Guest Posts & Link Insertions?

Chozzer

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Hi, hope everyone has had a lovely Xmas.

This is a 2 part question,

I'm looking for a link service that offers guest posts and link insertions and my budget is not massive, if I haven't got a massive budget, what other links do you feel will move the needle apart from guest posts and link insertions? I have a social profile set up and am active on them and also have citations to diversify the link profile and anchor text.
 
DanielS said:
I think @shaunm has been having success with forum posts lately.
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Yea I am a big fan of forum posts and think that they are an underrated backlink source and they are cheap too! I usually use them with niche edits and guest posts tough but I know people who use nothing but forum posts and are ranking for some decent terms.
 
Chozzer said:
Hi, hope everyone has had a lovely Xmas.

This is a 2 part question,

I'm looking for a link service that offers guest posts and link insertions and my budget is not massive, if I haven't got a massive budget, what other links do you feel will move the needle apart from guest posts and link insertions? I have a social profile set up and am active on them and also have citations to diversify the link profile and anchor text.
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In the early stages of my site, I wanted to start building links as my site gained authority and articles started to rank, but I also didn't want to spend thousands of dollars right away. One thing I tried to do was ask link/guest post providers to send me a list of sites in my niche with prices.

I would manually review each site and pick the sites that I thought could push some initial link juice towards my articles. I didn't spend crazy amounts of money on these links, I was able to purchase a decent amount of links in the $50-100 range and even negotiated a discount for a larger bulk order.

While I don't think any of these links were absolutely incredible where my site would skyrocket up in the SERPs, it did teach me a lot about the value of different links. This knowledge helped me once I was ready to allocate a larger portion of funds towards link building efforts.

Besides cost, the three most important factors for me were relevancy (how close is it to your niche), backlink profile (how authentic is the backlink profile) and organic traffic (what does google think of the content from the site).
 
shaunm said:
Yea I am a big fan of forum posts and think that they are an underrated backlink source and they are cheap too! I usually use them with niche edits and guest posts tough but I know people who use nothing but forum posts and are ranking for some decent terms.
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Cheers for the comment Shaun, if you don't mind me asking, do you use a service like Crowdo?

larcha said:
In the early stages of my site, I wanted to start building links as my site gained authority and articles started to rank, but I also didn't want to spend thousands of dollars right away. One thing I tried to do was ask link/guest post providers to send me a list of sites in my niche with prices.

I would manually review each site and pick the sites that I thought could push some initial link juice towards my articles. I didn't spend crazy amounts of money on these links, I was able to purchase a decent amount of links in the $50-100 range and even negotiated a discount for a larger bulk order.

While I don't think any of these links were absolutely incredible where my site would skyrocket up in the SERPs, it did teach me a lot about the value of different links. This knowledge helped me once I was ready to allocate a larger portion of funds towards link building efforts.

Besides cost, the three most important factors for me were relevancy (how close is it to your niche), backlink profile (how authentic is the backlink profile) and organic traffic (what does google think of the content from the site).
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Thanks for the response Charlie, and congrats on the 100,000 sessions on the authority site, I've been following your journey on YT.
 
I did 3 months of Crowdo forum links and nothing else, saw some solid, rapid upward movement. Previously only had some foundation links (bought a cheap gig) and a handful of guest posts.

Regressed a couple months after stopping the service. Unsure if it was the abrupt end to velocity, too many forums to other link types, not topically relevant enough, or if some had fallen off..or some a combination of these factors.

I tried Natural Links too. Didn't seem quite as topically aligned as Crowdo (even Crowdo topical relevancy seems to vary between orders a bit) but were cheaper, so, both providers about equal value in my book.

Thinking about giving it a go again but with edits and GPs added in, maybe will try that combo on another site (got a juicy little 301 incubating for the one I've already tried forum links on).

I've reached out to a few edit providers too over the last year or so and they'll pretty much say edits and GPs seem to get the job done. Naturally some bias there from edit providers but tracks with backlink profiles I've been seeing associated with Amazon affiliate flips on the marketplaces.

OP lemme know if you find any reliable GP providers at fair price points.. that is one I've yet to find a trusty source for :smile:
 
harrytwatter said:
I did 3 months of Crowdo forum links and nothing else, saw some solid, rapid upward movement. Previously only had some foundation links (bought a cheap gig) and a handful of guest posts.
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I have been looking for a service like Crowdo for years... obviously not looking hard enough. Will check them out, thanks
 
Chozzer said:
Cheers for the comment Shaun, if you don't mind me asking, do you use a service like Crowdo?
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Yea, I actually use naturallinks right now as its cheaper and provides similar links but I have used Crowdo a bunch too. Both services seem to use the same pool of forums and from my tests they had very similar retention rates too so it came down to price for me but I have been thinking of switching back to Crowdo just because their order form is easier to understand.
 
Taq said:
Do forum links really work. I'm fairly new to this but the research I did suggests forum links stopped working a long time ago. According to John Mueller, they don't work.
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I just read that and my takeaway impression was he was able to issue a blanket "no" because "all forums set their user-generated links to be nofollow".

But there's caveats. Not all forums set their links to be nofollow. Google is now using nofollow as a suggestion and not a rule. And surely there are aspects related to links beyond the simple discussion of whether or not page rank flows through the links or not. There's questions of relevancy, anchor text, and then non-page-rank metric-based discussions, etc.

Like Matt Cutts, John Mueller exists as a propagandist much of the time. He's there to tell you what they'd like you to think about reality and not always the truth or full truth about it.

I can also imagine he gets sick of mentioning every little caveat and getting into the weeds in every discussion, because he's not wrong when he says that these types of conversations aren't helpful to most people. Most people need to publish content and do marketing. If you do that, and pick up the real needle moving links like contextual, relevant links within the main content with a relevant anchor, then you end up ranking and you'll pick up plenty of forum links from that exposure. These "little" links will come as a consequence of focusing on what matters.

That's what I'd tell most people. I'd tell the other slice of people to get whatever links they can and "why not?". The last slice of people are the ones who are going to expect forum links to save the day and turn their hobby into a career and put way too much pressure on these "baby links". To them I'd say "you need more experience. A good way to gain that would be to get these forum links and get disappointed." Which isn't to say they don't work. They work some, but if your competition levels are high enough you may not notice them working at all.
 
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shaunm said:
Yea, I actually use naturallinks right now as its cheaper and provides similar links
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looks like the pricing is similar at this point, unless you're talking about 500 links/mo or more
 
I freelance for a number of big brand clients on guest posts and link inserts, and this is my $0.02:

You are going to get pretty cheap, low-quality sites if you don't have a big budget for this. Because, truth be said, a DA 70 site is going to cost more than a DA 50 site, which is more expensive than a DA 10 site.

If I were you, what I would do is hire a VA and tell them the process to find editors and content marketers at these bigger name sites in your industry.

Buy a cold outreach tool (I have used Replyify before and now use Smartreach.io) and set up the email sequences yourself.

Hire writers who will do the guest post writing for you.

All this takes some capital cost and time, but once you set it in motion, it's smooth sailing - your VA keeps building database of good sites to reach out to - you feed it into the outreach tool, and each time you get a 'yes', send the order to your writer to get the post written.

It is more cost effective than buying links via a third-party.
 
harrytwatter said:
I did 3 months of Crowdo forum links and nothing else, saw some solid, rapid upward movement. Previously only had some foundation links (bought a cheap gig) and a handful of guest posts.

Regressed a couple months after stopping the service. Unsure if it was the abrupt end to velocity, too many forums to other link types, not topically relevant enough, or if some had fallen off..or some a combination of these factors.
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What kind of link volume were you buying from crowdo?
 
The 20links/month package, tried a one-off Quora package during that time too.
 
harrytwatter said:
I did 3 months of Crowdo forum links and nothing else, saw some solid, rapid upward movement. Previously only had some foundation links (bought a cheap gig) and a handful of guest posts.

Regressed a couple months after stopping the service. Unsure if it was the abrupt end to velocity, too many forums to other link types, not topically relevant enough, or if some had fallen off..or some a combination of these factors.

I tried Natural Links too. Didn't seem quite as topically aligned as Crowdo (even Crowdo topical relevancy seems to vary between orders a bit) but were cheaper, so, both providers about equal value in my book.

Thinking about giving it a go again but with edits and GPs added in, maybe will try that combo on another site (got a juicy little 301 incubating for the one I've already tried forum links on).

I've reached out to a few edit providers too over the last year or so and they'll pretty much say edits and GPs seem to get the job done. Naturally some bias there from edit providers but tracks with backlink profiles I've been seeing associated with Amazon affiliate flips on the marketplaces.

OP lemme know if you find any reliable GP providers at fair price points.. that is one I've yet to find a trusty source for :smile:
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Were the links to the homepage or inner page on your site? Looking to trying them out.
 
Probably averaged a 70/20 split between inner pages/home page, I think they have a safe default anchor text option too that's predominantly brand/URL with a few partial matches tossed in. You can specify different anchor text ratios if you want though.
 
Super great post! I wasn't aware forum posts were available to purchase at scale. Are there any other weird link types like this? Thanks
 
I know this thread isn't about exclusively about crowdo, but I tested the 20 links per month out for a few months on a site that we did NO other optimization/links for during that time. What do you guys think. keep going with it? whats up with the 2 month dip in rankings?

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zelch said:
whats up with the 2 month dip in rankings?
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It's a very common thing Google does to confuse SEO's. They'll give temporary bounces like you're showing in your image that can last up to 3 months. Sometimes they'll delay results up to 3 months too. Happens all the time with a fresh influx of links and/or page rank, especially when the amount is relatively large compared to what's already there. Very common. The patent is called something like "Rank Transition".
 
zelch said:
What do you guys think. keep going with it? whats up with the 2 month dip in rankings?
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Thanks for documenting and sharing.. I need to tattoo "don't forget to annotate in GA" on the tops of my hands or something..

I noticed that after a few months things started to get stretched in terms of topical alignment. Also my total RD count wasn't that high so just a few months of Crowdo made forum link types rise to a significant percentage of my total backlink profile.

My goal with linkbuilding is to always make it appear as natural as possible..super safe anchors, no sudden blasts, no over-reliance on one link type (so a decent mix of profile/directory, forum, GP, niche edit type links). For this reason I run Crowdo 3 months tops otherwise my backlink profile gets too heavy on that one (forum) link type. If you've already got thousands of quality RDs you might be able to more naturally absorb a higher volume of forum links.

After a few months of Crowdo I transition into just niche edits and GPs, idea being the forums replicate real brand promotion/popularity, kind of like what people claim social signals do, but in this case, with actual crawlable links. With the Crowdos and very selective keyword research I started ranking for some long tails and now I have a steady drip of naturally earned links from said ranking content.

TL;DR don't make forum links the obviously dominant link type of your backlink profile

Related, anyone got any new/top notch niche edit/insert vendors? Like many here been using SERPWolf for quite a while but feel like topical alignment has fallen off a bit and I'm seeing more shared IPs with some of these leading me to believe they've got some "networks" in their databases.. not red, but yellow flags to me.

Since these are some of the best bang-for-buck links I'm looking for another vendor to supplement.
 
Ryuzaki said:
It's a very common thing Google does to confuse SEO's. They'll give temporary bounces like you're showing in your image that can last up to 3 months. Sometimes they'll delay results up to 3 months too. Happens all the time with a fresh influx of links and/or page rank, especially when the amount is relatively large compared to what's already there. Very common. The patent is called something like "Rank Transition".
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I literally fell for their trick. After 3 months of crowdo links, I saw no serp improvement, so I cancelled my crowdo subscription. I'm assuming t hey're watching for me to do exactly what I did. Do you think I"m playing into their hands by stopping the crowdo links? Trying to decide if I should re-subscribe and keep it going.

This is a site with 600ish referring domains and 3k total backlinks
 
after doing some more comparison, we are getting the same SERP movement just doing our own outreach (paid blog link insertions mainly) for 1/4 the cost of crowdo. case closed.
 
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