Many SEOs say that in order to get a website ranking, you need to create a natural link profile with links coming from a variety of different sources. This is what’s known as “link diversity” and it’s been a topic of debate for quite some time.
There are many different types of link sources that SEOs are utilizing today. I recently conducted a poll in my Facebook group, asking folks what link types they’re currently sending to their money sites.
As you can see there’s a variety of different platforms that you can use to get links to your site, ranging from “PBNs” to the coveted “Lol 5 idiots put GSA” links. Classy guys…. real classy.
Note: Just to establish this upfront, we’re not discussing social signals in this article as they’re considered to be a different category all together and serve a different purpose in today’s algorithmic landscape.
Back to the question at hand…
Is link diversity really necessary?
Answer: It depends on the size of your website and the niche you’re in.
Huge Websites / Corporate SEO
If you’re doing SEO for a huge corporate client (500+ pages) or personally manage a website with tens of thousands of visitors per day, then yes, link diversity is needed.
The bigger the website, the more natural it is that it would attract all types of links from a variety of different platforms. Take any of the big player sites, such as Amazon. The chances that Amazon is missing any particular type of link is virtually 0%. Large sites simply can’t help but attract links from all sources. Thus link diversity is a necessary ranking factor for sites of this size.
For the readers of my blog, who typically specialize in creating small to medium micro-niche sites (10-50 pages) or manage local clients… at the time of this writing link diversity is completely unnecessary.
But at the end of the day, trust and link juice gets sites ranking and that can come from as few link types as possible.
Reports
Personally, I have at least a dozen websites that rank solely from PBNs. I’ve sold even more and they’re all still ranking quite nicely. While I’d love to share these sites, I’m not going to, because who shares a niche?
However, you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s what some other industry experts had to say when I asked them about link diversity.
“The screenshot (click here) I have shared is from a site registered two months ago. All I have done so far is drip PBN Links for 2 months at random dates.”
“I’ve been building sites in competitive affiliate niches for years. At first with exclusively PBN links, and to this day the only essential addition has been social signals. Powerful links are what matters, and I’ve not experienced any evidence that Google requires diversity.”
“I’ve ranked a top niche in London (local) purely on base of 10 PBN links alone.”
What kind of links are actually impactful?
So we’ve established that it’s possible to send only a certain type of link to a website to get it ranked.
However, just because you can get away with sending one link type to your money site, doesn’t mean that you always should. Certain situations and budgets will call for different links.
The key is knowing what types of links are bad, what types of links are good, and when you should use them.
Below you’ll find my synopsis of different link types and their value. They’re classed in three different tiers from least to most valuable…
Class C – SEO Links
These are links that quite simply “only an SEO would use.” I don’t touch any links in this category.
Why you ask?… Guess what, SEOs? Google hates you.
As an SEO, you directly impact their revenue. If business owners can get their websites ranked through the use of SEO, then they’re not going to pay for Adsense (PPC). Hence, don’t do things that only SEO’s would do.
Blog Comments
Many SEO are still quite attached to blog comments. Namely, because they’re cheap. Before you freak out, bear with me for a minute and answer this question…
Q: What kind of normal person would go to a blog and fill out the “Website” field with someone else’s website?
A: No one.
Google doesn’t reward people who create their own links. In fact, all of their offsite penalties have revolved around this concept.
Blog comments (for links) suck, don’t use them… with the exception of when you’re creating links in the body of your comment. This implies that the blog owner has approved your comment and deems its content to be worthy of being
Social Bookmarks
Social bookmark sites (e.g.: Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit) emerged as a way to store your favorite websites for viewing at a later date. They’ve been highly abused as a way to get free links and, over time, this technique has been spammed to death. Social bookmarks used to be a part of my ranking strategy (mainly for anchor text diversity), but recent tests have shown that impacted nothing at all once I removed them from my link flow.
GSA Search Engine Ranker
GSA is a software that submits massive amounts of links through comments, web 2.0s, blogs, PDFs, etc. You name it, it can be spammed it with GSA. Since Penguin came on the scene, anyone who submits GSA links directly to their money site is asking for trouble.
SAPE
SAPE is a network of real websites comprised of a Russian ad network as well as sites infiltrated by hackers. Directly linking SAPE to your money site is asking for trouble, as these sites commonly get uncovered and heavy penalties are unleashed. Personally, I don’t touch SAPE for ethical reasons, but to each their own.
Class B – Links that Normal Businesses Use
This class refers to link types that are commonly utilized by normal, real businesses. While they’re not very hard to get at all (anyone has access to getting them), the fact that so many real businesses get them all the time puts Class B into a protected category and makes it relatively safe to use.
Web 2.0
Anyone can go out and create a Tumblr, Rebelmouse, or Facebook fan page for free. Real businesses use them all the time as well and some would argue (myself included) that the presence of a Facebook page is indeed a positive ranking factor.
Web 2.0s are great for pillow links, or if you’re doing some clever trust tiering, they’re a safe way to deliver link juice, trust and authority.
Citations
Most businesses (local or nationwide) are listed in local and industry directories. That’s why they’re completely safe to use. However, since citations are super easy to get and Google is well aware of that, you’re not going be ranking with citations alone unless you’re in a very uncompetitive niche.
As you know, citations are a necessary component for getting ranked in the map pack. They’re also a great source of brand, URL and image anchors and can even be used for affiliate sites.
PR’s have been an SEO tool for quite some time. A quality press release service can be excellent for pillowing (sending non-critical anchors), as a well-syndicated PR can get you 100+ URL anchors.
I suspect that over time, PR’s are going to lose their value as it’s a tactic that’s highly abused. However, since PR’s commonly link to real businesses all the time, it is very difficult to write an algorithm for.
Wikipedia Links
Links from Wiki are relatively easy to get. Typically, it’s just a matter of paying the right guy $50 and you’re done.
Personally, I haven’t seen much of a ranking increase from the “trust” gained from a Wikipedia link, however, in some cases I have seen a substantial increase in referral traffic. This depends on your niche and the Wiki page, of course.
Guest Posts (with Author Boxes)
Guest posts with author boxes are dead giveaways that you’re doing your own link building. Google has publically frowned upon guest posts, but I’m yet to see many penalizations occur due to it.
That said, guest posting on sites that don’t shout-out-loud “Hey, this is a guest post from the guy whose link is in this article” is safe as there’s really no way to penalize someone for it. These are free and clear, and actually belong in the Class A section below: “Authority Links, Content Marketing, and Outreach”.
Class A – Perceived Natural Links
It’s no secret that Google doesn’t want people doing their own SEO. They want links to occur naturally from 3rd parties who decide to link to your website on their own accord because these people believe that your content is helpful. Thus, it’s no surprise that the best links that you can get to your website are links that are perceived to be coming in naturally from 3rd parties.
Class A links are typically harder to get than Class B and Class C. These are the links that will get you ranked.
PBN
What’s so special about PBN links and why do they work so well? Why did the four experts above also mention them exclusively?
PBN’s, when setup correctly, have the primary intention of tricking the bot that they’re coming from a 3rd party. That is… if they’re setup on separate IPs, with separate owners, etc.
Aside from the fact that they typically deliver a lot of link juice, their appearance as being a link coming from a webmaster other than yourself is what makes them so effective.
Authority Links, Content Marketing, and Outreach
There’s nothing more real than a real link. Links from authority sites such as Huffington Post, Elephant Journal, etc. are hard to get. Authority sites like these have internally-staffed editors who highly scrutinize of who they link out to.
Typically, these links don’t deliver a lot of power. If you do manage to get links like these, they’re not likely to be on a homepage, but probably a fresh inner page instead. Don’t expect to rank from links like these, but if your site needs trust and authority, there’s no better way.
Great finding Matt.
That was my thesis too, but when someone such as yourself conducts careful case studies on it, it even sits better.
Enjoyed reading as always.
Thanks.
Speaking of PBNs… I have a really important question to ask.
I used lightningrank and ranksource to rank some of my websites and purchased a 5 links per month link package for some of my sites.
What happened was that both service providers created all the 5 links in 5 days in a row, so e.g. lightninrank created 1 link on monday, 1 on tuesday, 1 on wednesday….
After that I got really concerned and asked if that would not appear to be suspicious to google and the answer I received said, that it’s just fine and I do not have to worry. But to me that looks highly suspicious.
What do you think? Would it be really obvious for me to notice it in the ranking positions, if I had been penalized, like 40 or 50 positions?
By the way, the ranking of one of my websites increased after the first link package but dropped of about 8 positions from 8/9 to 16/17, but is back on 12 now. My other websites don’t look as good, about 30-40 and they are already 6 months old.
That sort of burst link velocity on such a small scale is fine. Remember, these links are going to be picked up on different days as well. Google will notice (index) them at different times. Just make sure you have the social jusitification to back those links.
Hey Matt, nice read. I like to throw in 10 manual blog comments and a few of the top sites from each link type (social bookmarks, comments, etc) but I suppose doing without them could work as well.
You’ve just changed my whole SEO plan for one of my websites 😀 – That’s good! Thanks!
BTW, where can I read more about A, B, C Class links? Is it all about the IP of hosting server?
Sorry, I’m not making the connection. The way I’m classifying these links has more to do with their difficulty in obtaining, history of abuse, relative safety, and effectiveness in ranking. Doesn’t have anything to do with IP.
When you own the property you can decide if it goes on the homepage (where all the power is) and you can build links as fast as you want while being in complete control.
Guest posts take time to obtain and perform the outreach.
If we can only build PBN links to a MS, then what is the star time? In the past, I usually started sending the PBN links when MS jump to page 3-4. Before that, I built diversity links to MS.
Now, Can I send PBN links as soon as the MS be built & indexed, but don’t mind if it has any postion in SERP?
Hi, matt ,
i’ve few questions, my site is UK based and is having a monthly search volume of <500 or so. Right now the site sits at position 6 ( previously it was on #2 ) without doing any SEO .
I'm given a task of improving the site's ranking back to #2 or #1 .
I've analysed the competitors sites backlinks, all of them have few backlinks, and two of them are directory listing sites,
Right now i don't own any PBN , so is it okay to buy PBN links for the site ?
Can i point them directly to the money site .
How many links can i go with ?
PBN links are fine to send straight the money site. As for how many, the anchors, link velocity, where to get them from etc… that’s your job as their personal SEO analyst to determine.
My first thought was.. can this be true? Everyone says you should be so careful and use sites with different IP:s, subnets, server locations and so on. This is good news though and something I experienced as well!
Hey Freddy. Please don’t misunderstand. Have varied IPs, servers, etc is required to have a natural link profile. However, the idea that you need various types of links (PBN, comments, web 2.0, directory, etc) to rank is a fallacy.
Do you have a press release service that you would recommend? I know that there are some decent distributors and some that are completely horrible. Could you point me in the right direction as far as finding the a press release distribution service that would provide the needed results?
Great post. Im curious how you attain proper link diversity with just using PBNs? Would you use Naked, and general anchors on your PBNs? I am using PR and Socials, along with several PBN links for one site. All of the anchors in the PBN links are Partial match, LSI, Exact Match, and branded. Would it be a good idea to use some naked anchors from PBNs aswell, or just leave that to the PR, web 2.0s? Reason I ask, is that it would probably look more natural if i had some naked, and general back links from in context PBN links aswell.
Hey Tyler… I link solely from PBN, press releases and ccitations. So for sure, I’ll end up using PBNs for a lot of pillow anchors. This is my strategy and it works for me. Many people feel like you shouldn’t waste PBNs for non-critcial anchors, yet I’ve never seen a single testcase where this is proven to be true.
I have tried just about everything when it comes to ranking websites and there is little doubt in my mind that PBN’s are the best. Not just expired domains but auction ones with power. I have 15 client sites and 10 white label for other SEO’s and hands down these are the best.
Hi Matt. Do you use press releases even for new sites? Is it risky to use PRs and know that after 2,3 months probably 95% links from media sites will be removed?
Yes, I use them for new sites. There is indeed link loss that comes with the territory with using PR’s but its natural link loss and by the time it occurs, you should have built plenty of sticky links.
Thank you for the material.
As for press releases, do you still consider them a safe way to dilute the links mass?
What about the fact that many companies use one tex to publish on 30-100 different sites. As far as we know, Google does not like to duplicate content. According to the idea, Google can be fined for using press releases servise (because they publish the same article on dozens of sites). Correctly?
So many real companies use press releases, Google couldn’t possibly penalize them, despite the supposed duplicate content. Feel free to test though if you have doubts. That’s what I do.
Nice post! You mention links from the homepage of a PBN, do you link from the homepages on all your pbn links? If so, dont you think this could be unnatural having a large portion of links from homepages? As most natural links are not from homepages but are from fresh articles. Be nice to hear your thoughts!
when talking about power, what do you think, how powerful is a link from a guest post (inner page with no backlinks) from a real web compared to a link from pbn (homepage link)? Suppose that both domains have similar DA, RD etc.
I am just wondering if guest posts from websites with DA 20-30 are really worth it.
I suppose so, but its hard to test for. You need to get a link from a site with zero backlinks and a lot of traffic. That’s not easy to come by so I’m working on manufacturing it.
Great post Matt… You mentioned quality over quantity, if I am trying to diversify my anchor text would you then say it would be better to use more low powered links rather than a few high power to get more keywords linking to my site?
Hey Matt,
My last message came out wrong. What I meant was that if I went the route of quality over quantity I am afraid I wouldn’t be able to diversify my anchor text as much as if I went for quantity over quality.
Matt Diggity
on December 13, 2017 at 1:11 am
If you rank with 10 links, you need much less diversity than if you did with 100.
Steve
on December 12, 2017 at 8:51 pm
Hey Matt,
I get the whole quality over quantity but wanted to know if I want to rank for more KW would it be advisable to go for lower quality but get more links which equals more anchors or still go for higher quality but less links which would equal less anchors.
John
on January 11, 2018 at 11:26 am
I have to disagree with your analysis on blog comments. I’ve used blog commenting for several of my sites and continue to do so in 2018. Great for pillowing and adding a bit of relevancy if done correctly. I’ve had ZERO negative impact. I don’t pay for blog comments but rather build them so I have quality control. Interacting with other biz in the same niche is normal and I think Google understands that.
Great post Matt. Can I ask you a question?
1. PR – I’ve read some blog said Google will penalize site that use PR because of the duplicate content. I see you have give your thought on Nick’s comment above (on April 3, 2017), but would like to know your opinion for 2018. I’ve seen some experts use PR for Launch Jacking, is this also push website ranking or just link purposely for diversification/ pillow/ foundation only.
2. Blog comment – I do blog comments, sometime I’m outsource it and find it useful in term of relevancy. Would like to know your thought on blog comments purpose for the relevancy.
1) In general, just look at things like this… would Google really make negative SEO so easy that I could just buy a PR for my competitors?
2) I don’t bother with any free, easy access links like this.
This is a list of the tools and services that I'm currently using to rank my own sites. Everything you find here has been tested and proven to show value in the many tests you've seen on my blog.
Great finding Matt.
That was my thesis too, but when someone such as yourself conducts careful case studies on it, it even sits better.
Enjoyed reading as always.
Thanks.
Awesome post Matt! So, I guess we need only to worry about anchor text that we use right? I’m mostly in affiliate/cpa niche websites.
I think that’s narrowing it down quite a bit. 🙂
So if you use straight PBNs, can you write your next article on how to pull that off? Tight articles across the board, brother 🙂
It’s probably about time I do a case study on how to rank a site from nothing.
Hey Matt,
great article as usual!
Speaking of PBNs… I have a really important question to ask.
I used lightningrank and ranksource to rank some of my websites and purchased a 5 links per month link package for some of my sites.
What happened was that both service providers created all the 5 links in 5 days in a row, so e.g. lightninrank created 1 link on monday, 1 on tuesday, 1 on wednesday….
After that I got really concerned and asked if that would not appear to be suspicious to google and the answer I received said, that it’s just fine and I do not have to worry. But to me that looks highly suspicious.
What do you think? Would it be really obvious for me to notice it in the ranking positions, if I had been penalized, like 40 or 50 positions?
By the way, the ranking of one of my websites increased after the first link package but dropped of about 8 positions from 8/9 to 16/17, but is back on 12 now. My other websites don’t look as good, about 30-40 and they are already 6 months old.
Sorry for my bad english.
Best Regards
Adam
And one more question: What would you do?
That sort of burst link velocity on such a small scale is fine. Remember, these links are going to be picked up on different days as well. Google will notice (index) them at different times. Just make sure you have the social jusitification to back those links.
Hey Matt, nice read. I like to throw in 10 manual blog comments and a few of the top sites from each link type (social bookmarks, comments, etc) but I suppose doing without them could work as well.
Agreed. Good stuff btw.
Also can add tiered links. Especially for guest posts without author box.
You’ve just changed my whole SEO plan for one of my websites 😀 – That’s good! Thanks!
BTW, where can I read more about A, B, C Class links? Is it all about the IP of hosting server?
Sorry, I’m not making the connection. The way I’m classifying these links has more to do with their difficulty in obtaining, history of abuse, relative safety, and effectiveness in ranking. Doesn’t have anything to do with IP.
Cheers Matt! Now I’ve got it 🙂
What is the difference between Guest Post and PBN Links?
Why do all the work and expense to set up a PBN?
A PBN, you own. A guest post, you dont.
When you own the property you can decide if it goes on the homepage (where all the power is) and you can build links as fast as you want while being in complete control.
Guest posts take time to obtain and perform the outreach.
Hi Matt,
If we can only build PBN links to a MS, then what is the star time? In the past, I usually started sending the PBN links when MS jump to page 3-4. Before that, I built diversity links to MS.
Now, Can I send PBN links as soon as the MS be built & indexed, but don’t mind if it has any postion in SERP?
Thanks very much, Matt.
Read this article to learn how I time my first PBN links.
Hi, matt ,
i’ve few questions, my site is UK based and is having a monthly search volume of <500 or so. Right now the site sits at position 6 ( previously it was on #2 ) without doing any SEO .
I'm given a task of improving the site's ranking back to #2 or #1 .
I've analysed the competitors sites backlinks, all of them have few backlinks, and two of them are directory listing sites,
Right now i don't own any PBN , so is it okay to buy PBN links for the site ?
Can i point them directly to the money site .
How many links can i go with ?
Sorry for too many questions .
PBN links are fine to send straight the money site. As for how many, the anchors, link velocity, where to get them from etc… that’s your job as their personal SEO analyst to determine.
Very interesting post. What do you think are most reliable, post links from PBNs or from Webs 2.0?
Thanks for sharing
PBN
My first thought was.. can this be true? Everyone says you should be so careful and use sites with different IP:s, subnets, server locations and so on. This is good news though and something I experienced as well!
Hey Freddy. Please don’t misunderstand. Have varied IPs, servers, etc is required to have a natural link profile. However, the idea that you need various types of links (PBN, comments, web 2.0, directory, etc) to rank is a fallacy.
Matt,
Do you have a press release service that you would recommend? I know that there are some decent distributors and some that are completely horrible. Could you point me in the right direction as far as finding the a press release distribution service that would provide the needed results?
Currently shopping around as well.
Hi Matt, I can get link from body of comment. Is it good to be a pillow links?
It’s not bad.
Hi Matt,
Great post. Im curious how you attain proper link diversity with just using PBNs? Would you use Naked, and general anchors on your PBNs? I am using PR and Socials, along with several PBN links for one site. All of the anchors in the PBN links are Partial match, LSI, Exact Match, and branded. Would it be a good idea to use some naked anchors from PBNs aswell, or just leave that to the PR, web 2.0s? Reason I ask, is that it would probably look more natural if i had some naked, and general back links from in context PBN links aswell.
Hey Tyler… I link solely from PBN, press releases and ccitations. So for sure, I’ll end up using PBNs for a lot of pillow anchors. This is my strategy and it works for me. Many people feel like you shouldn’t waste PBNs for non-critcial anchors, yet I’ve never seen a single testcase where this is proven to be true.
Do you think PBN will work in 2017 and right now ?
After the Penguin update
Absolutely. There’s so many other “worse” links than PBNs that are still working.
I have tried just about everything when it comes to ranking websites and there is little doubt in my mind that PBN’s are the best. Not just expired domains but auction ones with power. I have 15 client sites and 10 white label for other SEO’s and hands down these are the best.
Hi Matt. Do you use press releases even for new sites? Is it risky to use PRs and know that after 2,3 months probably 95% links from media sites will be removed?
Yes, I use them for new sites. There is indeed link loss that comes with the territory with using PR’s but its natural link loss and by the time it occurs, you should have built plenty of sticky links.
Hey Matt,
On the average, how many pages your affiliate sites have?
Roughly 20.
Thank you for the material.
As for press releases, do you still consider them a safe way to dilute the links mass?
What about the fact that many companies use one tex to publish on 30-100 different sites. As far as we know, Google does not like to duplicate content. According to the idea, Google can be fined for using press releases servise (because they publish the same article on dozens of sites). Correctly?
Or am I misunderstanding something?
So many real companies use press releases, Google couldn’t possibly penalize them, despite the supposed duplicate content. Feel free to test though if you have doubts. That’s what I do.
Hi Matt,
Nice post! You mention links from the homepage of a PBN, do you link from the homepages on all your pbn links? If so, dont you think this could be unnatural having a large portion of links from homepages? As most natural links are not from homepages but are from fresh articles. Be nice to hear your thoughts!
I also link from PBN inner pages.
People keep saying that we can not use PBNS because of footprints what is working better?
There’s some truth to that. PBNs with footprints are asking for penalties. That said, PBNs without footprints = rankings.
Hi Matt,
when talking about power, what do you think, how powerful is a link from a guest post (inner page with no backlinks) from a real web compared to a link from pbn (homepage link)? Suppose that both domains have similar DA, RD etc.
I am just wondering if guest posts from websites with DA 20-30 are really worth it.
Thanks
Inner page guest posts from DA 20-30 sites are going to pale in comparsion to a homepage PBN link.
Most of the marketer running with PBN but google doing nothing. Actually, they have very few to do as PBN is similar to a natural website.
Hey Matt.
Where would buying a post on a real blog with real traffic fall in the classes? Do you think it’s gained more power since you wrote this?
I suppose so, but its hard to test for. You need to get a link from a site with zero backlinks and a lot of traffic. That’s not easy to come by so I’m working on manufacturing it.
Up until now, its all theory.
Hey Matt,
Great post, Gregory is awesome too. Do you think it will be better to focus my stragies on tons of “low power” pbn’s or just a few “high power” pbns?
Thanks!
I prefer quality over quantity.
Great post Matt… You mentioned quality over quantity, if I am trying to diversify my anchor text would you then say it would be better to use more low powered links rather than a few high power to get more keywords linking to my site?
Hey Steve. Quality over quantity means the opposite.
Hey Matt,
My last message came out wrong. What I meant was that if I went the route of quality over quantity I am afraid I wouldn’t be able to diversify my anchor text as much as if I went for quantity over quality.
If you rank with 10 links, you need much less diversity than if you did with 100.
Hey Matt,
I get the whole quality over quantity but wanted to know if I want to rank for more KW would it be advisable to go for lower quality but get more links which equals more anchors or still go for higher quality but less links which would equal less anchors.
I have to disagree with your analysis on blog comments. I’ve used blog commenting for several of my sites and continue to do so in 2018. Great for pillowing and adding a bit of relevancy if done correctly. I’ve had ZERO negative impact. I don’t pay for blog comments but rather build them so I have quality control. Interacting with other biz in the same niche is normal and I think Google understands that.
Thanks for your feedback. As they say in SEO… many ways to skin a cat.
Great post Matt. Can I ask you a question?
1. PR – I’ve read some blog said Google will penalize site that use PR because of the duplicate content. I see you have give your thought on Nick’s comment above (on April 3, 2017), but would like to know your opinion for 2018. I’ve seen some experts use PR for Launch Jacking, is this also push website ranking or just link purposely for diversification/ pillow/ foundation only.
2. Blog comment – I do blog comments, sometime I’m outsource it and find it useful in term of relevancy. Would like to know your thought on blog comments purpose for the relevancy.
Thanks
Kelsey
1) In general, just look at things like this… would Google really make negative SEO so easy that I could just buy a PR for my competitors?
2) I don’t bother with any free, easy access links like this.