Over time backlink methods come and go, but not as often as people seem to think. It’s usually HOW you use a technique rather than if you use it at all that makes the difference to how effective it is. This seems to be a controversial topic – every time you see ANY method discussed on ANY SEO forum you can guarantee there will be one guy who says “this doesn’t work anymore” or “this will get you filtered”, followed by “lolz you’re just doing it wrong…”
The bottom line: you need to test these methods and work out the best techniques for your sites.
If you blast 100,000 profile links at a single page with a single anchor, then at best you’re going to see a very temporary improvement (more likely no improvement at all as the links are easily filtered). If you send a few thousand at a variety of pages to get some deep links + anchor text diversity then that may be more effective (and cheaper). That’s just an example – I haven’t tested it – but it’s essential that you test these methods to see what works.
Quick Note: Some of these backlink techniques are a bit “spammy”. You need to use your own knowledge and common sense to decide whether a site is too valuable to risk using these techniques on. In general I save the risky options for new sites or sites that I don’t really care about, while I avoid them on sites already earning money or if I’m doing work for a client.
Directory Submissions
I don’t think there is a huge amount of benefit to directory submissions anymore, but I usually pay $20 or so when I start a new site and get it blasted out to a load of different directories. Some are going to be very low quality, some probably don’t even approve sites anymore, but you get some links and they’re very cheap. Good for a bit of diversity, but I don’t rely on these links.
Whatever you do don’t spend a solid week manually submitting to 10,000 directories – just pay an outsourcer to do it for you. There are plenty of great providers on various SEO forums, just look at their reviews and how long they’ve been going for an idea of the quality.
Guest Posts
Guest posts aren’t something I’d bother trying to get for a spammy MFA site, but for high quality sites they are definitely worth the effort. Remember, if a site is high quality then it is going to be overloaded with guest post requests. That means a 400 word $5 article from textbroker isn’t going to make them sit up and take notice.
If you want to be featured on a high traffic, editorial site (which should be your goal with guest posts) then you’ll need to write something that’s going to stand out and be actually interesting to the reader. If you do this you might get some direct traffic too.
Blog Comments
Blog comments divide webmasters, but I’ve never seen anything other than positive improvement from using them. In general you should be looking for low out bound links (OBL), high PR and a service provider who’s willing to use several different anchors and multiple URLs (unbelievably some insist you use a single anchor and URL combination).
In reality it’s going to be hard to find a service provider who can provide <30 OBL on a large package for a reasonable price. There just aren’t enough auto approve comments to go around. The only way you can get these links is if you hire a native English speaker to actually write thoughtful insightful comments.
If you go this route then your best bet is to hire a full time worker to do it for you. It’ll take some training, and you’ll need to provide the URL list yourself, but you’ll get better quality links in the long run.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking, if done right, seems to be working VERY well at the moment. I’ll say no more about that.
Web 2.0 Submission
Web 2.0 submission (where you submit an article containing your links to sites like Squidoo and Hubpages) is one of those timeless types of backlink techniques that never seems to go away. If done correctly, you can get some decent juice out of these sites. I usually buy between 10-15 for a new site and then “backlink the backlinks” to get the most juice from them as possible.
Article Submissions
I had assumed that mass article submissions were becoming less and less effective over time, but a recent test has shown that they still have value in some situations. I’m going to be running some more tests to see if the results were a fluke, but if not then I’ll be using article submissions again – especially as they are so cheap (think Fiverr).
Side Note: Forum Profile Links (XR or similar)
You may have noticed I didn’t include forum profiles in this list. For a long time forum profile links worked very well, and there are still some who swear by them today. I haven’t seen that much positive improvement when using profile links over the last six months so, but that’s not to say they’re useless. For indexing backlinks, getting a bit more juice and providing anchor text diversity they still have their place. I use them a lot less than I did a year ago though.
