

The Really Easy SEO Link Building Strategy For Startups - mattseh
http://www.layeredthoughts.com/seo-link-building/the-really-easy-seo-link-building-strategy-for-startups

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InfinityX0
This is not a good strategy - generally, these links won't benefit you for SEO
purposes. If you want an "SEO for startups", I heavily recommend this guide:
<http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/> which comes from one of
the top agencies in the field.

In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which _then_ can
get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do
not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space -
however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these
keywords in Google's Blog Search.

If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical,
right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect -
the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves
organically over time.

~~~
dchuk
I've ranked quite a few sites with variations of this exact technique, so I'm
not quite sure where the idea that these links won't benefit you is coming
from. I absolutely respect your opinion though and do agree that reaching out
to influencers and engaging them is a big big deal.

This strategy is simply a component of an overall outreach and SEO campaign
for any product. It very much needs to be mixed in with a variety of other
techniques for full success.

The reason I shared it was because once you spend the hour or so to set
everything up, you can sit down each day with your cup of coffee and spend 15
minutes building some links while interacting with the community in a very
easy way. Mix that in with more specific outreach and you have a good strategy
for growing exposure to your product.

~~~
InfinityX0
It's very likely what you did made ranking a correlative rather than causative
effect. Most of these comments were probably no-follow, and even if not,
devalued b/c below the fold - reasoning: the Reasonable Surfer patent
-[http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-
surfer...](http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer-how-
the-value-of-a-link-may-differ-based-upon-link-and-document-features-and-user-
data/)

I agree that this can be helpful, but the way it is framed in this article is
dangerous, because it can easily be misinterpreted.

~~~
kaedus29
While I don't condone the methods posted in this case study, I think that it
goes to show that no-follow links do have value, that your on-page doesn't
have to be perfect, and that the types of links that you claim don't work
actually do.

<http://serpfu.com/case-study-insurance/>

Once again, let me clarify that I don't condone the type of link building
here, but I don't think that you can argue that it doesn't work.

~~~
WillyF
Their "Backlink Bomb" provides "50,000+ backlinks from 10,000+ websites
powered by 120+ content management systems and not a SINGLE blog comment."

Sounds like blog comments aren't the way to go.

They also advertise this service as "Penguin safe." Maybe if you launch your
site between algorithm updates. You can definitely rank with these kind of
links, but you will get torched eventually. This is not a long or even medium
term strategy for what most of consider a startup.

------
WillyF
I'm not a fan of blog commenting for link building. Most blogs use nofollow on
the comments links, and that makes them near worthless (except on very high
traffic blogs where comment links send meaningful traffic). Moreover, many
blog comments are spam. You don't want to be sending the same signal as
spammers to Google.

What I do like about this strategy isn't even mentioned about the author. Blog
commenting can be a great way to start a conversation and a relationship with
a blogger. Once you've done that, then you can get some real links instead of
the crappy links in the blog comments section.

~~~
dchuk
I briefly mentioned your main point, regarding starting a conversation and
really getting involved in the community. This strategy is absolutely focused
on quality over quantity, I outlined it the way I did just so people could
follow it and gather a lot of possible sources of blogs to try and comment on.

In regards to the nofollow topic, I left a comment on the post explaining my
thoughts about that: [http://www.layeredthoughts.com/seo-link-building/the-
really-...](http://www.layeredthoughts.com/seo-link-building/the-really-easy-
seo-link-building-strategy-for-startups#comment-3434)

~~~
WillyF
I really like the way that you outlined the technical tips for implementing
the strategy, but I think that you shouldn't have made the post about getting
blog comment links.

30 minutes a day is a waste of time for blog links. Even if you get 10 a day
from dofollow blogs, the ROI is very low. However, if you take the same
strategy and get 1 blogger to blog about you every month, then there's a much
better ROI (as long as it's a decent quality blog).

The bigger issue here is with Google's Penguin update. Building low quality
links can now hurt you. Blog comments are a perfect example of low quality
links. There are all kinds of automated software packages for spamming blog
comments with links. If you do the same thing manually and in a high quality
way, you're risking a chance that your link building footprint will look
similar to a spammer's-- at least in Google's eyes.

As someone whose site is just climbing out of Panda (thankfully not Penguin),
I would probably choose not to link to my site if I was going to start
commenting on blogs at a large scale. I'd just focus on the relationships.

~~~
dchuk
I've been doing active (and oftentimes aggressive) link building for a few
years now, I guarantee that this method is safe. I do agree that a judgement
call needs to be made when choosing to comment on a blog post to make sure
that the quality of the post and site is up to standards.

Honestly, if someone asked me how to get a lot of links to a site, I would not
tell this method. If you want a lot of low quality links, you need to be
automating heavily. This strategy isn't meant for low quality links.

Just because there's software out there to automate blog commenting doesn't
make all blog comments bad. A good comment on a good popular post is gold.

~~~
WillyF
If you're building a business in the SEO industry, you probably shouldn't
throw around guarantees like that.

I think that this method is probably safe, especially if you the target site
has a decent number of higher quality links. Still, it does come with some
risk.

It wasn't long ago that Matt Cutts told us that duplicate content was ok and
that Google would find the canonical version on its own. Then Panda came
along. It was a widely held perception that incoming links couldn't hurt you.
Now we know that they can.

Google's algorithm is a moving target, and it only seems that they will get
more aggressive on discounting or even penalizing links that aren't given
editorially.

------
stfu
In my opinion this works only for products and services with an existing
demand, i.e. in the worst case a copycat product, in the best case a product
solving a very explicit problem. If your product/service is relatively
innovative (i.e. for example 4square in their beginnings) and there is no
explicit demand existing, these strategies won't help that much at all.

~~~
kaedus29
Even if you have an innovative product with no existing demand, there are
still blogs/communities that this strategy will work with. What is the more
generic vertical that your product is in? In 4square's case, they could hit
anything mobile based, social network based, or people doing geo-based mobile
development.

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bhartzer
If SEO and link building/link earning was this easy, then everyone would be
doing it and there would be no need for SEO firms. There would be no SEO
industry. Companies wouldn't be hiring SEOs to do link earning for them.

Go ahead and try all of these methods described in that post and then see how
well it works. Shortly thereafter you'll be contacting a good SEO firm to
clean up the mess, remove bad links, and start creating content for you that
earns you links.

~~~
1123581321
Former SEO consultant here. This is a fine, low-effort low-reward way to build
links. The reason it works is it is not actually that easy to write the kinds
of comments that will make it on a worthwhile blog in the targeted industry.
The person who does this is doing better than average unless the goal is a
difficult one. The attention and traffic from comments actually part of
conversations is real.

Even if the keywords targeted are very difficult, this is a fine activity for
idle moments or for a marketing specialist/writer to do.

------
kaedus29
I think this post focuses a little too much on the SEO aspect of this blog
commenting strategy. While it is a good strategy for SEO, and it does work, I
think the real benefit comes from becoming part of the community that is
focused on whatever your startup is involved in. That exposure helps create
customers/evangelists that will then help promote your product/service to
others within their sphere of influence. The SEO is just an added benefit.

------
ovi256
Wow, it's pretty amazing, but you've described one of the use cases for my
upcoming webapp: www.alertoid.com

Technically, Alertoid would be an RSS reader that goes beyond the Read/Unread
tagging, with the Commented/Comment Approved stages you described.
Furthermore, it can be used for inbound marketing: as you monitor the keywords
that interest you, you see the blog posts that mention them and can use those
as starting points or ideas for your own blog posts, because if bloggers love
comments, they love answer posts or reposts even more, and it's another great
way to start a conversation and get backlinks.

/shameless plug

Hope my pitch was clear enough, don't hesitate if you have any feedback. If
you're interested by Alertoid, email's in my profile, would love to hear from
you, even more if you're a marketing/PR professional.

Feedback on SERPIQ: I just signed up, on the confirmation page
(<http://serpiq.com/users/sign_up>) I see "You have signed up successfully.
However, your need to confirm your email address." but a signup form is still
there, empty, as if nothing worked. That doesn't seem right!

~~~
dchuk
oh man I've wanted to build such a webapp for so long. That's awesome,
congrats!

I'd love to hear how you're tackling the problem of tracking the actual
comments that were left without resorting to a browser plugin in order to pull
the details from the actual form on submit. Or maybe I said too much :)

~~~
dchuk
I can't seem to be able to reply to you directly, so email me at
admin@serpiq.com and I'll gladly connect with you

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itsprofitbaron
Firstly I think I should point out that, I have previously used manual blog
commenting to rank for highly competitive keywords.

The strategy _was_ extremely effective however, it isn’t any more and doing
SEO this way isn’t a strategy your startup should adopt.

Google Penguin and to some extent Panda, were brought in to stop this kind of
SEO and some of the changes they made have been very effective in stopping the
effectiveness of this type of Grey-Hat SEO.

Similarly, your startup is probably on a new domain & with the changes to
Google Penguin/Panda to ensure you aren’t sandboxed the first 500-1000 links
you acquire are extremely important. By doing Grey Hat SEO – blog commenting,
directories, article sites you are putting yourself at risk of getting your
site placed in the sandbox.

After that you’re probably going to get a manual review and that is something
you don’t want & if you don’t think Google Penguin is effective, then don’t
but Google are going to keep making Penguin smarter & more aggressive about
punishing sites that have built non-authentically earned links.

Additionally if you’re an E-Commerce startup a completely different SEO
approach is needed & blog commenting is definitely not the way to do it (as is
the case for any startup).

~~~
dchuk
I think that's quite the slippery slope you just played out there. Per the
logic you presented, all blog commenters who put in a url in their comment are
Grey Hat SEOs? Come on now, that's a massive stretch.

Penguin and Panda were introduced to combat blatant spamming practices, both
with link building and content based spamming. Manually commenting with
thoughtful replies is just being a good community member, getting a link back
to your root domain is a nice little token for your efforts, and I would love
to see a single case study of someone employing the strategy outlined in my
post (at the volume I suggest) getting slapped by Google.

~~~
itsprofitbaron
As I said in my comment, I have previously used manual blog commenting
techniques to rank for highly competitive terms. Regardless of it being manual
or not, it is a Grey Hat SEO technique. The way the spammers do it via
spinning comments & blasting them out is Black Hat SEO along with the likes of
XSS injections, Xrumer etc.

My comment was mainly referring to the first 500-1000 links of a website &
avoiding being sandboxed etc due to significant changes with Penguin & Panda.

If a startup wants to link back then they should _only_ do it if they aren't
putting the keyword they want to rank for as their "name" which receives the
link. However, this is still a Grey Hat SEO technique & whilst the risk
reduces after the first 500-1000 links, it is much greater in those first core
set of links & can easily see a website sandboxed.

~~~
dchuk
Well in my post, I never advocated using anything other than your actual name,
site, etc. In the comments, I explicitly recommend creating real profiles and
using your real name. So I agree with you there.

As for the 500-1000 links thing, I assume you got that number from one of
Rand's posts (<http://moz.com/rand/the-first-500-links/>).

First, those numbers and guidelines are entirely anecdotal. Yes, there is a
"honeymoon" phase with new domains, but that's entirely unpredictable and
there's no hard limit of links before you're in the clear (or in the danger
zone for that matter).

Second, if a comment is put into moderation, and then must be approved by the
blog owner, how is that anything but authentically earned? The blogger can
approve or disprove your comment at her discretion, you're not exploiting any
systems or anything.

I simply can't ever agree with someone who says that leaving a blog comment
with your url in the website field makes you a Gray Hat SEO. If that were the
case, there would be tens of thousands of mommy bloggers yelling at Google for
banning their sites.

It's natural engagement with the community, with backlinks as a nice little
perk.

~~~
itsprofitbaron
I didn't get that from Rand's blog although I have read it. I got my figures
through testing with some junk domains (I experimented with around 25 domains
- .net, .com and .infos) to see of they get sandboxed when pushing X amount of
links to it or by doing certain things and those were the results which I
found albeit it's a small sample size.

Regarding the second part, it's very easy to beat the approval system on many
blogging softwares - Wordpress for instance is extremely easy to do.

And regardless if you agree with me or not, blog commenting is a Grey Hat SEO
technique. I also said that the effects for doing a few links is minimal in
terms of negatively affecting a sites SEO rankings which I agree with you on,
I am just disagreeing with you over the fact that this should be a startup's
SEO strategy

~~~
dchuk
Well, I tweeted the question to @MattCutts let's see what he says :)

<https://twitter.com/iamdchuk/status/240989741246455810>

Regardless of our disagreement here, thanks for the discussion!

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jfoucher
Very cool, but instead of tracking your keywords only in google, why not use
<http://mention.net> or some other similar tool?

~~~
dchuk
Luckily I have a very simple answer for you: I have never seen that app
before. It looks very sexy though and I will be giving it a shot. Thanks for
the recommendation!

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benologist
There's an even easier strategy and it can be very successful: use your
company blog to write generic startup fluff for HN even if it's irrelevant to
your company and users or customers, which it will be almost 100% of the time.

Edit: I'm not referring to the author's blog.

~~~
halcyondaze
I think that the author's blog is separate from his company blog. Looks like
he writes not only about SEO (which is what his product is built around), but
startups, code, and general business.

~~~
benologist
I should have been more clear, I'm not referring to _this_ blog - I'm
referring to content _like_ this on a company that sells cats' blog.

------
radagaisus
GitHub Wikis have tons of lists of 'Apps using this library'. That, right
there, is lots of link juice and promotion if you use a lot of open source
libraries.

~~~
ovi256
Not an SEO expert in any way, but I read that Google discounts links after the
first n on the page. The n threshold varies with whom you listen to. Those
pages look too much like link farms, so it's understandable why they would do
that.

