My take longer than a month for anything to happen, may not happen at all. It is very hit and miss these days and there is no rhyme or reason that I can see.

Make sure your mixing up your anchor texts real good use lots of variations. The web 2.0 SENuke type links almost do nothing these days. Try using some some blog comments and some blog posts combo lightly and mixing up the anchors, recently had and some luck with this.

In content blog posts and homepage back links are the two most effective links you can get, the higher PR the better. You might even try through in some bookmarks some cases they help.

With Google, it seems to me that any links you can get by just sitting at your keyboard and placing them are minimal in value - really minimal. There is possibly "some" accumulated value, but for competitive SERPs, it's not going to do the job these days.

As kd454 mentioned it's the "in-content" links that do a great job - but how do you get those? First, you've got to develop content that another site would want to recommend to their visitors. And second, you've got to let those sites know about your content, somehow or other. A well developed social media presence can help, as can direct, one-on-one outreach. But none of that is easy and it can't be done with a totally automated approach.

This is content marketing, and it takes a kind of real networking and relationship building to be truly effective. Over time, the positive effects can start to snowball, but still, it always starts with the quality and uniqueness of content you are offering on your site.

Hi guys. Tedster, the most part of this was exactly that. I created targeted link bait that ended up topping reddit, had hundreds of shares on google twitter and fb. And then a shed load of links. And despite that particular page getting a lot of direct traffic from the links, over 15,000 to that one page, in a Single day. No effect on ranking at all.

The main competitors links are crap. But come in the hundreds of thousands.

Frustrating as bloody hell.

Would you suggest not using senuke at all? I figured that it would do some good in my niche, as the competitors links are all mostly weak.

This bout of linkbait created more high quality links, than some of the competitors have in total.

One particular site, currently at 100,000 daily visitors has the most ridiculously ugly, unusable website, plagued with ads and affiliates. Their links are nothing but spam. It really gets me down that we've invested our lives in to our site, that looks and works so much better than the rest. We create good content an have lots of great links.

How the hell does google feel the competitor has a more worthy site. I just don't get it anymore. I once thought everything made sense. But really it doesn't.

Feeling a wee bit deflated.

Maybe Google purposefully delays the effect of newly-found backlinks as a way to discourage artificial link-building. Many site owners are looking for fast results and get discouraged if they don't see a quick effect.

Quality, not quantity. How many links did you get that were smack in the middle of a NEWLY PUBLISHED article with the right anchor text? Hopefully a lot of them, not you'll just need to wait until those articles get pagerank value (I hate the term pagerank, it doesn't mean what most think anymore).

When links appear on freshly minted articles they are given more value than links appearing on old established posts.

I have considered that, but it seems ridiculous on an established website, that naturally gains links. you'd think at some point, you'd have gained enough trust to not have to deal with such crap.

But maybe that's what's happening. As if all those PR 4, 5, 6 links mean nothing, I give up.

How the hell does google feel the competitor has a more worthy site. I just don't get it anymore. I once thought everything made sense. But really it doesn't.

Yep nothing makes sense anymore from what I can tell. I have many sites and have built sites to experiment with the new "algos/panda" there is no way of knowing what your doing it going to work the ROI makes it pretty much not worth it anymore. I can do the same thing on 10 sites and 2 of them may do well and the other almost nothing.

I have customers that buy links from me some big and mid size company's with big budgets for links, if you have the money to spend on super high quality relevant links you will have no issues ranking other than that it is hit and miss.

One month would be fairly quick IMO to get a bump like this. I personally would be happy with a three month delay from a link building campaign. It's my belief that google sandboxes new links of sorts (they like older more stable links as they're harder to spam). You might just need to wait a bit more.

Now google does like fresh links (which is somewhat of a contradiction) but I think it is only for fast changing sectors (News/tech/that type of thing). Could be your sector that google has classified you as as might prefer older links over fresh links.

How is your link velocity? Have you gone from say acquiring 5 links naturally a month to say 500? It's widely suspected google keeps an eye on link velocity and factors this into the SERP's.

What percentage of your links are natural (somebody saw/liked what they saw from social and linked to you) and what percentage are from SENuke and artificial link building? If the latter this could be the problem as google is getting good at spotting this. I ask because I noticed your comment about varying anchor text which suggest to me that quite a number of these links aren't natural.

Also, I would be suspect of SENuke, although I'm not familiar with it, it sounds like a link building scheme that crawls the web looking for prospects, compiles fake content based on real content and submits this to patsy sites using a number of fake profiles? Correct me if I'm wrong... It does sound like something that would raise google's attention IMO...I'm sure Cutts is already familiar with this particular app.

Every link thus far, has been pretty much natural. Yahoo site explorer reports 81,000 links.

Users sharing stuff either socially, on forums or web masters sharing the content.

This campaign, was largely to get high quality links from authority domains but threw in the whole SENuke stuff to balance it out.

Maybe I just have to wait, but I absolutely cannot see these links ever having value now. I feel pretty confident they're "lost".

A month isn't long enough to judge results.

And any campaign will look unnatural if there is a significant flurry for one month, then nothing. That alone can dampen the effect of the links you built in my opinion.

In a genre where you are developing that much traffic, you must be generating revenue. Invest consistent revenue from the website back into link building opportunities. Guest posts, writing guides, link baiting - long term.

Find ways to ensure that users share your content in social media long term.

And continue to source out those very hard to find links in your related space and you will do fine.

*30,000 visitors per day.

What are you doing to keep those 30.000 a day engaged and remember you?

What are you doing to make those 30.000 a day link for you?

What are you doing to have those 30.000 talk about you?

You say you get plenty of natural links already,
so if it was my site I would focus on making those natural links come faster and in more numbers,
how about trying to make a strategy around that instead of simply building links yourself?

and as others said before, give it 3 months at least...

cheers
viggen

This discussion confirms my assumption on link building.
I have never worked (never will) on link building for my sites. The maximum is the little social buttons at the bottom of articles.

I haven't even looked for the sites linking to me.
The user engagement, branding, social awareness plus user experience are supposed to work but still I am not sure how/if these metrics affect ranking and in what extent.

I think SE (especially Google) are still struggling with the "social data" they gather from the web. Messi Panda is the result of their efforts.

I have some experience of the app you mention, it is in the snake oil class of software programmes, endlessly spamming web2.0 sites with spun junk which they delete within minutes of you posting it.

I used it for a while in both versions before giving up on it, if you have 30K uniques a day that is a serious amount of trafic you should be able to get these visitors working for you if you use your imagination.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:40 pm (utc) on Oct 4, 2011]

As others have said, Google is taking into account many other factors besides backlinks these days, and blasting massive amounts of crappy links to your site has much less effect.

However, GOOD backlinks DO STILL WORK. Also, have others have said, with the levels of traffic you get, you should be able to find ways to build organic links.

If you want to learn about how to get non-organic (grey hat?) good quality backlinks that really help, this is not the forum to do so.

Advertising 30,000 or 40,000 visitors within short period is mostly will not work. The first and foremost one about link building is manual link building. High PR manual link building such as forum, profile links, press release, article submission, social book marking, directory submission are working definitely. It boost up your inbound links and page rank as well as traffic. But little slowly, not like 30,000 or 40,000. But it may be. Depends upon your niche and promoting ways.

@realmaverick

be aware about taking so much backlinks, specially the quality of them and avoid for example sites that repeat the same link in the whole site.

Also I remember a Post where it was said that the effect of a new link is delayed.

I really dont know if my actual penalization is about dup content that I deleted or about the 25k of backlinks that use to send 3 sites, but one of them start to link me from the whole site 4 months before I recieve the penalization. The links watching GWT were increasing week by week till I recieve the penalization...

so I conclude watch every site were you link will be...

I think link building is dead. I got 4.6 Million (according to webmaster tools), and I think 2.5-3 Million were from the last 12 months.

Serps are the same, but I got 2x more traffic than last year. But I don't think it's attributed to the additional links. Might be something else I did.

In my experience, the links that you are building now start to really pay off in about a year. After a year of link building you can look at the pages that you built links to vs the pages that you didn't and see a measurable difference in the amount of traffic coming in. If you have two similar sites, one of which you built links to, you can start to measure the differences in about 6 months. In a year, the site with a great link building campaign should be flying high compared to the one without.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Google appears to be moving away from links as their sole source of "recommendations". It sounds like you are doing it, but link building without a social campaign doesn't make sense to me these days. If you are a merchant, make sure you are getting good reviews from your customers on shopping aggregation sites.

SEO used to be about keyword targeting and links. Now its quality content (including keyword targeting), recommendations (including links), and user satisfaction.

Tedster nailed it:

"This is content marketing, and it takes a kind of real networking and relationship building to be truly effective. Over time, the positive effects can start to snowball, but still, it always starts with the quality and uniqueness of content you are offering on your site. "

realmaverick,

1) don't get discouraged - it's complex and obfuscated, but not impossible - I am willing to help you (see below), till then remember...

2) the PR you see in the toolbar is often wrong or out of date - don't rely on it or care about it - it is just one metric to use out of 20!

3) crappy sites will inevitably get removed from the index. What you think is crappy and Google moderators do is two different things. You could always make an official spam complaint against them if they are spammy

4) senuke links are of low value, possibly even weighing AGAINST you - you have to be very careful and do senuke links the way NO ONE else does, or they a will have no to negative value - remember EVERYONE uses those same sites that senuke does regardless if they are using senuke per se

5) also, it may take months for those links to give you any good (or bad) link juice - it just takes time to spider them and for that data to proliferate to the other data centers - did you ping or index those links in senuke?

6) at high PRs it takes thousands of links to make any signiificant opsitive difference, but much less links to make a negative one (in theory) if you are already close to he "bad backlink percentage" threshold.

7) IMO with such a valuable site, IF YOU DO NOT KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING WITH ADDING QUESTIONABLE BACKLINKS, then DON'T. It's not worth the risk on such a high value site getting banned or penalized. If you are getting good links from viral content, then keep doing that. There is no way you can EVER get penalized from having too many people like you.

8) There are WAY more metrics that could be holding you down / propping them up. What's your bounce rate? Avg. time on page? Do you have dup content, thin content on page or across pages? Too mnay ads above 700px, etc.?

9) older sites are often grandfathered into their state, be that either penalty or "useful" or even "vital" - google is often slow to change on older sites (for better or for worse) - that's the main algo I am describing, panda happens ALL TOO QUICKLY :-) Panda is not (yet) part of the main algo

[edited by: tedster at 9:10 pm (utc) on Oct 21, 2011]

I like to redact what I said earlier. I think you needs loads of links not to just your home page to get good results.

I'm not sure what's going on with my site, but I'm getting 500,000+ new links in a month for a few months now. My site traffic has been increasing steadily lately also.

@azn romeo 4u

how are you getting more than 500,000 links per month?

seems a bit strange for me, getting in a natural way that amount of links :)

@azn romeo 4u: link building is not dead, you are probably not doing it right. Getting 500K links a month is not natural that is why your SERP is steady, which may eventually fall if Google discover something strange in your backlink profile. Your traffic have increased possibly because they are from referals from these 500K links a month.

As for the OP, I have noticed that there is a big delay now in Google indexing new links, so that might be the case for you. Lately, 1 month is too short to see any decent effect, I've seen one of my client's ranking increased after a couple of months.

Relevance has always been the key to backlinks and it has not changed. You can easily beat your spammy competitor by getting a very small quantity of highly relevant backlinks.

I was just doing some testing recently. For a website that has been ranked #8 for not very competitive phrase (~20 million results) I got 10 backlinks from websites similar to mine, I think 5 of them had that keyword as an anchor. Two weeks later and I am up to #2 without anything else being done with the website.

I do this type of testing at least once a year to make sure quality still beats quantity and so far have not been disappointed.

I also expect to see result within 2 weeks from recently acquired links and usually do. But again - quality links.

P.S. Getting a high quantity low-quality backlinks also works, but much slower. I have a few competitors that buy butt load of links and they get results, but after doing some investigation it appears that they had acquired most of their links 1-2 years ago (relative to the time their websites show up in decent spots). So prepare for a long wait :)

[edited by: atlrus at 11:43 pm (utc) on Nov 7, 2011]

As someone "in the trenches" of that 'low-level' internet marketing game, I can tell you what 'we' do, and what works today.

It's still largely about links. What's changed is the link profile. In the 'internet marketing' world - what many of you would consider the "mmo" or "make money online" world (yes, lots of spammy, gray, and blackhat stuff, but none-the-less a keen awareness of rank & traffic building) - the world still revolves around linkbuilding. Since many of us aren't in a position to easily get high-authority links, we focus instead on the 'best' of what we can get.

As has been mentioned, editorial or 'in-content' links are the strongest, with 'in-content' links on 'best' sites being the goal.

These would include high-PR and/or high-authority sites in your own or related niches.

How? The best method is "guest blogging". Search for and create a list of 'good' sites: those high-PR and/or high-authority sites that publish often. Write - or outsource - the best/highest quality articles you can manage, and offer them to those sites/blogs in return for one or two 'in-content' links within the articles. Follow the basic anchor-text best practices.

Next, article syndication. Yes it still works, providing you do it 'right'. This means the better article distribution/syndication networks (here's a link to an excellent comparison of some of the better & better known networks: [imimpact.com...]

Leverage RSS feeds, mix in some social bookmarking and blog commenting. Unfortunately, SEN has 'burnt out' the sources they post to, but there are still worthwhile social media sites, etc.

If anyone is interested, we recently published a "post-Panda" course on 'free traffic'. It goes over both organic, and 'other' traffic sources & methods. I'd be happy to post or email some of the material.

Michael

*Main competitor has hundreds of thousands of spam links and is getting 400,000 visitors a day. So lots of room for growth!

In my opinion, and its just that... If your "main competitor" is hitting 400k daily visitors, you are competing against someone in the same level as a Groupon or Zappos, something at that level.

I feel your efforts would be better in the way of Branding. Maybe start your own affiliate referral program, etc. Leave backlink building as a result of the branding of your business.

MH