Niche edits have become very popular in the SEO world. Basically, these involve the link seller placing a link on an already established page.
Ryan thought this would be an interesting test to see whether there is any benefit from a link coming from an old page.
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The next one is from Ryan. Does a link from an aged page beat a link from a brand new page? This comes out when you're talking abouts Niche Edits and is highlighted right here. If you don't know what that is it's basically someone has a website there's an article on there. It's a great article, he wrote it a year ago.
You send an email to him saying, "Hey, great article. Can you drop this link inside of there with this anchor text." Then they will tell you yes or no. Most of my outreach that I do for my own agency and for my clients is Niche Edit type outreach. Why write a whole new article when they have a good one up there? You praise them, say it's good. Be a little bit funny and then say, "Hey, would you mind doing this?" nine times out of 10 – like, I can send 200 of those emails and I'll end up with 10 backlinks out of it. That's ten so that's pretty good.
Then, you'll get the people who sell links for $50 and whatever and I just ignore all those people because I'm offering them something in trade as well as I'll get you some reasonable linking from SEO This Week, for example. If I'm doing it for them or a client site or just doing some additional resources and add that piece of ours and get a nice reciprocal link. That's a trade. That's the value of those Niche Edits.
You can buy them. Be careful of your providers just because sometimes those Niche Edits are sape in nature but it's really on them. Basically, all that really means is they got access to the website by hook or by crook or just dropping the links in there and turning this part into a backlink but when you go there it doesn't look like a backlink. That's one of those hooks or by crooks. They still work. It works really well and they don't necessarily do harm to the website that the backlink is on. It's just there.
There's quite a few providers that were selling those as real solid Niche Edits but really what they're doing is they got hooked into those sape network kind of thing and they are selling it that way. Most people really, at the end of the day, don't care unless they want to write... The more white ~ pretend like they care but they're getting the value out of these Niche Edits regardless. So, that's what a Niche Edit is. He looked at those ~ building it on brand new guest posts, building it on a brand new PBN link or whatever.
Here's where the new link and here's where the old link and he actually gave the old link a whole lot more link or work to do. This one's not only got to beat this one but it's got to beat the rest of the control pages. We expected those to do pretty well and I looked at it and he's got the new link indexed. There is a new link. The old link went up a little bit.
Then, the new link and then the old link and then the old link just said "boom" and take over. You'd see that there's some timeframe here. The 24th, he doesn't have the data on that one but there is some time before that old link kicked in – and I think it's in relation to, at some point here at this period so he had to resubmit the test page. He resubmitted it and wait a little bit. Then, boom!, it kicked right in and the new link dropped right back down.
The lesson here is that old links are actually probably better because old links, I'm assuming, have some power to it from backlinks but it takes a little bit more time to see that in there. So, if we're going to do this Niche Edit stuff, which I recommend and there's a lot of people that do, there's some steps that you need to take.
Step one is to do the research and make sure that the Niche Edit is on a topical page. Two, make sure that it has links already. Then, three is after the link is placed make sure it's recrawled to force that through. You can use something like speedlinks, Colinkri or Omega to get those pages recrawled. If it's your own network just resubmit that page to the Search Console to force to recrawl and save yourself some money. That will kick in. ~ that time period that Ryan had to wait went by a lot faster.
DORI: Actually, that's part of our packages. We're doing Niche Edits and we're doing them on HTML sites. So, we have a whole group of HTML sites that we go in and we change then put the Niche Edit on and have it recrawled. Sometimes we're doing it on inner pages but they have to have a TrustFlow of 20. That's our minimum for those. So far they're working out pretty good and we have a link spinning thing going on on that too. People can submit a piece of code to us and we can send that link form, live there and take the value of link echo.
I was going to say six months ago I did a whole series on domains and age. It didn't matter if the domain had age but it mattered if the domain had content on it. It didn't matter if it had links coming in but if you had content and age it beat out a new domain. So, age and content. Anytime you buy a site just install a WordPress blog on it or something. It made a difference.
CLINT: That's a really good point there. If you're like me and you collect a whole bunch of domains that are good ideas that you want to do then don't get around to them. When you buy them get into a habit of putting even a single page on there just so it has some content and builds some age.
You are inadvertently but strategically you're building that up. You got some content on there. If you don't use it for anything else you drop some backlinks on there once in a while and leverage those at the same time. Still, at some point, you're getting a return of investment on those and they are not really hard to do.