut them down for quality and I mainly looked at search traffic and DR, but then I also looked at some like I had a, somebody helped me go through each of them and look for some of these other key factors similar to what you’re talking about.
Now, I redid it again after the helpful content updates, and my list was like 167 or something. Now it’s down to 102 or something of sites that still get traffic or the sites that get qualified enough, which was over ten thousand.
So, I got a long winded way to say that after the helpful content update, I saw a lot of these sites that accept guest posts are still quality sites they still got hit, and I want to get back to something you said earlier in a previous conversation with you and I is it seems like thisbucket of sites to work with is getting smaller and smaller.
Can you elaborate on that? Is, are there any themes is it specific industries that you saw this getting going down on, or, I’d be curious to see your thoughts.
How did HCU impact the link buying market?
Ian Howells: Yeah. So I think there’s a couple, I think two things is happening at the same time.
One is post HCU, folks who had their sites get hit and lost their income, some portion of them went I got to find some way to I need money coming in, right?
I have to have some way to generate revenue from these things.
And if a marketplace will list it and people buy links on the thing okay, fine.
My, mediavine or whatever, like my display ad revenue went to zero.
My Amazon associate revenue went to zero or near zero.
If people will pay me a hundred dollars for a link, like that’s better than the $0 a day I’m earning now.
Like I gotta get something going. So then you see this push of inventory expansion of sites that aren’t actually all that good, right? Which then is on the marketplace, right?
The marketplace is the first line of defense.
It’s like doing diligence to make sure that these are good sites and that will vary widely from vendor to vendor.
So, I think that’s one is like you see the pie expand.
Sites that are having trouble ranking because they’re just trying to find a way to generate revenue, which I understand on the publisher. And I understand the incentive on the short term incentive on the marketplace. And anyway, the second thing is a lot of the.
For almost all of the sites in the marketplace, inherently, if they’re in the marketplace, they know that the site is a money-producing asset, and one of the ways the site can make money is by selling links, obviously, if they were in a link marketplace.
I think that also makes it highly likely that they overlap with the sites that maybe went very overboard on every piece of content being the best XYZ or XYZ review, where every article was just affiliate centered, and that was obvious, and there’s no real brand behind the site, right?
It’s not like folks are looking for that site by name, it probably doesn’t get much traffic outside of organic search traffic.
Basically, it’s in the bullseye of the stuff that looks like the HCU update went after.
Okay, so now you have like sites that fit that mold were probably heavily present in a bunch of links marketplaces to begin with, right?
So the type of site that the HCU went after overlaps a good amount with the type of site that was selling links in the past.
And you have folks that even if they weren’t selling links in the past post-HCU, I have nothing to lose. Screw it. I might as well try and sell some links off this thing.
So I think the work of doing your own diligence and making sure that like you feel good about the stuff you’re buying is much harder now because there’s just so much more noise in the system than there was 24 months ago.
Vince: Yeah. That’s probably the case all across the industry, right?
Ian Howells: I don’t envy running a link marketplace at present, right? Because it’s a big, competing pressure of you want and need large inventory, but if you kicked out every site that lost 60 or 70 percent of its traffic, like you don’t have a whole lot left. So I get the competing incentives and don’t envy the folks that are in the position of having to make that choice of do we take short term pain to try and I don’t know how many folks are interested in building a long term brand name around a link marketplace to begin with.
So maybe there’s not competing pressure and I’m just I’m just making that up in my own head, but it doesn’t seem, it doesn’t seem terribly low stress, I would say.
Vince: All right, let me ask two specific questions based off the notes that you, or things that you said earlier.
I’m going to expand a little bit on this idea of building links from scratch starting a site from scratch and how to build links there.
The easy way obviously is to buy links.
You get a bunch of guest posts sites, and just start building your authority there. What are alternatives?
What are alternatives to buying links for sites just starting out?
Ian Howells: Yeah. So I think the ideal way so I’ll use Charlotte as the example, right?
If I’m starting a thing, I would first look to sorry, are we talking about actual businesses that are trying to build links, or are we talking about like content sites that are just trying to monetize affiliate traffic?
Like what, because they’re two very different answers.
Vince: Yeah. Great question. Let’s say you’re an actual business dentist or or yeah, small business that wants to have an online presence. You’re not a content focused affiliate site.
Ian Howells: So I should. I should asterisk I don’t mean to say that publishers aren’t real business that you suddenly can be.
The large majority of sites that pop up are not destined to be actual businesses.
They’re like a hobby attempt at making some quick money.
So I, I don’t want folks that run legitimate content businesses to think I think they’re garbage and get offended but that’s the quickest way.
Do you mean a real business or do you mean a brick and mortar like brick and mortar.
Vince: Brick and mortar.
Ian Howells: So for for a dentist, right? I would be looking at.
In Charlotte, it’s Charlotte Agenda, right?
Like local media that covers like who’s hiring, who’s, they do a lot of like restaurant food and drink entertainment type stuff.
So, a dentist isn’t exactly in the wheelhouse, but that model of if you live in a major or semi-major city, there’s probably a local blogs or publishers that focus on like stuff happening in the area.
So I think I would look to that hey, it’s like a truly local link, right?
Like the relevancy is spot on there in terms of the geo relationship so stuff like that I think is really easy to lean on local sponsorships, right?
Your local chamber of commerce may list all its members, and you can get a link from that.
Again, it puts you in good company.
Geo relevance is really high when sponsoring local stuff, right?
Little leagues and whatever else all need sponsorships.
Libraries are always in need of funding, right?
So you can do some good and get some good PR out of it as well, right?
Like basically the stuff that you would do.
If search engines as a thing didn’t really exist, like what would you have done 20 years ago?
Chances are the list is pretty 20 years ago, Jesus 30, 30 years ago.
I forget that I’m old. Uh, the stuff that you would have done without search engine results in mind is like very similar to the stuff that you would do with search engines in mind because those things also tend to be very beneficial if there’s a link component to them as well.
So, I think focusing on that would be a good start to building that initial base.
Vince: Yeah, people talk about this idea of would you still want to link from this site if Google didn’t exist, right? Kind of value. It sounds like what you’re saying. In most of those cases, though, it does sound like you’re still going to have to shell out money.
Is it? Is it possible to do this with no budget these days? Because I think it used to be, right?
Is it possible to build links with no budget today?
Ian Howells: Yeah, so I think possible, sure.
It’s a lot harder, right?
But I don’t know that anybody should have the expectation that like I can again, we’re talking about what if search engines didn’t exist?
I don’t think your expectation would be that you could start a business for free, right?
That’s not, that’s a weird base level assumption that none of this should cost me anything.
Since, I don’t know since when that’s been true. Hell, domains used to be 30 a year.
Now they’re like 99 cents for some extensions.
So I think it’s certainly I don’t know that I’d call anything impossible, but it’s significantly harder to do it without having some sort of budget or even just like time, right?
There’s brick and mortar stores in my hometown where during the pandemic they naturally got crushed because they couldn’t be open for business anymore.
So the woman who owns it pivoted to selling on eBay and Etsy, stuff that she hadn’t really done before, but it was like I need some way to continue getting revenue because this has been a business she’s owned for the last 25 years.
And then the other biggie, which ended up working really well for doing weekly Facebook live streams and product demos.
And then letting people just comment, like claiming that they want one and then somebody would like her assistant would DM them and coordinate to take their credit card payment over the phone and then they would just pick up at the location without ever having to go in the store like they would just run it out like ordering curbside pickup at a restaurant except like physical product and it got to the point where—not that it’s like a meaningful amount of money—but she now makes a few hundred dollars a month from Facebook just from the live stream activity that she’s generating every week, right?
So there are creative ways that you can do it.
That didn’t cost her anything to do, but she burned a lot of time doing it.
So if it never worked, like that would have been a whole bunch of wasted time, right?
So you’re going to expend your budget, whether it’s money or time, in some way to try and get this to work.
Again, I would significantly question the success likelihood of somebody who goes into opening a business and tries to figure out how to open a business without spending any money. You’re stacking the deck against you.
You can try, but oh man, are you playing on hard mode?
That’s not ideal.
Vince: Yeah. That brings up this idea of this, like quality versus quantity thing, right? I think The thing that people, the thing that’s hurt link building, at least from my perspective over the years, is just the focus on quantity over quality.
What you get is this talk of cost per link all the time, and you want to get the most with, from your money and people equate that with, the quality factor is, if you’re not educated enough, they just fall off the wayside.
Do you think there’s ever a point when quantity trumps quality in the case of link buying?
Like where you should be going out or, if somebody, have you seen successes where people go out and just buy, I’m going to buy a hundred links and just really, blast this to try to.
Is there ever a case where link quantity is better than quality?
Ian Howells: So there are more rare, but I think the place where I’ve seen that happen is like way back in my original answer, the situations where it’s a legitimate brand, they’re large, they’re to pick a number like DR/DA authority score or whatever, like 80 plus, like established significant web presence.
Everybody’s got a link for and by everybody, them and their three, four major competitors, everybody has a link from the Guardian or New York Times or fill in the blank on like the major media that you want coverage on.
We’ve just stalemated because everybody’s got coverage on the majors and like we’re the three category leaders in the space and so like link quality.
We all have it, right?
So then at that point, you’re in this arms race of the differentiation comes in from volume on the lower tiers, and what’s, what pages, what anchor text, how fast are they coming in what’s the velocity look like?
What is that angle?
So that it happens.
I think most people, most mere mortals, don’t have to play that game and be involved in that fight, but they exist.
It’s just not the case for like most publishers and most folks that I would imagine are representative of the buyer side of these marketplaces.
Vince: Yeah, that makes total sense. All right, another quick hit question here is the idea of buying links just for link diversity sake. Is that ever something you would do?
Ian Howells: You mean like just in terms of having a higher LRD count or?
Vince: No. Say. A lot of people talk about link diversity, right? Like you want to have a nice diverse backlink portfolio.
If say you’re working with a digital PR agency and all you get are high end news links, right?
But you don’t have, you’re not getting links from local businesses or something, is that something that people do?
Is that something you’d recommend to shore up these? Holes in your link profile.
Do you look at the diversity of a link profile as a differentiating factor or ranking factor?
Ian Howells: Yeah. So I think I would more commonly recommend people to pursue if what you’re after is anchored diversity.
So if you’re getting a bunch of high end links, and it’s always the brand name or the name of the face of the company, then exploring some link purchasing to complement that with mixing in some partial phrase match anchors on the keywords that you want to go rank for.
That’s interesting.
I don’t know that I would look at it as a Diversity play of Oh man, we’ve got all these great links. Let’s go buy some real mediocre shit so that we balance it out.
Like that stuff will happen all on its own.
You don’t need to go expend budget to get crummy stuff.
So like that would be a strange use case.
Anchor, though, to me, makes a whole lot of sense in both directions.
Like one, like we’ve done a bunch of link programs in the past and are. Backlink portfolio anchors are really heavy on keywords, like going and buying a bunch of branded anchor text can help try and push you back into a safer zone.
But on the diversity standpoint, like anchors are really where I would anchor on that.
That would be the focal point for sure. Cheese aside, not so much the like traffic tiers.
Vince: The sites that say write for us and they offer clearly offer guest posts. Is that something you avoid?
Do you blanket avoid sites that say “write for us”?
Ian Howells: For stuff that isn’t high-tier, there are legitimate publishers that accept submissions from contract writers.
They may pay you if they accept your article.
Like, all Write for Us pages are not created equal in general.
It’s one, it’s like a yellow card yeah, it may not disqualify you completely, but it’s not helping.
And if there’s a couple other there’s only so many marks and columns that you can get an X in before you get tossed and that’s certainly one of them for sure, yeah.
Vince: Yeah.
I guess let’s close this out with this question about this failing for people, right?
Ian Howells: Like you’re buying links and it’s not working.
Vince: Yeah. Or some ways that, yeah, maybe an agency is doing it for you. What, yeah, what are some of the biggest signals that you’ve seen where it’s failing and why?
When do you know your link buying is failing?
Ian Howells: Yeah. So I think a biggie is, unfortunately, you have unsophisticated folks on the buyer side, whether that is an agency doing it or the end client, like somebody in house at a client at the actual end business receiving the link, who’s not doing much diligence into what they’re buying.
And they’re actually buying links on mediocre sites that can’t rank for anything and aren’t going to bestow any trust to you through linking to you, right?
So you end up just wasting your money on stuff that like, somebody who knows more than you would not have purchased to begin with, right?
That I think is the biggest reason because, and it’s hard to fault people, right?
You should take it seriously and want to learn about this if you’re trying to make money on the internet and through SEO specifically.
But I understand the folks who just don’t go super deep and just hear enough to understand Oh, links are important for ranking in Google. I need links.
Here’s people that are selling links this shit’s easy this is very straightforward, right?
I’ll just go buy these lists, right?
I think there’s a lot of folks that fall into that trap of not having a deep level of understanding.
I think that’s probably the most common.
I think for others, there’s probably pockets where links aren’t the problem.
So in the past, like the SERPs look very different now, but two years ago, if you were trying to rank an e-commerce page, an e-commerce product listing page for best XYZ, finding a bunch of links to try and make that happen probably wasn’t going to get you anywhere because the whole front page was listicles, right?
Like the type of stuff Google was clearly biasing towards ranking wasn’t the type of page that you were trying to push on.
So have at it.
Spend all the money you want.
It’s very hard to force a page type into a SERP if Google clearly has a preference for a different page type.
So part of it could just be like a foundational strategy.
Misalignment of what you’re trying to rank for what SERPs and if you keep hammering that like it may not do you any good.
But I think people buying mediocre stuff is probably the most significant contributor to it not working.
It’s like you’re probably just buying links that aren’t very good or like your domain is wrecked, and almost no matter what you do the first page ain’t gonna happen, or they’re just like way overshooting their fighting weight, right?
If you launch a new site tomorrow and want to rank for credit card review terms, you better have a lot of budget and a lot of time to wait this one out because it’s not going to happen quickly.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. That is one of the biggest things that I saw. Not the credit card thing, but the idea that in a lot of cases sites that were hit by the helpful content update, no matter what they did, you could build super quality links. You can build a ton of them.
They didn’t seem to help at all. Like the helpful content seemed to be the biggest.
Ian Howells: Dark clouds are hard to get rid of.
Once you run a foul, like that, that update in particular, it seems like that will follow you around for quite a long time now.
We could be a month away from an update rolls out and we see a bunch of right, like wild stuff can happen and has happened before, but for sure if the site has a bad mark against it somewhere.
I liken SEO to taking supplements. You can take an iron supplement all you want. If you weren’t iron deficient to begin with, you’re not gonna notice anything.
But, like, somebody that was iron deficient is gonna be like, oh my god, this stuff’s amazing.
Like, I feel so much better. That was the solution to the actual problem you have.
I think folks can very commonly misdiagnose their problems and spend money on solutions that could be totally legitimate solutions to somebody else’s problems.
It just was never the answer to your problem, and spending more money on it isn’t going to make that true all of a sudden.
Vince: Yeah. I wish we could leave on a more positive note about the update. To your point, it could be as little as next week when Google releases something, and we’ve seen some of these sites recover. I saw 20% of the sites that were impacted recover 20% in the last something.
So 20% of their recent traffic or 20% of the traffic, they were dinged for.
Ian Howells: Oh, got 20 percent back of what they lost. Yeah.
Vince: That’s not a win.
Ian Howells: That’s a That’s not a win.
Vince: It’s progress.
Ian Howells: Fair.
Vince: Ian, I want to thank you so much for your time. Let me just put a bow on this because to help me understand this.
It’s, it seems like one of the smartest ways that you can evaluate the stuff is it’s not a one-size-fits-all all it’s what I’m getting from you.
Like there are a lot of industry specific evaluations.
You have to make there’s a lot of competitor-specific evaluation timelines of your business, not only in just like link buying but like SEO in general, right?
Like the SERP that you’re trying to compete in, it sounds to me that that is the smarter way to do things.
That’s how you seem to evaluate most of the stuff you do, huh?
Ian Howells: For sure. And I think it is doubly true. So like you said, that’s true for like SEO in general, but I think it’s very true for stuff like link buying.
If you’re looking at spending significant money every month to pursue this thing, it is well worth the extra time and effort, in the beginning, to understand exactly what we are doing, why, what we expect, and how long we are going to do this before we make a call on working, not working, and whether to continue or stop.
Do not just start spending money on links because you think generically like links are good, and you need more links to rank in Google.
Yes, but please spend the time to figure out like what you’re actually doing and do it intentionally just like anything else. But like I said, especially in this where you’re talking about like thousands of dollars a month and spend to go try and do it.
Vince: Yeah, I expect us to get a lot of feedback or at least people have a lot of questions about this kind of stuff. So please, if you do leave a comment, I’m sure Ian would be happy to answer or I’m happy to relay to Ian. And maybe there’s a part two of this. If people do have a lot of questions, Ian, thanks again so much for your time.
You can catch Ian online, Traffic Think Tank. He’s very active on there. Obviously his co founder, he is active on LinkedIn. Are you on Twitter X these days? Just add at
Ian Howells: Ian Howells. Very hidden, very hard,
Vince: hard to find. Thanks again, everyone. Reminder and subscribe. I’ll leave a review that would help us out a lot.
And thanks again to Ian.
Ian Howells: Awesome. Thanks.
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