When starting in SEO, link building is a complete black box and something quite tricky to crack. Even if you’re trained really well, the chances are that you still won’t actually understand anything of actual value in link building. Even seasoned link building experts can’t answer the question everyone has on their minds. Will buying this link actually have an effect on my positions on specific keywords?
As an SEO noob you would expect this to be the foundation of SEO and something which any seasoned expert can answer. The truth is that if someone tells you that getting a domain to link back to a page or article will have a dramatic effect on a keyword you are trying to rank on, they are most likely lie’ ing.
You see, SEO is a complex beast and search engines don’t really like to help us out. They’re more preoccupied with getting PPC money than educating the community on what will actually help them get better results on Google. This absence of information has brought about the birth of an entire software ecosystem. An ecosystem that attempts to index the internet and re-create some of that Google magic we all chase. Assigning power scores and ratings to websites. All interpreting Google’s logic in their unique way. Or you’d think that until you realize that they are all doing roughly the same thing, but just using different terminology.
These proprietary algorithms give SEO’s an indication that powerful and relevant domains could have a more drastic effect on your rankings if you get a backlink from them. But then think about it. You are working hard to get a link from a domain, which has been assigned a score, by-product that realistically has no way of knowing whether that score is relevant to the way Google works or not.
So my answer to this question is … YES. Link building does work when done right. That said whether you’re a newbie to SEO or moving from on-page to off-page SEO, there’s no easy journey to get there, and realistically no one is actually going to help you. Especially online. People are too preoccupied trying to sell you a subscription to a product which won’t really help you rank.
You need to get out there, come up with your own strategies, start collecting data, and looking for correlations between link building, anchor text, link velocity, domain signals and on-page SEO until you come up with the magic formula yourself. Unfortunately, this is not a short journey young Padawan, but once you crack it, you’ll….
If you were expecting a positive affirmation there into how well you’d do after you crack the code. I’m sorry to disappoint, I’m not a liar and its best you know the truth which others will hide. This is a brutal industry you are entering, and from one day to the next, the tricks you’ve spent years perfecting could get you penalized and years of collective knowledge reduced to taking huge L’s across the board.
Thats why I started Gainchanger. As Co-founder, I got frustrated with this lack of clarity around this topic, and my obsessive nature took over. The result is the closest answer anyone new to SEO asks. Its something we keep to ourselves and particular clients only. Trust is crucial, and the queue is long, but who knows, maybe one day you’ll get the chance to meet us and get the answer you’ve been chasing all these years.
