Forum Moderators: martinibuster
How can one outsource linkbuilding? Are there cheap firms in India that work reliable? What's your experience and what are the fares to expect? Do you pay per link or how does it work?
Thanks a lot! W.
if that is the type of image you want to present, then knock yourself out.
if you are looking to approach site owners and webmasters in a more sophisticated, professional manner, i would recommend keeping it in-house.
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:39 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2006]
[edit reason] Cleanup in Aisle 12. ;) [/edit]
Guess I will have to send my e-mails myself ;). But thanks for your info, guys!
I think of each link request as a mini partnership request. I would rather link from one authority in my field like an .edu then 10 content stuffing adsence based sites reguardless of PR smeeR.
Look for quality not quantity.
Just because it requires a bit of knowledge on the website, why shouldn't a firm build quality links on a commercial basis? Advertising agencies, for example.
What is the cheapest option?
There is a whole range of service providers that provide link building services. If you search for SEO related terms at the major search engines, you'll find a lot of sites that offer such services. Many of the biggest SEO firms advertise link building services, and the paid ads on the search engines are stuffed with sites that offer such services.
These are generally going to be high-end links. So, if you want to outsource your linking, you have a vast array of choices. There are tens of thousands or more sites out there that are grouped into hundreds or thousands of networks from which you can rent links or buy advertising space. Many of these still count towards link popularity but some don't (like Google adwords links). The prices can run from a low click rate, to tens of thousands of dollars per month, depending on your keyterm, the traffic on the network, and the technology of the advertising network.
More traditional link building services would be those that try to provide more permanent links by trading links rather than trading dollars for temporary links. Much of that work is probably done overseas, and the good companies are probably not looking for a lot of work as they are likely to have a repeat clientele.
why shouldn't a firm build quality links on a commercial basis?There are lots of them. It's its own industry.
It was great for new sites!
For sites having a large number of links I had to check several links I had been charged for: several links were added before that work.....
Another dangerous thing is that the company uses a semi-automatic programm: it means that they sent link request to several of my competitors...
My suggestion: use Indian company for only new sites and instruct the company.
The best approach is to filter link requests befiore sending..
Just a thought, but have you considered hiring an actual person to do this part-time? You could take the time to inform them about your site, what you're looking for, etc, have them run their first few link requests by you before sending, and so forth? In thinking about it, I think you (generic "you") could probably train someone in this if they were just accustomed to surfing and searching the net a bit. Just give them steps like:
1. Search Google (DMOZ, etc) for "blue widgets"
2. With Google toolbar installed, click on link, view Pagerank. (Insert other criteria they should use for selecting link partners.)
3. If Pagerank is higher than X, go through the site and see if they have a linking policy. If our site has something that theirs is missing, or that would add to theirs, find the contact link.
4. Compose email to contact explaining *specifically* what about their site made you think they might link to you, and request a link. (Perhaps provide your trainee with a couple of template emails.)
5. ...?
6. Profit!
(Sorry, couldn't resist the last two. :-))
But seriously, folks -- I think I'd personally prefer to do that if I couldn't do it myself. Might be more expensive, but you'd be less likely to get angry messages from webmasters saying, "My site has nothing to do with BLUE WIDGETS so STOP sending me requests to link to your stupid blue widgets site!"
I think I'm prejudiced against outsourcing link development simply because every single link request I get is completely and utterly inappropriate and obviously the result of some automated process. :-)
But really, I think a reasonably clever person could follow the above instructions after a bit of initial oversight, and end up getting better quality link partners than an outsourced company.
But maybe that's just wishful thinking ... :-)
JK
3 to 5 Dollars strikes me as quite a lot,
I have some stats on using Arelis that should enlighten the actual dollar value of using that applicatiion to build links.
Using an Arelis DB, built either in Keyword or Competitor mode, a prepared DB, a linker can review 180 sites per day. Two-thirds of these will be deleted as inappropriate (for a myriad of reasons) for linking. Thus, only 60 per day will be worth contacting. Of these 60 sites worth contacting two-thirds will be contacted via online form and one-third via email. The linkback rate will vary, of course, but a general average of success is about 12% to 14%.
Thus, a linker working from a prepared DB will get about 40 links per week.
Because building DBs of potential sites is also labor intensive, you need one full-time linker building DBs and one fulltime linker doing further review and contacting sites. Thus, it takes 2 full time linkers to hit 40 links per week. That's about 20 links per linker per week. Or 4 links per day.
If you are paying your linkers $10 per hour, then that's $20 per link in straight salary cost. Then, of course, there's the overhead of training them and equipping them.
Keep in mind that this would be a pretty liberally contacting campaign, contacting sites that link to your competitors and/or have any kind of similar content, and the link may not come from the page with the specific content that is related to your site and/or the link may come from the only page on their site that has anything to do with your content. Campaigns with more stringent linking parameters, like only directly related sites, can suffer much worse actual link output.
Thus, if you are paying $10 per hour, your costs can quickly go to $80 per link or more. Granted, these are are likely to be the closest thing to permanent links that you can get. Sure they have a degradation factor, similar to a radioactive half-life, but they will likely endure for some time.
Since rented links start at about that point, in the $50 and up area (per month), paying $80 per link is not bad for a close-to-permanent link (on average they last a couple of years). That's only $3.33 per month or so, dividing $80/link by 24 months of life.
So, $3 to $5 per link, is certainly not a lot. That's probably the absolute minimum range that would be charged by a 3rd world SEO link provider.
I would love to find a real serious link building company.
A few years back my first partnering experience was with some Indian firms who have tried to charge be $1500 a month for 2 developers. The project was only supposed to take 1 month. That was a joke. My personal opinion is that the person I was dealing with was a freelancer and not a firm. The amount of work completed in one month was very little and it all came in the last week of the month. After 6 weeks he started whining that he needed more money and blaming me for changing the project. The truth is I never changed the scope I just had to explain the project to him in more detail because he was skipping over and leaving many things out, in other words half assed.
In my experience with firms in India (all firms) you should expect to be very detailed in your instruction, expect half assed service unless you demand better, and expect someone at the firm to "get sick" at least 2 - 3 times during your project. You truly are hiring the equivalent of what you could expect if you hired a college intern.
Once you get past all of that you need to decide if the extra time you spend babying your overseas partner is worth the money you'll save in labor costs.
Whether it's helpful for ranking is still very difficult to say. It's easy to follow the band wagon of weekly seo newsletters in the inbox saying its dead.
The stack of top ten sites that havent flinched in three sectors im in tells me different.
Either way, Swebbie is certainly right. From almost any standpoint, trading content is better for all.
I recently used a well known website that allows all types of web service providers to bid for projects.
To do a trial run, I placed a project for getting a small number of quality, inbound links and provided explicit instructions about what was to be delivered.
There are hundreds of service providers listed on this site, many of them are link gatherers.... but none seem to be interested when the deliverables makes it clear that only on-topic, quality links will be acceptable. They were able to nominate their own price for consideration, but even then there were no takers.
Either I was looking for services in the wrong place or the idea of having to deliver quality links was a turn off.
Reciprocal links is good to outsource to other countries like India or Pakistan.
However, you still have to get quality links which you should do yourself or get someone in the US who knows about SEO to handle this. You need to find ways to get quality related sites to link to you, so you need to find someone that can do this.
