AP 0381: Is It Worth Buying Backlinks?

AskPat 381 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 381 of Ask Pat. Thank you so much for joining me today.

All right, here's today's question from Dean.

Dean Brown: Hello Pat. This is Dean Brown from ModernGreenLife.com. New blog looking at ways to reduce our carbon footprint. I have a question for you about buying backlinks. A year or two ago, you would see ads on places like Fiverr.com for 100, 200, or 300 back links. But, after Penguin and Panda, most services on offer are now for what's described as 10 quality backlinks. Is it worth buying backlinks in this way? Considering buying links purely as a way to get my site a little boost, and because I don't have the budget for full on paid traffic this moment in time. Thank you very much, and keep up the great work, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey Dean, thank you so much for the questions. Yeah, I remember those days, they weren't too long ago, and they were right when I was creating niche sites, and there were a lot more opportunities to boost your search engine rankings, and optimizations through things like that. Things like buying backlinks, or building private link networks, and all those types of things. Those strategies don't work out very well, and Google obviously is catching on to a lot of those tactics that used to work. A lot of those tactics do not work anymore. Of course you can now also see it represented in the Fiverr offerings. It's no longer 100, 500, 10,000. I saw one for 10,000 backlinks once.

I mean, can you imagine 10,000 random websites pointing to your website, how much … That just triggers Google to say, “Wow, okay. This person doesn't know what they're doing. They're looking for the shortcut, therefore let's actually penalize this website,” or remove it all together from the search engines, which has happened before. Now you're going to get these quote, “Quality links,” from these other sites, and just 10 of them because too many, and you're going to cause a red flag. But any sort of weird sort of buying backlinks, that's just, Google does not, not, not approve. Yes, 10, likely they aren't going to be able to find out. But if some of those websites are websites that these people who are selling these links from, if Google makes that pattern connection, which they have robots, and spiders, and algorithms that do this. If they see this one website that happens to be linking to 200 brand new sites that are all paying, it's just, it's just not going to be good for any of those sites that are there. Even if your site only has one of those links. Is it worthwhile to purchase back links? No. Never. Not for a million years at this point. What is worth it is spending time figuring out who or what other websites out there, it would be worthwhile to network with. To provide value to, to potentially get a link back. To guest post on, to be a guest interview on a particular show. Things that would give you a backlink because of the value that you're providing, not because of some payment that you made to somebody who's brokering these deals.

You want real backlinks. Real backlinks that come from real recommendations. That's what … Backlinks still matter, and they matter because it's a vote in Google's eyes, that a site is worth ranking higher than others, based on a particular topic. If you can get legit backlinks, legit votes. Votes of confidence from other bloggers, other podcasters, other websites out there that are linking back to you and they're real, that's going to help you. Unfortunately it's not a thing that you can just say, “Okay, this is what I'm going to get now.” Then you pay, and then you get it.

It takes time, it takes time to nurture these relationships. It also takes time to write quality articles that can be posted on other peoples sites, that other people would welcome as guest posts on their site to link back to your own. You could also follow the advice from Kimanzi Constable, who was a guest on SPI Podcast Episode 145. Which was titled, How to Become a Contributing Writer on Large Media Sites. How to Become a Contributing Writer on Large Media Sites. When I say that, I mean sites like Huffington Post, or Entrepreneur.com or any other niche magazine type websites that are in your particular niche. Entrepreneur Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Life Hacker. Those are all ones that I know that relate to the entrepreneurial world.

You may just have to dig a little bit to see, or perhaps you already know what other websites in your space are sort of the top media sites for your particular niche, that you can then become a contributing writer toward. I would definitely follow the advice from SPI Podcast episode 145. You can check that out at Smart Passive Income Podcast, Session 145. Kimanzi gives away the whole formula for how to cut in line on these websites, and get ahead of the pact, and get your article approved so that you can get a mention on these sites. Which do a lot of other—it gets your article written on these major media sites. These are great for a number of reasons. Many of them will allow you to put a link back to your website, or some sort of byline, which is great. It gets that backlink.

Even more important than that, you're going to get social proof by having your article posted on these sites that a lot of people in your space likely know. It gives you a lot of social proof, and it also gives you a lot of authority. If you become a contributing writer, especially if that writing is great, and people talk about it, and people share it. It's only going to help your brand, and that's where I would start. I would never start with, “Okay, I'm starting from brand new. Where can I buy some backlinks?” That's not going to help.

I would start with the mindset of, “Okay, I'm just starting brand new. Where can I get in front of the most people?” This is going to be on other sites where your audience already exists, or on large media sites like this where there's quite an array of people in your target audience, and other target audiences too. Again like I said, this is the way I would approach it, and do not buy backlinks. Never do that. If you feel like … We're at a point now with building websites, where if you feel like something's not legit, if there's a little bit of a weird feeling about some tactic you're using, you probably shouldn't be using that tactic.

There's also an article on the Smart Passive Income blog that talks about back links. It's called, The Backlinking Strategy That Works 2014 and Beyond. What you're going to do is look up, “Backlinking strategy that works.” These are white hat, or gray hat tactics depending on how you feel, that will really give you some more information on how you can, in a legitimate way, get more backlinks to your website. Ways that are very creative, and this is an article, a guest article actually from Brian Dean over at Backlinko.com. That's, again, another great resource all on its own. BackLinko, B-A-C-K-L-I-N-K-O, like Back Link with an O at the end, dot com. Go ahead and check that out. That'll give you a lot of great advice for other strategies you can use, other ninja tactics to get some legit back links, to help your site rank better.

Again, those large media sites, and also reaching out to other influencers, and potentially getting a guest post on their sites, or having them guest post on your site, those types of things. Social media shares, connecting. Again, it's all about the networking, it's all about the building relationships, which is what a lot of people don't want to do. It's unfortunate, because that's really where you get the most bang for your buck. Dean, I hope that helps you out. I wish you all the best of luck. Thank you so much for your question, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

To finish off, here's a quote from Leo Burnett. He said, “What helps people, helps business.” Another short and sweet quote, and I love quotes like this because it's so short, but easy to remember. “What helps people, helps business.” That's really what it's all about. Finally, as I said yesterday. Please if you have a couple minutes, head on over to SPISurvey.com. For the next couple weeks we're collecting a ton of data from the audience so we can better serve you in the future. Please check it out, it would help out tremendously. SPISurvey.com. Thank you, I appreciate you. Check out the survey, bless you. Chat soon, see you tomorrow. Bye.