Link Fart- How to Build Links STUPIDLY!
I recently messed up bad by suggesting a friend should use Pay Per Post for some link building love. Well, what ended up happening is far from ever reaching a link building “How To” book.
I’ll make it short and sweet.
- Friend is on page six of Google for his desired key phrase.
- Friend buys $700 worth of PR 5 and up links on Pay Per Post.
- No real change happens.
- 30 days later friend buys another $700 worth of PR 5 and up links on Pay Per Post.
Poof, friend vanishes from page six and and top 100 search engine results pages too. They’re still in the index but no where near the top ten pages.
Here’s what I think happened. The same people who took the “post opportunity” the first time around, took it the second time around as well. Google noticed multiple links from not so relevant sites within 30 days apart from one another and punished my friend (thank the heavens it wasn’t a big client…lesson learned!)
So I write to Eric from StoneTemple.com the guy with all those Rambling’s About SEO and this is what he had to say…
“Hi Jean-Pierre,
Sorry for the slow response, but I am at SMX West in Santa Clara right now.
A couple of things to think about:
1. Is it possible that the pay per post links originally benefitted you, and
once they were detected and disabled, they simply stopped providing any
benefit? This is a scenario in which you would not recover, simply because
you were not actually penalized. Another words, in this scenario, all that
happened is that your paid links stopped adding value.
2. If you have in fact been penalized, and you have stopped buying links, I
would file a reconsideration request. Make sure you do this from within
Google Webmaster Tools. The standard advice for this is to keep it short
(no more than 3 paragraphs) and direct, admit your sins, point out that you
have cleaned it up, and ask for them to remove any penalty that may have
been applied.
Do NOT do this if you are concerned about what may happen to your site as a
result of a human review by a Googler. I.e. if they found some other
practice you have been using that they are not happy with, a reconsideration
request could make your situation worse. So make sure you are squeaky clean
before doing this.
3. With or without a reconsideration request, the process can take as little
as a few weeks, to several months. Unfortunately, there is no formula to
how quickly these types of things progress.
The other thing you need to think about, to drive your long term rankings
strategy, is what are you going to do to get natural links? These will be
the keys to long term success.
Hope that helps!
Eric”
Thanks for the great advice Eric, I appreciate it.
I think I will tough it out for a few more weeks though, considering we’re still in the Index and see what happens. If there isn’t an improvement soon, I’ll have to beg Google for forgiveness.
What do you think I should do? Apart from get my brain checked ofcourse…