

Ask HN: Anyone ever use Fiverr for SEO?  - kevbam

Hi, I am considering using some of the fiverr jobs on offer to give my website a bit of a traffic boost. Anyone have any experience doing this? Any particular jobs better than others?
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PaulHoule
There's a saying that the farmer's footsteps are the best fertilizer.

I've never seen a third party linkbuilding service, based on humans, that was
worth 1/3 of what they charged for it.

I'm not against semi-automated services that can get you into 200 directories
for $5; even the best sites have large numbers of trashy links.

If you want a real traffic boost you need to build top quality links. This is
tough.

Let's say you've got 1000 visitors a day. A site like that can make enough
money on AdSense that you get a monthly check, enough to pay the server bills,
but it won't cover your car payment. You want more.

According to quantcast, that puts you at roughly the top 100,000 of all web
sites. If we guess there are 20 million web sites, that puts you in an elite
club of the top 0.5%

Let's imagine that Google is still using PageRank. If you look at the theory
behind it, PageRank simulates a web surfer making a random walk. So the
PageRank of a site ought to be proportional to the traffic it gets.

If you're at the 1-in-100,000 level, you get very little PageRank from sites
that are at the 1-in-1,000,000 level. To really move up, you need to get links
from sites that are bigger than you -- but these are just 0.5% of the sites!
It doesnt hurt to get links from small-fry sites, but the bulk of your effort
needs to go to recruiting powerful allies.

For every site I've successfully SEOed, I've

(1) written at least one really good sales letter to persuade people to make
links to this site

(2) worked harder at promoting the site than I worked at making it (and I'm a
VERY technical guy)

(3) had keywords in the domain name

At this point I wouldn't even start a project without (3). Some sites suck so
much that you just can't do (1). Most people won't work hard enough to do (2)
and that's why it's possible to win.

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kevbam
Paul,thank you very much for getting back to me with the above.Some very good
advice which has got the creative juices flowing.

I thought google had down graded the importance of keywords in the domain
name? This was meant to combat people registering exact match domains to rank
for specific terms.

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PaulHoule
All I can say is do a few queries and look at the SERPS and come to your own
conclusion about the keywords.

Bing and Google will nuke a content-free site with good keywords, but if you
make a good site with clear quality indicators the keywords definitely give
you a tail wind.

~~~
kevbam
Okay that makes sense,thanks Paul.

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bvlaar
Just a quick insight. I work with someone who runs a small online business
selling health products over the web. He swears by ffiver for SEO in addition
to more well known techniques. One way he found to legitimize his business was
to buy Facebook likes, Youtube subscribers, and Twitter followers. I consider
this modern/social SEO. Having a social following as a business can legitimize
it in other people's eyes. His business has about a 100:1 follower to
following ratio, and ever since he purchases followers, hes had a large
increase in real followers. This follows the herd mentality. People are more
likely to follow your business and interact, if there is proof others have
done so. Hope this helps

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kevbam
Thanks. Buying facebook and twitter followers is something I considered as
well. Will keep this in mind!

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helen842000
Don't do it. It wrecks your site. Those link building packages just cause your
site to become awash with spam. To the point I've had to turn comments off on
the one affiliate site I tried it with.

700+ junk comments every DAY and no discernable difference in search engine
results. Lingering somewhere on page 3. Plenty of traffic, several thousand
per day, none of it genuine users though.

I built another site that I've carefully optimised myself, I'm constantly in
the top 5 results for my phrase on Google, 300+ uniques per day which has lead
to a genuine community and just 1 spam comment in 6 months which was actually
an advert for a link building service!

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kevbam
Thanks for the warning. I was considering only taking jobs which offered less
than 100 links and/or manually link building. Do you think this makes a
difference or will they just tell you they did it manually?

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helen842000
I think they'll still add you to places/directories you don't want your site
to be in.

Building good links yourself can take time but it's really worth it. Aim for 5
a day for a few weeks.

You care the most about the success of your site. No SEO service will take the
time & trouble to do it properly.

If you'd like help specific to your website, my email is in my profile.

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jvvlimme
Traffic is worth sh*t.

You need targeted traffic which converst (buys your product, clicks the ads,
whatever your conversion is) and that's something these guys can never give
you.

If you want to spend money on traffic, you're better off learning how to do
PPC advertising. At least that way you get traffic from people who have some
interest in your site. You can easily find a voucher from Google for 50$ free
PPC advertising to get you started.

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AlphaDex
You can't really generalize, there are some good gigs, some bad gigs. Most of
the "most popular" work either temporarily or superficially. I would not
recommend using fiverr unless you have a solid understanding of SEO (you can
HARM your rankings if you are not careful). Also, the good gigs I mentioned
are good, not great. In other words, they are worth $5, but probably not $6.
Good luck!

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fiverjob
I don't use fiverr, but now i use some of the services on fiverjobsite.com
instead. They are fantastic!!

Give them a try.

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duiker101
I do not really see how you would do this... care to explain a bit further?

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kevbam
Thank you for getting back to me. Fiverr offers a lot of link building jobs
that promise a massive boost in traffic for your site. See links below for
examples: <http://bit.ly/O0hSTe> <http://bit.ly/O0i3Ot>

I realize a lot of these are just going to automatically build links on low PR
sites. However, I was wondering if there are any legit SEO services on fiverr?
Has anyone ever seen a positive result from any of the link building services
on offer on fiverr?

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benhebert
I bought a few packages from fiverr for a site that I built 3-4 years ago with
a minor benefit.

My recommendation would be to build your own 2.0 sites like squidoo / hubpages
link back to your main site and then blast those squidoo / hubpages with
fiverr.

