As SEOs, we're constantly bombarded with opinion statements about which links are good and bad.
Google ignores X type of links, don’t use profile links, they don’t work and could get you penalized, forum profile links are wrong, forum profile links are okay, blog comments are good, and Edu links are the best links to get. I’m sure you’ve heard it all.
Testing will help us better understand what is really working today.
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Transcription below:
For rankings increases so there's 10 tests in this one test here which is pretty good because there's a lot of missed etc and I think we've all heard them and I got them written down in their forum profile links are bad, forum profiles are fine, blog comments are bad, blog comments are good.
EDU are the best links to get because they're the most trusted EDU's are now the worst things to get because the spent because of the fake scholarships link building method that went around for a while.
And like I said, I I'm pretty sure you guys heard all of those myths. And so we wanted to start testing different types of links. In this case, the tester did profile links on high DR sites.
EDU backlinks, he set up one powerful link, and then it's tier 2s to it, to boost it up even more. And then we use the PBN link. From our homepage PBN.
The homepage of a PBN is one link. And he tested those against each other.
Here's the setup. And everything I won't go too far deep into that. But you see nine profile links that were dofollow, 6 Edu backlinks that are dofollow. 1 powerful backlink was 50 tier 2s, all dofollow. And then the homepage of the PBN. And here's where they started out. Actually, this is where they finished.
Yeah, that's where they finished. And then in their order. So the winner of these four tests was, all of them provided a boost of some type. But in the order of power, the nine profile links actually beat everything else. And that's significant because when people are asked, and I'm in a lot of groups and stuff, right? So when someone recommends profile links, they're instantly jumped on by the white hat crowd. Oh, no, those are bad, those are spam, they don't work anymore.
Google filters them out. Well, the test is different. Not only did they increase rankings, but they beat the other sets. Another one that is often told is one, high power backlink from a relevant website is more valuable then in this case, 9 profile links from non related websites. Well, the test proved it. But tthat's incorrect. And it's still kind of, this is actually really good.
Dori: Do we know when it says high DR for the PBN link? Do we know what DR that was? And did they happen to get the trust flow of that? That would make a huge difference.
Clint: It wasn't any setup.
Dori: Okay because you're getting 9 links compared to 1 link. And I am a proponent of I believe, you know, one link from a strong site is better than 100, I don't know? PR zeros are what trustful zeros. Possibly, I mean, actually we should test that out. But I would say, you know, there's going to be a point where that 1 link is going to overtake those 100s on whatever that DR is, whatever that trust flow is.
Clint: I think that could be true if you got a New York Times link on a high visibility story that's generating a whole lot of backlinks, that obviously could probably be 9 profile links. But how many people are gonna have access to these hyperlinks right?
Dori: Yeah, I would like to shoot off a high trust flow link into that, you know, off of a page and see the bids that 9 profiles. And then again, you know, I guess profile links are just on authoritative sites. They don't have any authority themselves right?
Clint: Twitter, Product Hunt, asp.net, which is Microsoft's .net form. These are all high trust flow websites. But the downside is there's no inter linking.
Dori: You know, it's not about the site, it's about the page. So a profile page wouldn't necessarily have much authority at all correct? I mean, I've not done profile links at all, actually, ever in any of my linking history, so I'm kind of curious about this.
Clint: Well you don't have no entities, you slacker.
Dori: Hahahaha
Clint: Profile links established entities. So if you're following entity SEO, and you're establishing your business and your brand is the entities, you naturally attract profiling. And the fastest way to get a large set of profile links is to go to know them, and just pay for their service to get these 630 web 2.0 profile links built out from your brand.
If you're a proponent of IFTTT networks, or what is the other one, social fortress or recent occasion, you are already doing profile link building. And you are just actually doing it smarter because you are using the syndication services to repost all of your stuff. So you're building upon the authority that that page generates within that social platform. And, and some of those platforms, you actually get some Titans and some internal rankings and stuff too. So they're not entirely always orphan pages in the profiling section, so you do carry a lot of that boost.
Dori: I assumed that they were orphan pages, but this is gonna make me look into profile links and services a lot more.
Clint: This is the second set right here. And he didn't like label them for this one, kind of stuck to made it hard to figure out but 9 profile links again, 60 to use, one powerful backlink with the tier 2s again and the profile links, one again for the second set of tests.
So, my guess is and I didn't get talked to him before the webinar, but my guess is he looked at the initial test results, he had the same reaction that Dori did. What? No, I can just do this with PBNs and it should always win every time.
So, he retested everything and that's how he ended up with 10 tests total. Was just kind of re verified the results, which is really cool. Because you know, it's it's nice to know, what works on your website?
And it's nice to know what works universally on most websites and having the 2 tests or 8 in this case, bouncing that out just kind of kind of proves that these types of links, you know, everyone noticed them. Don't create those, they're not good for you. Well, the test is different, right? He said it would probably be interesting to actually like this is a powerful profile backlink and then this one was the PBN. So here's the PBN right here.
Dori: I'd like to know. Go into majestic.
Clint: We don't care about no majestic.
Dori: Yeah, we do. Trust flow as where it's at.
Clint: It's only as accurate as the data that they have. Let's see, I am signing, he kept me signed in, Trust flow through.
Dori: Well, there you go.
Clint: You are of 17. Back links, 104 and let's try this. Fresh domains, 45
Dori: It doesn't even matter how many domains, which I mean that?
Clint: Well, it does because the domains that are linking to the page drive this.
Dori: But you can have 10 links that you can give a site, a PR30. You know, or even a couple links, if they're from high trust flow or high URL are pages.
Clint: Right but when you look at, in my case, here when you're looking at referring domain count, you're looking at data set. How much data does majestic have? from 45 domains? I don't have storage.
Dori: Oh Okay, I'm sorry.
Clint: How much data is href working at? So that's why I look at it.
Dori: Does a href have historic or fresh? They just have the one data set right? Because if you go to majestic, you see that they have in the historic more than 104. Yeah, so that's interesting. Okay, yeah I get what you're talking about data set. I was just arguing wrong point.
Clint: I don't know, I would be mad at you if I found that in your network. But they really depends.
Dori: It's not gonna be in the manual network, it could be in something I did. Tend not to. Trust flow zeros, I let go. But normally, anything less than Trust flow 10 I let go. But see, it's still natural, you know, you're going to need 50% of trust flow zero sites. Actually I'm not going to say that's what you need.
That's typically what I have found to be normal in a backlinking profile. And I've done a shit ton of backlinking profiles. So my thought process if I'm only backlinking with my PBNs, and that's mostly what I only do, I want to have a natural profile. So I want low profiles on top the high profiles. I just want those high profiles to be, you know, more anchor text rich.
Clint: Yeah, I wouldn't, this domain here, I wouldn't buy another PBN.
Dori: No, I would definitely not buy that as a PBN. But no, there has to be a trust flow of 20 or above to start out with. But you know, your too down the road, they might have lost links and lose some of that, and that's when I'll let them go out of the network. But I'll mainly keep them if they're a trust flow of 10 or above. We don't buy those. That's not what we start out with.
Clint: Okay, so end of the day, 2 tests, the profile link is one, as you see from the analysis of the PBN page, probably not the best link for that maybe there could have been a choice of picking up something a little bit higher.
So, certainly, some room for improvement or at least some retests. And you can just bounce us around and actually do this for yourself because every web page we react to something differently. Redo or do this on your own site and test that and then see where you're getting actually the best bang for your buck because at the end of the day the purpose of this test. Are you wasting money buying profile links? Are you wasting money buying PBN links from provider x? are you wasting your time boosting your profile links? Or should you be buying EDU's?
Individual websites will react differently even though we get the same result in these tests, then this test will. So we duplicate this and then go out and try some different variations. PBN links, some forum links, that kind of stuff, citations and see what you get. And ultimately what ends up happening is you're going to develop a link process that you'll do every time for sites in that niche.
If you're an agency and your niche down, that's perfect because you know exactly what works. And if you're an information site, it's even easier because once you get it nailed down, you can rinse and repeat across the board, and really go to town with it. Dori you have something?
Dori: Yeah, I just said this really opened up my eyes to profile links, and even the small number of that can be useful. So at the end of the day, I'm like, oh, wow, okay, profile links. They're not a waste of time.
Clint: Nope, totally not. We mentioned Angie's links, Angie's List? Angie's links, I think is what it was called. Yeah, every month she would send 50 in a PDF, she would send 50 places you can go and get these profile links. And it actually worked really well. I wish I could actually find some archives of those lists and bring those back and see what we could do with those. That'd be pretty cool.