Overzealous link building

[wheel]

I had a call from a fellow yesterday to pay for a directory listing in my niche directory. He's been link building for 10 days.

I did a Yahoo backlink check, and it's showing variously 6K to 30k backlinks. Pretty much all directory and similiar. All in that 10 days. Holy cow. He said he's got some rankings in Yahoo but is nowhere in Google.

I think the guy's screwed for Google, but have no experience with this stuff. My recommendation to him was to wait 3-6 months and see where he's at, at which point he should start looking for quality links.

What would you have suggested?

[jdancing]

It depends on the site, topic and keywords he is ranking for. Massive link campaigns can work wonders in google, I have seen it and still see it. They also can collapse like a house of cards if every link is not natural.

When the collapse happens rinse and repeat. This is not a cheap strategy, and if/when it does work money to cover link expenses needs to be recovered quickly.

Anyhow, I think your suggestion is good. He needs to wait and see for signs of movement in google before spending more money.

[CainIV]

Unless he is penalized, I don't see a reason to wait on building quality links. In fact, often quality links re-align websites that currently have issues (if there are in fact ranking issues)

Using the Yahoo tool will return total results including multiple results for links on the same server. It is my opinion that Google entirely discounts all but one of those links on those websites.

There are more accurate tools to use (free) in the marketplace that are well known that will show unique linking domains. That's a much better number / reference to work with in link assessment.

[leadegroot]

If he has a bunch of junk or able-to-be-spotted paid links, then backing them up with quality links *now* may wipe out the faux pas.
I wouldn't wait.
(I would slow down the buying - unless he plans to maintain that velocity permanently)

[brickmarketing]

Building links that fast is not good at all. Google could actually penalize you for building links to quickly.

[Goodfellas]

I'd suggest... scrap the domain! Chances are, it's been red flagged by Google read bad! Any domain that builds that large quantity of links are doomed.

Why bother with so many backlinks anyway. Only worthwhile chasing after the few authority links IMO.

[martinibuster]

Ten days is not enough to judge the effectiveness of the campaign. How long has the site been up? That could be an issue, too.

[wheel]

The domain's been around for years with nothing going on and few if any backlinks. Just some dude woke up one day and decided he was going to do 'SEO'. 5000 directory submissions later he manages to find my niche directory and gives me a call to pay for his submission :).

He seemed to have all the decent directories covered, but he's got every last little $5 general directory as well. And now I see him trying to drop links in my forum.

[CainIV]

Looks like he needs to hire you Wheel as his consultant :)

[michaelj72]

my first reaction was holy cow, about yahoo actually indexing all those sites/pages so quickly - i hardly thought it possible since he just seems to have started things. google these days seems to take longer though with some recent directories that i've submitted to they go and cache the page within a day or two but usually it's a wait.
google won't index and/or cache a lot of those pages/directories he's submitted to for some time (so there might not be so much danger) but still if i were him i'd slow it down a bit, strikes me as a bit of an 'unnatural' link growth pattern, might raise some red flags as they say. but then again if he's getting some real quality directories in there that should even things out a bit with the lesser quality submissons.

[Goodfellas]

Who is that guy? I need to hire him! On the condition that he slows the pace... just a tad!

All that hard work going to waste... [sigh] I bet, out of those thousands of directory links he's gotten, only a few dozen would be of some value. Come to think of it, I could probably have spent 1/5 of the time he's spent, yet probably achieve better results.

Btw, 3-6 months may not be enough. I've come across newbie webmasters with slightly aged sites they may have purchased for cheap, then they go off on a behemoth of a link building spree... and guess what? 6-12 months later, they're still whining about why their SERP's are nowhere to be found.

[londrum]

depends what kind of site it is, though. maybe they aren't expecting to get much traffic through the serps anyway. in which case 3 million backlinks in a week might be worthwhile.

[CainIV]

I'd suggest... scrap the domain!

I wouldn't. Despite what some hear, it is not difficult to reverse penalization, especially algorithmic filtering / penalties.

Just be smart and honest about what happened, get to the source, document the issue, submit the reinclusion request, and build GOOD, trusted quality links at a much lower, natural rate.

The domain will come around just fine...

Would you board up your brick and mortar business because of bad press in a local newspaper?

[Aspects101]

which unpaid directories does google look at... I started a couple of days ago at roi media. trying to learn new things.

[FranticFish]

What do you mean by "look at"? Positively or negatively?