Backlinks Scam

[Esquire]

Do you know the difference between a "no follow" link and a "follow" link ...?

If you don't ... listen up ... and I'll help you avoid getting scammed.

Google created a metric call PageRank to calculate the link points. Many SEO folks refer to link points as “link juice.” The link juice flows through sites and into new sites through hyperlinks. The more reputable the site, the bigger boost of link juice the linked-to site gets.

Now we can define a follow link – Follow links are links that count as points, pushing SEO link juice and boosting the page rank of the linked-to sites, helping them go higher in the SERPs as a result.

A no follow link (on the other hand) is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank, and doesn’t help a page’s placement in the SERPs.

No follow links get no love.

A no follow link is created with the nofollow link HTML tag, which looks like this:

<a href="http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

The nofollow tag is basically a notice sign for search engines saying “don’t count this.”

I'll spare you the "why" site owners do this (main reason: deterring spammers) ... for now ... just know that a lot of site owners add this "no follow" attribute to all of their external links.

So ... if you hire someone on Fiverr (for example) ... to create some backlinks for you ... make sure they are expressly promising you "follow" links ... otherwise ... these "great high ranking" backlinks they are promising you ... are probably "no follow" links ... and are just about worthless.

My guess is that 99% of the folks ordering these type of SEO services have no clue about this distinction ... which is why people keep getting scammed.

In fact ... I would not have known about this distinction ... but for my having recently stumbled upon an article on this topic recently ... after I ordered some back links on Fiverr.

The link to the original article appears above ("link").

Anyway ... I figured I'd pass it along ... so no one (else) gets scammed.

Fooled me once. Gave em hell. I'll probably will get my money back. Not happy.

But the second guy I hired on Fiverr ... expressly promised "follow" links ... and the links he delivered ... all checked out. And sure enough ... my site got a nice boost in the rankings.

To investigate ... just right click the link in issue ... click inspect element ... and check for the "no follow" language above.

That's it. Carry on.

 

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[theag]

SMH.

Sounds like you read an article from, like, 2009.

This is very dangerous information that can ruin people's businesses. And I'm not talking about this supposed "scam".

The guy might have done you a favor by selling you no-follow links, because those dont hurt you so much if they suck (which they do, if they come from fiverr).

You are setting yourself up for a lot of pain.

Recommendation from somebody in the industry: stay the F*ck away from SEO, especially stuff like this, if you dont know EXACTLY what you are doing. It will ruin your business.

 

[Esquire]

Note to self -- Listen to the Ag.

Well ... glad I posted this thread ... if for no other reason ... than to get the "Ag Fingerwag"

I am no SEO expert.

Advice taken. Thanks Ag!

 

[borntodominate]

Depends, no follow links can help you create a natural looking backlink profile.

But honestly imo, seo at this point is a game you cannot win. Time to exploit other methods of driving traffic

 

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[Esquire]

Well ... just got my money back on Fiverr (via a site credit).

Compliments of @theag!

Guess I'll be buying a caricature of my girlfriend instead.

Much safer bet!



... or then again ... I could also buy a custom video of cows break-dancing ... decisions, decisions ... what to choose ...?

 

[borntodominate]

Well ... just got my money back on Fiverr (via a site credit).

Compliments of @theag!

Guess I'll be buying a caricature of my girlfriend instead.

Much safer bet!



... or then again ... I could also buy a custom video of cows break-dancing ... decisions, decisions ... what to choose ...?

buy social media followers

 

[Djs87]

Feel lucky you only lost a couple bucks dude. Anyone buying fiverr links for anything other than negative SEOing the competition, building parasites, or blasting a tier 2 is asking for it. It's one thing to build churn and burn junk sites doing adsense and affiliate offers, but if this is your real business, spam links are a great way to ruin it permanently.

Take this SEO lesson and apply it elsewhere in your business. Don't dive headfirst into something that seems too good to be true because it probably is. Always do your homework first. This isn't meant to insult OP because it's an honest mistake, but don't make it twice.

As for the no follow links, they are important for maintaining a natural backlink profile which is still probably worth more than 5 bucks. So imagine what good links would cost? Also, an SEO who tells you that pagerank matters anymore is probably unaware that it hasn't been updated in two years. There's a chance Google maintains the system internally but I wouldn't count on it. PR is dead.

Any SEO who's worth their weight will charge you your last good kidney for services. That or they're too busy making their own money to do someone else's SEO. This shit is an art. Takes time, creativity, and patience.

Your best bet is to probably stick to whitehat blogging and social media... Lay low for awhile lol

 

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[RHL]

People need to learn another valuable lesson too: You can't buy much of value for $5.00.

I've talked to two YouTubers who got Adsense permabanned buying views and likes off of Fiverr. Sony lost ONE BILLION total views to their videos when YT updated to sweep out cellular IP and botnet views.

When it comes to buying "fake" or "artificial" popularity, you can only game the system for so long.

 

[borntodominate]

People need to learn another valuable lesson too: You can't buy much of value for $5.00.

I've talked to two YouTubers who got Adsense permabanned buying views and likes off of Fiverr. Sony lost ONE BILLION total views to their videos when YT updated to sweep out cellular IP and botnet views.

When it comes to buying "fake" or "artificial" popularity, you can only game the system for so long.

I beg to differ

 

[Esquire]

Feel lucky you only lost a couple bucks dude. Anyone buying fiverr links for anything other than negative SEOing the competition, building parasites, or blasting a tier 2 is asking for it. It's one thing to build churn and burn junk sites doing adsense and affiliate offers, but if this is your real business, spam links are a great way to ruin it permanently.

Take this SEO lesson and apply it elsewhere in your business. Don't dive headfirst into something that seems too good to be true because it probably is. Always do your homework first. This isn't meant to insult OP because it's an honest mistake, but don't make it twice.

As for the no follow links, they are important for maintaining a natural backlink profile which is still probably worth more than 5 bucks. So imagine what good links would cost? Also, an SEO who tells you that pagerank matters anymore is probably unaware that it hasn't been updated in two years. There's a chance Google maintains the system internally but I wouldn't count on it. PR is dead.

Any SEO who's worth their weight will charge you your last good kidney for services. That or they're too busy making their own money to do someone else's SEO. This shit is an art. Takes time, creativity, and patience.

Your best bet is to probably stick to whitehat blogging and social media... Lay low for awhile lol

Negative SEOing the competition and building parasites ...? Hmmmm ... that is an angle I had not thought of before.

So if there are (for example) blogs showing up in search results ... talking shit about me ... that I want to kick back a few pages ... are you suggesting I pay someone on Fiverr to create shitty backlinks to them ...?

Because if so ... sure ... I'd pay $5 for that.
What do you think ...?

Would I specifically request shitty backlinks ...? Like ... hey ... create some backlinks to this or that blog from Russian gay porn sites ... or something like that ...?

I've got lovers ... and I've got haters ... so if I can kick some of the haters in the nuts with shitty backlinks ... I'm totally game for that.

What do you think ...?

Any recommendations as to what kind of shitty links to request ...?

 

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[Durete]

Hmm, that comes to the question: Anything that you can do to prevent someone sending shitty backlinks to your site?

 

[3things]

Negative SEOing the competition and building parasites ...? Hmmmm ... that is an angle I had not thought of before.

So if there are (for example) blogs showing up in search results ... talking shit about me ... that I want to kick back a few pages ... are you suggesting I pay someone on Fiverr to create shitty backlinks to them ...?

Because if so ... sure ... I'd pay $5 for that.
What do you think ...?

Would I specifically request shitty backlinks ...? Like ... hey ... create some backlinks to this or that blog from Russian gay porn sites ... or something like that ...?

I've got lovers ... and I've got haters ... so if I can kick some of the haters in the nuts with shitty backlinks ... I'm totally game for that.

What do you think ...?

Any recommendations as to what kind of shitty links to request ...?

In your scenario above, it's not necessarily about buying shitty links - you may not want to open that can of worms with competing sites, other website owners etc. it's about "reputation management" where you would create press releases, branded parasites, blogs, accounts etc that will naturally bump the stuff you want bumped off the front page of Google.

For your own name or brand it's quite easy to control the first couple of pages of Google results without resorting to anything that damages other people's sites and may come back to haunt you. You don't want to go pissing in other peoples ponds without knowing what your doing or what damage someone you piss off could end up inflicting on your own name/brand.

 

[nzerinto]

Hmm, that comes to the question: Anything that you can do to prevent someone sending shitty backlinks to your site?

No. It's a shitty situation, because at the moment the only thing you can do is proactively monitor your site using 3rd party link tools like Majestic or Ahrefs, to make sure you don't suddenly get an influx of (spammy/low quality) links, which might be an indicator of a competitor trying to do negative SEO on your site.

Also just to comment on the original point - not all "nofollow" links are created equal. All links from Wikipedia are "nofollow".....

 

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[Bila]

Cancelling all payments for SEO guy i have been doing business with for 2 years now could have bought a Chanel bag instead
Thanks guys, very valuable infos

 

[nzerinto]

Cancelling all payments for SEO guy i have been doing business with for 2 years now could have bought a Chanel bag instead

What an odd statement. If you haven't been getting results from the campaign, why has it taken 2 years to find this out? Finding out about follow/nofollow should have no bearing whatsoever on whether a campaign is providing ROI or not.

 

[Bila]

What an odd statement. If you haven't been getting results from the campaign, why has it taken 2 years to find this out? Finding out about follow/nofollow should have no bearing whatsoever on whether a campaign is providing ROI or not.

I am a service provider, 40% of my new clients come from " searching on Internet " ....So, that was the point of my intervention : I dont understand enough the ramifications of SEO to be paying somebody, every month, for it.

 

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[Vigilante]

We had an SEO guy on full time payroll for one of our clients. He worked hard. Deployed ALL of the latest tricks. Did everything right. Was a smart MBA guy from India.

When we fired him, we lost exactly zero traffic. None. Zero impact.

 

[Bila]

Exactly @Vigilante ...from reading the thread, my first thought was: my 40% new clients every months COULD be the result of Seo guy....and could be not after all ...until i have enough knowldge about it...keeping my money in my pocket instead

 

[Semmy]

Negative SEOing the competition and building parasites ...? Hmmmm ... that is an angle I had not thought of before.

So if there are (for example) blogs showing up in search results ... talking shit about me ... that I want to kick back a few pages ... are you suggesting I pay someone on Fiverr to create shitty backlinks to them ...?

Because if so ... sure ... I'd pay $5 for that.
What do you think ...?

Would I specifically request shitty backlinks ...? Like ... hey ... create some backlinks to this or that blog from Russian gay porn sites ... or something like that ...?

I've got lovers ... and I've got haters ... so if I can kick some of the haters in the nuts with shitty backlinks ... I'm totally game for that.

What do you think ...?

Any recommendations as to what kind of shitty links to request ...?

@Djs87 @Esquire you must be kidding, right?

That creates ZERO value and is plainly wasting your time and efforts better used serving people that are ready buy stuff from you and improving either that stuff or the way how you reach - anything else is reacting to other people and constantly looking in the back mirror instead of looking ahead.

As an former active adult webmaster I had an competing affiliate stealing my whole call to action texts and even cloning the blog design I did use at one point in the past. I kept innovating and changed my design and added some special twists on things that only I could do - I thought. Low and behold they kept back imitating things like me and even imitating the original company to make them look they are the original company (a strategy that works often in affiliate marketing). After complaining to the main company I did promote for not punishing other affiliates playing unfair I just shut down my sites after a while and moved on. It is misguided energy if the only thing you have to think of is "how to keep off the competition from playing unfair".

Of course being on the wrong side of the affiliate marketing game (hence: BEING the affiliate) is another mistake as you have complete lack of control of what you are promoting.

 

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[Djs87]

@Djs87 @Esquire you must be kidding, right?

Am I kidding? No. Re-read what I stated.

All I said was that using them for negative SEO is one of their only functional purposes. Patrol BHW and you will see this.

I never said negative SEO was a good idea. In fact, I think quite the opposite. I think anyone who would do that is kind of a prick. It's sort of an unwritten rule NOT to do it in the SEO community, but it still happens on occasion. I'd rather focus on building a good brand and do my own quality SEO. I don't worry much about my competition, at least never enough to take time out of my day for sabotage.

 

[theag]

We had an SEO guy on full time payroll for one of our clients. He worked hard. Deployed ALL of the latest tricks. Did everything right. Was a smart MBA guy from India.

When we fired him, we lost exactly zero traffic. None. Zero impact.

Sounds like he did a very good job then (I'm serious). Of course firing him has zero impact if he did solid work for you. SEO takes time. I dont understand your statement in that regard.

Would be more interesting to see how your organic traffic developed since you hired him.

And thats exactly the point of hiring somebody (good) fulltime instead of using an agency or freelancer btw.

Often the results with (good) agencies and freelancers are good as long as you have an active contract with them.

Many, even the top agencies, will just remove or change the links they built for you after you fire them. And I'm not talking about thousands of spam links. I'm talking about really good links. Links that cost $500-1000+ PER LINK to build.

 

[SBS.95]

Recommendation from somebody in the industry: stay the F*ck away from SEO, especially stuff like this, if you dont know EXACTLY what you are doing. It will ruin your business.

This should be mandatory reading for everyone on the forum. I see so many incorrect thoughts about SEO, and I'm far from some guru. The more I learn about SEO, the more I ignore it. The industry seems to be drifting more and more towards "build it and they will come", and that should mean good news if your content wasn't bought off of an Elance writer from Pakistan.

 

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[borntodominate]

This should be mandatory reading for everyone on the forum. I see so many incorrect thoughts about SEO, and I'm far from some guru. The more I learn about SEO, the more I ignore it. The industry seems to be drifting more and more towards "build it and they will come", and that should mean good news if your content wasn't bought off of an Elance writer from Pakistan.

True but I disagree, people need to do some actual marketing and not base everything on seo.

 

[SBS.95]

I disagree, people need to do some actual marketing and not base everything on seo

That is what I said--you should not be reliant on SEO. I didn't say that no marketing was required.

The internet is a big place, and even with quality content, you're not going to just blow up without doing any extra work. Some marketing will always be needed. But I am saying, given more budget ($$$ or time) to put into creating more quality content OR SEO services, it should usually be content, because that is usually the bottleneck.

 

[borntodominate]

That is what I said--you should not be reliant on SEO. I didn't say that no marketing was required.

The internet is a big place, and even with quality content, you're not going to just blow up without doing any extra work. Some marketing will always be needed. But I am saying, given more budget ($$$ or time) to put into creating more quality content OR SEO services, it should usually be content, because that is usually the bottleneck.

I agree, I think I just wanted to rant when I posted that lol

 

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[nzerinto]

We had an SEO guy on full time payroll for one of our clients. He worked hard. Deployed ALL of the latest tricks. Did everything right. Was a smart MBA guy from India.

When we fired him, we lost exactly zero traffic. None. Zero impact.

With all due respect Vig, that's a redundant statement. If the guy had already done (good) SEO, the site isn't going to "slide back" and start loosing traffic the minute SEO is stopped. If SEO is done correctly, the site will maintain traffic/ranking for a while. How long will depend on the niche/competition. I've seen sites maintain ranking/traffic for years after we "completed" work with the client, and in some cases, continue to increase.

If you mean that his work made no difference prior to starting and compared with "completing" his work, then that's obviously a different matter, and justifies firing him (for not providing an ROI).

Anyway, completely agree with @theag - for anyone that isn't clued up with SEO, it's best to stay away from it, and get better (short term) returns via paid marketing efforts instead.

 

[csalvato]

@theag hit the nail on the head with every single post here.

To reiterate, stay the F*ck away from SEO unless you know what you're doing. And if you REALLY wanna know how SEO works, it only takes a week to really figure out everything you need to know about it.

Really, 9 times out of 10, if you have to pay attention to your rankings, you got everything in your business a$$ backwards and need to probably re-evaluate your whole strategy.

EDIT: And once you know how SEO really works, you can hire someone to execute it pretty inexpensively.

 

[Tom.V]

Just here to give @theag some "trust flow"

If you don't understand SEO, find someone that does. Otherwise, you'll be looking for people like me to rid your site of its toxic links or to diagnose and put together a plan of action to fix over-optimization, which is not cheap in either regard.

 

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[Silverhawk851]

+1 to @theag , dangerous waters

Rather take my time and learn to convert on paid traffic.
Once you can buy traffic anywhere and convert successfully and profitably, you now hold your own reigns, so to speak, instead of Big G.
You have control.

SEO is NOT free, and has a massive opportunity cost due to the time it takes. Also high risk.

 

[Durete]

So with the sayings of "Stay away from SEO if you don't have a clue"

What do you think about automated plugins, such as YOAST SEO? Do they boost your SEO by a bit with all their automatic stuff, or should you just remove anything that has to do with SEO from your site if you don't know exactly how it works?