Online Marketing Today

“Hey Duncan, I have a question regarding Link building. 3 months ago, I started buying blogroll links on high quality blogs (PR4+) through forums like DigitalPoint, V7N, WebmasterWorld, etc. This technique has been EXTREMELY useful as I gained 1st page on Google in less than 3 months for major keywords. However, I want to know if this is good for the long-term because I am noticing now that it doesn’t seem to be that effective anymore.

I have lost a few positions and a few keywords have dropped to 2nd page despite heavy link building. What do you think about buying blogroll links on high quality blogs? Is it good only short-term or good all the time? Can Google penalize me for obtaining too many blogroll links? Will it see a pattern there and suspect link buying?” ~ A. R.

Hi A. R,

I think buying (or “acquiring” by any other means) blogroll links on high quality blogs is certainly a valid link building method.

You’ve seen yourself how effective it can be.

Is it only good for the short-term results?

No, so long as it’s not your exclusive focus, and I’ll talk more about the soon.

Can Google penalize you for obtaining too many blogrolls links?

Extremely unlikely – meaning I’ll eat my hat if that has or does happen (just keep it under your belt that you’re actually buying text links). Only you and the webmaster know that you’re paying for those links so how would any search engine know otherwise (let alone anyone else)?

There are more reasons that I can list that a blogger might decide to include your website in their blogrolls (other than because you’ve flicked them some coin).

If they’re starting to loose their impact here’s the first possibility you need to eliminate.

You want to know for a fact that your search engine ranking fluctuations are not simply occurring due to the normal fluctuation in search engine indexing updates.

Generally a website might appear in position number #7 for a specific keyword term one week, then fall back to page 2 the next week, be back in #7 the following on so forth. Often this is just the normal “Google flux” – a process that will happen less frequently (and less dramatically) as your incoming links mature and gain more weight from their “age”.

If you know this is not the case, then it could be any number of other reasons that are pretty hard for me to identify specifically – without having witnessed the “whole picture” over time.

It could be that the blogroll links themselves are loosing “weight”. What I mean by that is the pages on the websites you’re advertising on, have lost some of their ability to pass you the same amount of “relevancy” that they were when you had better search engine rankings.

On the other hand assuming the “status quo” has remained the same, it could be that your competitors are simply building more incoming links, and/or have more developed and more “well rounded” incoming linking campaigns.

In either case, it comes down to diversifying your focus.

What you suggest is happening indicates to me that you might need to branch out a bit.

You want to also focus on building incoming links (targeted with anchor text and relevancy for the keyword terms you’re looking to rank well for) from numerous other sources as well.

Using techniques like directory submissions, article marketing, blog commenting, social bookmarking, social networking, purchasing non-blogroll links… list goes on.

Take this hypothetical example.

You manage to obtain a top 5 ranking for a specific term by securing 5 very highly relevant and powerful incoming links from authority websites.

If just one of those links is lost, chances are you might drop out of the top 5 results, down into the top 10, top 20, top 30 or even lower depending on how important that one link was. You’re basically always relying on just those 5 links to hold the position.

On the other hand if you have several hundred incoming links from niche directories (and other sources) and manage a top 5 ranking for the term in question – you could probably loose 20 or more of those links at once and see little to no impact on your actual search engine ranking.

This is why I like to lay down a solid linking foundation from many sources.

If one source (or a sample of that one source) has changed in positive ranking improvements, then it’s not such a big deal.

Given your doing blogroll link advertising, it suggests to me that you’re somewhere in between the above two extremes and more likely than not you just need to let those links “age” a bit. You said yourself you’ve only being using this technique for 3 months so that seems to be the most likely problem to me.

However I still highly recommend that you continue to diversify rather than “waiting to see”.

If you want to speed up and really secure your search engine rankings (and reduce the Google Flux differential) considering “acquiring” a text link or two from as many of the top websites that already rank for the term in question.

(4 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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