Hiring link builders
As most of you probably know, link building is a time consuming activity and manually requesting links can be the most boring SEO activity. Although this requesting needs to be done to get a good link basis, most of the time it is just too expensive to do it yourself. So when do you hire someone and who do you hire for which job? In this article I will give my opinion and hopefully you will all comment to give me your thoughts.
Link acquisition methods
In linkbuilding we distinguish between three basic ways how new links are acquired.
- Script driven links
These links are generated by scripts. Sites like Google scour the web and generate links. But also RSS feeds that are syndicated and other scripts generate links. - Requested links
These links are requested or submitted by the website owner or someone directly associated to him. It requires a manual or automated action to get the links. - Human driven links
These links are placed by people without the request of the webmaster. Just because they like the site or because it is very relevant for the content on their website.
Manually requested links
There are many link opportunities that require some kind of action on your part to get the link. For instance to get listed in directories, you can make use of automated directory submission services, but quality directories are still human edited. Your success rates will dramatically drop when you request all links with the same message.
A link request should be a personal message to the human editor and that is hard to automate. Not only directory submissions, but every link that requires a request needs to be as personal as possible. Even paid links need to be requested and a personal bond can make it cheaper.
Request administration
First create a list of every place where you would like to get a link. Once a list of possible link partners has been made, check which links are requestable. Human driven links can be gotten with just marketing and promotion, but once you have relevant content, you can also request the link. Script driven links are maintained automatically, but sometimes submitting for instance your RSS feed is required to get listed. It can at least speed up the process. You can use link administration software to help you categorize the links.
When do you automate, outsource or do your own link requests?
For every requestable link, find out what content is the most suitable for that site. Plan the creation of new content/linkbait for some of those links. See if that linkable content can be created through automation, requires normal written text or requires your expertise.
Then categorize the request process itself between automated, manual outsource and manual do-it-yourself. Don’t look just at the technical possibilities, but also look at the value of that link for your ranking, should it be placed. Use the RAT checklist to help determine its value. Also look at the quality of outsourced link builders. I use both cheap labour for easy links, experts for more difficult links and myself for the hardest links.
Making it easy for cheap labour
Marketing expertise is a trade you won’t find in cheap labour and a link request consists mainly of marketing. You have to model the link request process so that the email contact is just a tiny part of it all and the email contact can be outsourced to cheap labour. This can be done by:
- creating specific linkable content for every group of linkers,
- creating exchange methods (return links, promotion, money, etc.) as reward when your content isn’t enough,
- creating a couple of standard first messages that can be easily personalized to become unique,
- instructing ways to research the linker and his interests and standard ways to personalize the request message to that linker,
- instructing how to combine the right content for the right linker with the right anchor text and description and still making it unique,
- instructing link worth and when to use exchange methods and
- instructing how to react to certain replies.
As you can see you still have to do quite some work, but your effort doesn’t need to grow with an increasing amount of requests. If the request process involves thousands of personalized emails, you can better use cheap labour than doing it yourself. And you can always outsource this link building supervision to an expert and let him prepare everything for the cheap labour.
Hiring cheap labour
Sending emails and following your instructions requires: language skills, internet access and supervision. The language skills required determine how cheap the work can be.
People from India can be used for English. They’re relatively cheap, have internet access and also have highly educated people available to do the toughest work and give local supervision. For Dutch you can use people from Surinam; The French have northern Africa; For Spanish you can use South America; And the Chinese have their own cheap labour.
But most of the time I need quality work and I use local people. Local people can connect better to the linker and success rates are much higher. I hire students and housewives because the work can be done from home and whenever they want. When you pay them for every successfull request, they’ll be extra motivated. The Dutch language skills are better than people from Surinam and they are more creative in persuading the linker. Most of the time they also have more feeling with the product or service they are link building for.
Conclusion
- Hire linkbuilders as cheap as possible, but differentiate by skills required for a certain success rate.
- Hire separately for link bait creation and link acquisition.
- Hire locally for harder links and find people that could understand the field they are linkbuilding for.
- Hire experts to prepare, instruct and supervise the whole project. This is a real sub-expertise of search engine marketing and most SEO’s should stick with code and content. I do most of it myself, but that is because I’m a real cheapskate ;)
July 27th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
For my Dutch readers here are a few partners to check:
M4M for link building, buying and negotiation services.
Linkbuilder.nl for using housewives to request links.
Studentenwerk for cheap student linkbuilders.
July 27th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Link Building isn’t that difficult, you can automate part of the proces (discovery), but it stays labour-intensive.
Offcourse there’re shortcuts: buy bulk or non-relevant links.
Then you come with the dilemma: “everything what you do now is on you’re record for tomorrow, Google has an indefinite memory capacity to store the history of you’re website and I believe they (will) use that data.
Read about it in ‘Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data‘.
There are different angles you can play the game, but I would stay away from ‘as cheap as possible (volume)’ you don’t need thousand of links to get results.
Go for the right kinda links (hubs and authorities) and you get some bonuspoints for that; you’re in the right ‘neighbourhood’ and they’re much harder to emulate by you’re competition.
So if you serieus hire an professional, their experience and finesse will be a great investment for the future of the website.
July 27th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
You’re absolutely right Martijn. You need quality links.
That is why I do the discovery part myself and even most other parts. But email requests and contact is something time-consuming. Research on a website owner to get the email personalized just right is also something that can become expensive if you do it yourself. Hire the right skills, but try to minimize the cost.
July 28th, 2007 at 1:11 am
It’s very time-consuming, but the requests and contacts are very important (so many nuances and variables) that I would prefer them to do them personally.
From here on it’s the art of the deal, you try to het them as cheap as possible from webmasters who want to sell you links, preferbly *only* me :)
Here lies the next problem, you don’t want them out of the ‘link-market’, -besides artificial pumped sites- lots of linksellers want to sell as much as possible and aren’t really selective who they sell to etc. That doesn’t make it any eassier.
In the end, it’s very time-consuming and sometimes boring work, most of the people want to do as less as possible, it’s going for the extra mile that gives you the advantage.
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:48 am
Good point. I like how you use local people to link build in other countries. or giving them credit for every link they can create. this sounds like a great idea!
August 8th, 2007 at 5:20 am
Good article, but you could have mentioned where we can find these cheap link workers, the ones I am finding charge a FORTUNE! I am talking $8 for a p2 link, unbelivable!
August 8th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Price depends on what you are willing to do yourself (the preparations). In India you can get both cheap and expensive labour. If you just leave the sending of personalized emails to indians, you can hire any company or student job agency and get it cheap. If you’re not willing to put the extra effort in yourself, you will have to hire indian specialized companies and probably pay 5-10$ per link (for instance: http://www.theseoworld.com/one_way_link_building.html is about 5$ per pr2 link).
Just don’t focus too much on PR. More important: You should have a varied link profile from all walks of life. With any anchor text, any PR, any TrustRank and age, and steadily build up over time. With linkbuilding services under 5$ you are more likely to get links just from a link network that can be easily detected by search engines. And even a PR 5 site marked as part of that network can’t pass much linkjuice to you.
In linkbuilding, cheap can mean short lived, so make sure the link sources aren’t overmilked cows that can be penalized any moment.
This is also my warning to linkbuilding services: Don’t overmilk your cows! Offer link request services in stead of links from your own websites.
September 27th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
If you’re looking for cheap linkbuilding services, you can try My Agent of Value www.myagentofvalue.com. The company, Agents of Value, not only offers linkbuilding services but also has webmasters, programmers, graphic designers, all of which you can hire for a long-term project. The rates are fixed monthly, no matter what projects you want done (the rates vary according to their position).
Agents of Value isn’t Indian or Dutch. It’s a company based in Philippines, and Filipinos are as skilled in English communications and internet marketing as Indians and Dutch are. It’s really worth it!
December 5th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Just don’t go for buying or selling links. Google can detect the link buying now. Go for ethical and relevant link building as neuroseoservices.com is offering to their client. Its affordable and ethical.
December 21st, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I’m not sure I’d trust farming out link building to anyone, especially when the motivator is on a commission basis. It seems like a good way to get a penalty. What I’ve been seeing lately is linkbaiting by making controversial postings, such as blind items. Makes one wonder their true intentions.
December 24th, 2007 at 9:29 am
The way I do it is with strict rules on acquiring the links. The students get paid per hour, but they can get a higher hourly rate if their successrate increases. All the preparation for these link requests is done by somebody I educated and trust. My main advice is to use somebody you can trust to do the link verification and administration.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Hiring people to do SEO is kind of tricky.
You can get your site banned in no time if you hire a SEO rookie.
I would not hire a SEO man ever.
Wasted money on him + wasted money in buying the domain. What’s the point. Nothing to win here
March 31st, 2008 at 9:21 am
Hiring link builders is tricky, but you should keep full controll yourself.
It is best to get the link builders as an intern or as temp. This way they work from your office and you can instruct them anyway you want. If needed they can even use your company email address.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Even, why hiring a SEO company or a link builder, if you have a website which is useful to your visitor, then people will automatically give you the link.
What you think?
April 8th, 2008 at 11:55 am
@Amit: in an ideal world that would work…but first you need to be discovered to get thoose links.
So you need links form other websites —> to get noticed/discovered —> great content will attract more links –> resulting in higher rankings —> more visitors.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
@ Martijn, your ideal world is called link-bait :) Though that takes time..
Links aren’t the first things you need, you can also do it the other way around:
Make more out of your visitor then 0.03 ct a visit (affiliate marketing)-> Buy traffic through adwords -> get discovered -> stop buying traffic and make a living.