
Ask HN: How do SEO consultants get backlinks? - notastartup
I hear many different claiming to know SEO and offering SEO services, but I&#x27;m curious as to know if they know how to get first page rankings for any website they take on, why not do it themselves and get rich off it?<p>How do they get backlinks? Do they spam it? Obviously not because that would get you banned or would it?<p>What role does web scraping play in SEO? I hear people scraping links or something like that to find out where they are coming from what does this mean?<p>Does anyone have a clear step by step to what they do as a SEO consultant? Say I want to rank number one for &quot;painting service&quot; what would it take to get there? create a bunch of wordpress blogs and link it to each other? Pull a rap genius? What things can be automated?
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patio11
Most people who claim to be able to rank for arbitrary keywords are lying.

Of the universe of people selling SEO services who also do link-building (n.b.
not co-extensive), common ways to acquire links include:

1) Content marketing 2) Guest posting 3) Buying links 4) Private I'll-scratch-
your-back-if-you-scratch-mine arrangements 5) Comment spamming 6) Controlling
authoritative sites which can link to their own/client sites 7) Classical
linkbuilding -- sending out lots of emails to people with related or unrelated
websites asking them to link to your site

These include several tactics which Google publicly discourages.

You can automate or semi-automate portions of all of these strategies.

It is really, really important that you understand the following sentence:
Google will eventually describe as black hat any SEO strategy which both a)
works and b) can be scaled algorithmically. Content marketing is, on current
guidance from Big Daddy G, pretty lily white, but if you figure out a way how
to do it such that you rank for [student credit cards] and [canon ink
cartridge], your tactic will eventually receive adversarial attention from
Google.

If you had a client which was a painting service, you'd probably say "Look,
you don't really want to rank for [painting service] worldwide. You want to
rank for [painting service] in Worchestershire, which is the only region you
actually service. We're going to do some table stakes onpage SEO to make that
happen, make sure your Google Local data is accurate, and then try to solicit
a few dozen links to your page via methods you don't care about. This will
make you enough money to justify the $X00 I'm going to ask from you monthly
for this."

The answer is slightly more interesting if you're in more competitive markets
than painting services in Worchestershire.

------
RealGeek
Most of the SEO consultants are selling nicely packaged snake oil. Many get
links by blog comments, forum and directory spamming. But, there are few good
consultants as well and they use several creative and hard ways to build
links.

Following are some of the effective white hat link building practices:

1) Competition research: Find out your competitors backlinks using a tool like
[http://www.ranksignals.com](http://www.ranksignals.com), and try to get
backlinks from their sources. This is easy and highly effective. (Disclosure:
[http://www.ranksignals.com](http://www.ranksignals.com) is my product)

2) Content Marketing / Guest Posting: Ask relevant bloggers in your niche if
you could write a blog post on their website. They usually credit you with a
link.

3) Infographics: Create an awesome infographics and spread it around the web.
Don't forgot to provide an embed code with a backlink on your website. If you
get enough bloggers sharing it on their blog, you will have lots of relevant
links.

4) Sponsor contests and giveaway: Reach out to high quality blogs and offer
them to sponsor contest with a giveaway of your product. This is almost free
to you if you have a digital product / service.

5) Create an awesome design and submit it to all the design showcase websites
like Dribble, Behance, Deviantart and hundreds of other web design galleries.
These are hundreds of easy links right of the bat. Moreover, popular web
design blogs (like SmashingMagazine) may pick your website and link to you;
these blogs usually have very high PR.

~~~
matryoshka
These are brilliant suggestions. All of them are worth investing your time in
as they will pay back in high quality backlinks - the ones that do make a
difference in Google rankings.

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mhoad
So I have done SEO at enterprise level for many years now (i.e. not the snake
oil that is commonly labeled as SEO).

My first piece of advice would be to not under any circumstances go with what
you are suggesting by creating your own artificial link network. Not only will
it not work but it will more than likely hurt you significantly. In fact I
would go as far to say the same thing about all link networks, they are a
ticking time bomb that will be waiting to blow up in your face.

My personal suggestion for someone who is fairly new to this is to take a look
at [http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-
strategies](http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies) for what I
consider to be the most comprehensive list of link building strategies on the
net. You can also get a feel for what the value of each of these strategies
would be there as well (for your own sake, avoid the low quality ones, they
too are a ticking time bomb).

Also for what it's worth trying to include your keywords in the anchor text of
these links is waaay less important now (thankfully) than it used to be. A
general rule of thumb I follow is if it looks out of place then don't do it.
7/10 I am perfectly happy to just have my brand name or URL as the anchor text
to my website.

------
stevekemp
I run [http://blogspam.net/](http://blogspam.net/) which is a service which
filters blog-comments in real-time for a "spam vs. ok?" result.

The submission of comments is relentless, and automated. I can see the very
same comment submitted to 100+ blogs from 50+ IP addresses, in almost real-
time.

I've no idea what software is being used, to spider blogs, identify
submission-forms, and mass-submit, but I see evidence of it daily.

This comment-spam stuff is supposed to be bad, supposed to be marked down by
Google, and others, but given the sheer amount of comment-spam out there I can
only imagine it works pretty well.

~~~
mhoad
The tool you are thinking of is called XRumer
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer))
and it is the bane of the internet and the industry. Steer clear of it is my
only recommendation.

~~~
stevekemp
Given my preference for blocking/detecting its submissions I'm not likely to
have any use for it - but regardless thanks for the pointer.

