Should I Pay For Links?

[MinstrelJunkie]

In January, our site went from 750k sessions/m to 250k sessions/m.

So I'm throwing the Kitchen Sink at it in a major way.

Including:

• Hiring real niche experts to review articles, and be included as a Reviewer
• Recording "podcasts" with experts to embed clips into relevant articles
• Training 2 full-time writers to go through articles in detailed edits (2-3 hours per edit)
• Overhauled the site design and navigation, much more of a brand
• Pruned 200+ articles that weren't relevant to the core of the site
• Adding way more author info + backgrounds
• Getting a US address + phone # (but failed at getting listed on Google My Business)

And in the pipeline:

• Driving traffic from Facebook + Pinterest
• Building out a newsletter
• Creating troubleshooting flowcharts for articles
• Taking lots of unique images (site is 99% stock images atm)
• Hopefully building a semi-active YouTube following

The remaining black box for me is links.

I believe our site got dropped + snippet banned due to us being way too broad with 1,000+ long tail articles, and no real site presence / EEAT. I'm trying to build all of that naturally, and I feel like we may be missing out on links to help do this.

The question is, should I hire a link-building agency to help strengthen our site's authority?

If so, what kind of strategy should we use?

I think we need to target site-wide improvements, like improving EEAT by getting mentions of our authors. Rather than paying for links to rank a few individual pages.

Our site was previously earning over $30k/m. My goal with a link campaign would be to get those rankings back, rather than improve on them.

Would appreciate any thoughts on how best to go about doing this.

Thank you!

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I think to answer that realistically you'd need to give more information about your current backlink profile, how that compares to your nearest competitors that you'd realistically overtake (are they ahead of you etc?) where you got your links from (are they all stuff that's on the Dutka blacklist that every agency sells or were they all PR magic that you got through amazing content etc).

Tempting as it always is, in my position, to just say 'yay links definitely' the truth is if you're already 100% or more ahead of all your competition on quality links adding 10% more might only boost your traffic by 10% which doesn't exactly get you back to where you were before. The budget/time is better spent elsewhere.

I like your logic/thinking though about where Google is going with 'EEAT' - I've seen no evidence that author-based links currently are a factor in the link quality algorithm - but I wonder if it's on the cards. The only challenge I'd see is that when they look at natural links journalists and high quality bloggers tend to reference the brand producing the content not the writer - people would say 'Coke has released a new study showing that Diet Coke can assist in weight loss as part of a balanced diet.' (well they might not lol but you get the idea) but they probably wouldn't say 'Billy Jenkins, head of diet research at Coke said....' unless they interviewed them specifically. So I wonder if it really lines up with enough useful data for them in the real world to use or not.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I agree with Steve that since we don't have details, we can only philosophize and be theoretical here. In a generalized fashion, Google's algorithm was originally built on Page Rank and that's still a huge part of how they sort what is high quality or not. It's how other real people "vote" for content, by linking to it. And it's able to give weight to different voters (links from a rinky dink forum by a nobody vs. links by some big wig journalist in a 200 year old newspaper business).

To set some expectations, the game is very different for sites with 2,000 pages all targeting lower to middle competition keywords, versus a 25 page site each targeting higher competition keywords. Where you might try to get links to all 25 pages of the one site, that's going to be very cost-prohibitive on a 2,000 page site unless the links are less powerful / lower quality. But if your keyword research and on-page were done well, you may not need much more than that. Especially since it's a numbers game anyway. You might be happy to spray-and-pray 2 links each at every page and see what happens.

That also brings you to the "hammer one page and watch the rankings like a hawk and only this one page is largely affected and I can see results happening fairly quickly" or the other side of the coin where you "hit every page with just a couple links hoping at least one gets indexed and while some may magically pop up and increase traffic we're really just spreading juice throughout the whole site and watching all the boats rise with the page rank tide over a much longer period of time". With this 2nd method you can still pick specific targets to go harder on, budget permitting.

I'm not trying to make any points here, other than to say that yes, links still matter big time and are perhaps 40-60% of the algorithm if you consider all the various factors related to them (and this is an off-the-cuff estimate), and there's different ways to approach the link building game based on what kind of site you've built.

In your case, establishing some domain-wide strength in terms of backlink metrics would be the first order of business. That doesn't mean go straight for HARO and Digital PR. It could mean starting with all your social media profiles, then some niche edits, then some guest posts, then bribing some editors from big sites. Then there's always the question of tiered link building, too. It never ends. I always say to spread your wings far and wide at first (take whatever link you can get to get tied into the "net", especially within your niche), and then start aiming for either/both increased relevancy and increased power.

One final word of advice would be that nothing will move the needle like a contextual, relevantly anchored link. That means a link within a relevant article with a relevant anchor text. The article doesn't have to be perfectly micro-niche'd relevant but within the same vertical/niche is preferable and the anchor text shouldn't be overly-optimized. And the links don't need to come from sites in the same niche, either. Article-level relevancy is good enough. Nobody has the luxury of being that picky and being that picky means you run out of links to obtain, too.

 

[MinstrelJunkie]

Massively appreciate the detailed write-ups!

I've tried to go with a balanced approach, so have paid for a few links to test. Going to try and keep it super natural with more domain/brand recognition than individual pages or anchors.

We ranked very well for much of our content in the past, so if I can get us over whatever site-wide issue is affecting us right now we should be good as gold. Just need to build as much EEAT (which I'm realizing is very link-based) and brand authority as we can.

Also doubling down on content quality in-case that's the issue.

Will keep you updated! Thanks again

 

[AhFreshMeat]

I agree with Steve that since we don't have details, we can only philosophize and be theoretical here. In a generalized fashion, Google's algorithm was originally built on Page Rank and that's still a huge part of how they sort what is high quality or not. It's how other real people "vote" for content, by linking to it. And it's able to give weight to different voters (links from a rinky dink forum by a nobody vs. links by some big wig journalist in a 200 year old newspaper business).

To set some expectations, the game is very different for sites with 2,000 pages all targeting lower to middle competition keywords, versus a 25 page site each targeting higher competition keywords. Where you might try to get links to all 25 pages of the one site, that's going to be very cost-prohibitive on a 2,000 page site unless the links are less powerful / lower quality. But if your keyword research and on-page were done well, you may not need much more than that. Especially since it's a numbers game anyway. You might be happy to spray-and-pray 2 links each at every page and see what happens.

That also brings you to the "hammer one page and watch the rankings like a hawk and only this one page is largely affected and I can see results happening fairly quickly" or the other side of the coin where you "hit every page with just a couple links hoping at least one gets indexed and while some may magically pop up and increase traffic we're really just spreading juice throughout the whole site and watching all the boats rise with the page rank tide over a much longer period of time". With this 2nd method you can still pick specific targets to go harder on, budget permitting.

I'm not trying to make any points here, other than to say that yes, links still matter big time and are perhaps 40-60% of the algorithm if you consider all the various factors related to them (and this is an off-the-cuff estimate), and there's different ways to approach the link building game based on what kind of site you've built.

In your case, establishing some domain-wide strength in terms of backlink metrics would be the first order of business. That doesn't mean go straight for HARO and Digital PR. It could mean starting with all your social media profiles, then some niche edits, then some guest posts, then bribing some editors from big sites. Then there's always the question of tiered link building, too. It never ends. I always say to spread your wings far and wide at first (take whatever link you can get to get tied into the "net", especially within your niche), and then start aiming for either/both increased relevancy and increased power.

One final word of advice would be that nothing will move the needle like a contextual, relevantly anchored link. That means a link within a relevant article with a relevant anchor text. The article doesn't have to be perfectly micro-niche'd relevant but within the same vertical/niche is preferable and the anchor text shouldn't be overly-optimized. And the links don't need to come from sites in the same niche, either. Article-level relevancy is good enough. Nobody has the luxury of being that picky and being that picky means you run out of links to obtain, too.

I really like the idea of 2 or so links per page due to the size of the site. I also like the idea of running just a few digital pr campaigns that attract powerful links to a few pages that are relevant to the main topics/categories the site covers. Of course, the answer is simple: do both…. But I still wonder which is better? Interesting to think about.