Tiered link building - still exactly the same?

[AhFreshMeat]

I was told recently that tiered link building isn’t as powerful anymore. Of course, we all hear these things randomly and theres usually a lack of evidence to back a claim like this up.

Please correct me if I’m thinking about this wrong…

What I’m curious of: Wouldn’t you rather build tiered links, not particularly to just “pass more juice”, but to help rank that first tier link higher in the SERPs? Wouldn’t this be the goal? Which would in turn provide the most amount of value to your post? Of course, this is sort of assuming your first tier link and your own post is evergreen.

Or perhaps no? Way off here?

Another thought: We can all spend effort on building links, but whats to make me spend more effort on tiered link building and choose it over increasing the amount of unique referring domains?

I haven’t really focused on tiered links, so thats where my curiosity is stemming from.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I was told recently that tiered link building isn’t as powerful anymore. Of course, we all hear these things randomly and theres usually a lack of evidence to back a claim like this up.

There's so many incentives for people to say things.

• "I don't want to spend the time, therefore it sucks."
• "I don't want to spend the money, therefore it sucks."
• "My competitor offers it, therefore it sucks."
• "I offer it, therefore it rules."
• "I've already spent a ton of time on it, therefore it rules."

It's pretty hard to get a reading on someone's motivations over the internet. But it's definitely something to consider, as you've pointed out.

Wouldn’t you rather build tiered links, not particularly to just “pass more juice”, but to help rank that first tier link higher in the SERPs? Wouldn’t this be the goal?

It depends on your goals. Are you trying to cover more of the SERP real estate at the top because your offer has such a huge ROI and you're not necessarily an pure SEO-based business, and you have great average customer lifetime revenue and low churn so every conversion helps?

Or maybe you're an online reputation management company looking to bump other negative posts down. Or you're convinced that a ranking post with more traffic sends more positive ranking signals on to your post. I could see reasons to be concerned with this, but in a typical SEO campaign this isn't the goal. The goal is to pass more juice, as you've said, AND pass relevance.

We can all spend effort on building links, but whats to make me spend more effort on tiered link building and choose it over increasing the amount of unique referring domains?

This is the real question, in my opinion. By the time you're looking at these types of link building campaigns, you're probably not looking to collect every single low-quality referring domain to your site, though you have access to them.

So you can use them instead to boost up the strong ones you do intend to use. I like to describe it as filtering (I like the word "laundering" in that sense, though it has negative connotations) or validating the juice you're sending. As you pass it through finer and finer filters with tighter micron gaps, more of the crud gets pulled out. What I'm really trying to say without the analogy is that the juice becomes more trusted as you pass it through higher and higher trust and authority domains, as well as continuing the chain of relevance.

More referring domains is never bad, but they're not all domains that are good enough to make a dent to you, or perhaps they're less relevant (or not at all) than you desire, but you'd use them to stack behind your 3rd tier or whatever. Also, you could take a direct link from these domains and then still use them multiple other times through tiers, too. There's no "all or nothing" or "one and done" type of logic to adhere to.

Maybe you have a finicky, picky client who wants results but will only accept the most pristine and beautiful referring domains (the things Google doesn't care about like the color palette of the web design and the font choices, etc.). You still need to get them results, so you do tiered link building. That's another possible reason.

 

[AhFreshMeat]

There's so many incentives for people to say things.

• "I don't want to spend the time, therefore it sucks."
• "I don't want to spend the money, therefore it sucks."
• "My competitor offers it, therefore it sucks."
• "I offer it, therefore it rules."
• "I've already spent a ton of time on it, therefore it rules."

It's pretty hard to get a reading on someone's motivations over the internet. But it's definitely something to consider, as you've pointed out.


It depends on your goals. Are you trying to cover more of the SERP real estate at the top because your offer has such a huge ROI and you're not necessarily an pure SEO-based business, and you have great average customer lifetime revenue and low churn so every conversion helps?

Or maybe you're an online reputation management company looking to bump other negative posts down. Or you're convinced that a ranking post with more traffic sends more positive ranking signals on to your post. I could see reasons to be concerned with this, but in a typical SEO campaign this isn't the goal. The goal is to pass more juice, as you've said, AND pass relevance.


This is the real question, in my opinion. By the time you're looking at these types of link building campaigns, you're probably not looking to collect every single low-quality referring domain to your site, though you have access to them.

So you can use them instead to boost up the strong ones you do intend to use. I like to describe it as filtering (I like the word "laundering" in that sense, though it has negative connotations) or validating the juice you're sending. As you pass it through finer and finer filters with tighter micron gaps, more of the crud gets pulled out. What I'm really trying to say without the analogy is that the juice becomes more trusted as you pass it through higher and higher trust and authority domains, as well as continuing the chain of relevance.

More referring domains is never bad, but they're not all domains that are good enough to make a dent to you, or perhaps they're less relevant (or not at all) than you desire, but you'd use them to stack behind your 3rd tier or whatever. Also, you could take a direct link from these domains and then still use them multiple other times through tiers, too. There's no "all or nothing" or "one and done" type of logic to adhere to.

Maybe you have a finicky, picky client who wants results but will only accept the most pristine and beautiful referring domains (the things Google doesn't care about like the color palette of the web design and the font choices, etc.). You still need to get them results, so you do tiered link building. That's another possible reason.

Thats super helpful. I suppose I’m trying to split up where I spend my time, but it seems like tiered link building could be done without too much extra time; since the “left over” links you have access to that you might pass up for whatever reason could be sent over as tier 2’s and not go to waste if its “not perfect” enough.

Awesome stuff