[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]
If you’re an SEO, chances are, you’ve recommended link building as a tactic. And, unless you work for a very trusting firm, you’ve probably been met with the question, “When will we see a return on our investment, and how much will we see?”
This is a question I’ve been asked numerous times, but never had a good answer for. The truth is, a new link doesn't affect rankings immediately. That makes it hard to tie an individual link to SERP rankings increases, since there will usually be several other links and on-page changes made to a target page between the time when you get that first link and when you finally see increases in rankings.
So, I set out to figure this out myself. I'm lucky enough to be working for a company with nearly 200,000 indexed pages, which gets hundreds of new links each month naturally, through PR and through my link building efforts. That means I've got a lot of pages that only got 1–2 links in the last 6 months, and didn't go through many on-page changes.
I picked out 76 links pointing to pages which are all similar to each other in content, and we didn't change that content (significantly) for 6 months. I focused on rankings for target keywords with a 25–35% Keyword Difficulty Rating. I looked at two versions of their target keywords, so I could have a bit more data. The results aren't super surprising to SEOs, but they're often questioned by the managers of SEOs, and now you have graphs to prove what you've been saying all along.
It takes 10 weeks on average to see 1 rank jump
More links do have a more immediate effect. Jacob at Exstreamist promoted some material that got him around 20 links to one of his pages, which was being outranked by other pages with about 6 more inbound links. It took his page 5–10 weeks to move from #9 to #5.
It seems that each link has a small to medium effect initially, but that effect increases over time. If you add a lot of links at once, you're not only going to see faster results, you're going to see much bigger results over time.
The lower the rank, the more effect a link has
The pages that I observed that were already ranking on the first page of SERPs didn't show much of a rankings increase with one link, barely moving over one spot in 22 weeks. In contrast, pages ranking on the second or deeper pages of SERPs took off after 8–9 weeks.
Keep in mind that I am working with a fairly small data set, so I don't recommend that you promise a 10 spot jump after 22 weeks.
Higher DA will move the needle faster
Wondering where DA 50+ links are on this graph? I didn’t have enough to pages other than the homepage to get meaningful averages. Sorry, guys.
Unsurprisingly, a higher DA will have a bigger effect — in fact, you can see that the average rank change for a page that got a link from a site with a DA below 25 actually dropped after 13 weeks, then recovered to barely two ranks up.
I generally have a rule that I don’t want to spend any time or money on sites with DAs under 25. This chart shows that they’re not completely devoid of value, but be prepared for a very, very small change in rank with these guys.
Interestingly, both the DA 0–25 and DA 25–50 sets showed their first big jump after 10 weeks, but anecdotally, I've heard that higher DA links will have faster effects. This may be because higher DA sites get crawled more often (so the link will be discovered sooner), but I think this may be a purposeful delay in the algorithm. Google's probably taking a bit more time to trust a link from a lower-quality site.
Cool! So, if I start link building now, I'll see results in 10 weeks or sooner!
Actually, no. It takes a while to get links from a (legitimate) link building campaign. Each step is going to take a varying amount of time, based on the company you work for and the resources you already have. Here’s a list of steps you should keep in mind.
1. Getting the resources
Finding an agency (1–3 months)
The easiest route when you’re starting out is to hire an agency, since they’ll come prepared with a whole team of experienced link builders and will recommend their own tried-and-true strategies. Based on my experience watching businesses scope out Distilled when I worked there, the decision-making process is going to take you 1–3 months. It can be more if you’re a large company with a lot of bureaucracy, or if you’re trying to get a really good deal. Once you’ve chosen your partner in crime, you’ll usually have to wait a couple of weeks to a month to formally start.
Hiring a link builder in-house (1–2 months)
If it’s easier for you to hire a person than an agency, or if you think this is the best long-term strategy, you may end up needing to hire someone. The best candidates here are going to be people with link building experience, a customer service background, and/or bloggers who have successfully built up their own communities. According to Fast Company, it takes about 23 days to hire someone, so include that in your timeline.
Work with PR (almost immediate)
You can work with your PR team to start optimizing their media hits to also include good links. The success of this strategy will vary based on whether you’re going for general Domain Authority link building — in which case, all of those homepage links they’re getting will help you a lot — or trying to build Page Authority to individual landing pages, in which case they’ll probably have a hard time helping you out.
It's worth pointing out that I don't know any SEO who relies solely on PR wins to drive their link building strategy, so branch out if at all possible. If you're low on budget, though, try buying your PR team some drinks and getting them on your side.
2. Coming up with a link building strategy (2 weeks–1 month)
Once you’ve got link builders working for you, you’re going to need to come up with reasons why people will want to link to you. Here are some broad ideas, from fastest to longest ramp-up time:
Your company as a resource (1 week)
One way to get links is to find pages that are listing resources for something that your company provides. For example, if you’re Lyft, you can look for blogs and other sites that list ways you can make money with a flexible schedule.
Your potential here is going to vary based on what your company does and how well you understand the solutions your business offers and who appreciates them. Allow at least a week to prospect potential sites to reach out to.
Your expertise as a resource (2 weeks–1 month)
People are always looking for experts online, and your company probably has some valuable knowledge you can share. For example, if you’re Periscope Data, a company that lets you turn your database into graphs and tables for easier understanding, you might have a hard time finding many sites that are looking for your exact product. But you can put together advice on how to properly write SQL, and boom: thousands of more linking opportunities!
In this case, you’re going to need to both prospect to find the right sites to connect with, then you’re going to want to offer either quotes, guest posts, or resources on your site to entice them. That’ll take a few weeks to a month.
Infographics (1–3 months)
Infographics may be a little overused by SEOs, but high-quality visual assets can get a lot of attention. Just keep in mind that if you don’t work closely with your PR team, you may end up with a lot of posts sharing your infographic, but not linking back to your site.
To put together a good infographic, you’re going to need a compelling idea, clever/unique data, and a good visual designer. They’ll take you at least two months as you get started (but bank on three), though you may be able to get the time down to one month, if your company is a smoothly running machine.
In-depth research (1–3 months)
Write a really unique or really well-researched, well-written article, and you can probably get a lot of shares even without a visual component. This works best for companies that are leaders in their specific field and have a lot of data that their upper management is okay with them sharing.
Expect for this to take just as much time as an infographic — your writer needs just as much time, if not more, as a visual designer. OKCupid’s (previously) famous blog took 2–4 weeks of developer time and 4–8 weeks of a writer’s time for each post.
3. Executing (2 weeks–1 month)
Once you’ve got your strategies in place, you’re going to need to email each prospect, possibly going back and forth with them as they take their time to get back to you, post the wrong link, or need more persuading. You may get a few immediate wins, but remember that you’re not paying them, so you’re at the bottom of their priority list.
Kicking off a link building campaign? Here’s what to plan for:
- 1–4 months: Find a link building agency and start them at the beginning of a month, OR
- 1 month: Find an in-house link builder
- 1 month: Come up with your top link building strategies
- 1–3 months: Prospect for potential sites to target, and pull together the content that you need to entice those links
- 2 weeks–1 month: Execute! It’ll take awhile to write all the emails you need to write, and respond to the feedback you get
- 5–10 weeks: Wait for those links to take effect! Tell your team not to panic for at least 10 weeks (although effects will continue to grow beyond that)
All in all, that means that it may take you 6 months–1 year from beginning to end before you start seeing noticeable effects from your link building efforts.
As an SEO, I feel the need to reiterate: SEO is an investment. Yes, it’s going to take you a lot of time to get those results. But do you see how those rankings keep moving up and to the right, even after you’ve secured those links? Set your manager’s expectations that this is going to be a long process, but the money you pay now is going to pay off continually as long as you keep on top of your competition.
Good luck, and happy link building!
Kristina, thank you for sharing your research with us.
Albeit a small sample size, I still find your data interesting. Dissenters might poke at a few flaws, the sample size, the anecdotal nature of the research, but I find it valuable. To me, there are far too many variables in any site's unique SEO situation with each unique keyword and each unique link acquired to really ever come to definitive conclusions.
That said, allow me to share a couple of my thoughts on some other variables potentially worth considering...
"...a company with nearly 200,000 indexed pages, which gets hundreds of new links each month naturally, through PR and through my link building efforts."
I'd be curious about the number of internal links pointing towards each URL you tracked rankings for that received new external links. As you mention, hundreds of natural links are rolling in each month, likely towards pages that have internal links on them, likely towards pages you tracked rankings for. It would be another interesting data point in my opinion. Was there a difference in ranking lag between highly internally linked pages and less internally linked pages? Did the natural links rolling in and flowing link equity through the site significantly impact anything?
"Interestingly, both the DA 0–25 and DA 25–50 sets showed their first big jump after 10 weeks, but anecdotally, I've heard that higher DA links will have faster effects. This may be because higher DA sites get crawled more often (so the link will be discovered sooner), but I think this may be a purposeful delay in the algorithm. Google's probably taking a bit more time to trust a link from a lower-quality site."
I think you're making some dangerous conclusions in the section about DA. Specifically, equating "low DA" to "low quality". DA is simply a quantitative metric that does not account for quality in any way. A low DA site may be of superb quality, but simply new, or lesser linked.
"Unsurprisingly, a higher DA will have a bigger effect — in fact, you can see that the average rank change for a page that got a link from a site with a DA below 25 actually dropped after 13 weeks, then recovered to barely two ranks up.
I generally have a rule that I don’t want to spend any time or money on sites with DAs under 25. This chart shows that they’re not completely devoid of value, but be prepared for a very, very small change in rank with these guys."
I don't think these are fair conclusions to make with a small sample size. In my opinion, it's not wise to advise avoiding sites under DA 25. Moz has a very, very small picture of the web with their limited index. It's also important to remember that the web is not static, it is an organic ever changing landscape. Site's grow in domain authority over time, and the links you've acquired on them may increase in power as well.
Relevancy is more important than DA. I will never avoid a site that is under DA 25 if it is highly relevant, high quality, and my target audience is there. It would be interesting if you could assign a relevancy scale to the sites/links/target pages/rankings you tracked and compared against your findings!
Nicholas, I agree on the understatement on low DA in that 10-25 range.
We have reached out numerous times to extremely relevant sites with DA in this range and they have turned out to be some of best links in a campaign. Not only in regards to link relevancy but very targeted referral traffic as well.
These links can sometimes end up being the best links as sites grow in age and DA everyday. From our experience, more of the DA 10-25 range have been more responsive to a conversation about links, guest spots or anything else. Maybe because they are relatively new and are open to new ideas, who knows, but it works for sure.
We have been going on a steady pace of RELEVANT LINKS for most of our clients and seen this strategy to seriously provide an increase in the SERPS.
In any case, I think it is dangerous to put any one conclusion on any one site with a number.
Who knows, in a week that DA 22 could be a DA 33.
Glad you liked the article! You brought up a few points, so let me touch on them one by one:
On internal links: I purposely chose pages that had the same number of internal links in our navigation, but there is naturally some variation in how often a page was referenced in the body of another page. I agree, this would be a good area to dig in to! I didn't think of it while working on this analysis, but I'll definitely look into that more closely in the future.
On quality: Yeah, I'll admit that I used "quality" the way a lot of SEOs mean it, to mean how we think Google can asses the value of a site, not the actual quality of writing, future potential of the site, or value it brings. Maybe I should have used the word "reputation?"
On DAs below 25: This is just my personal, current cut off. When I worked for Distilled, we gave the outreach team a minimum of DA 35 to shoot for. I know a lot of agencies that, like you, focus more on how relevant a link is (which I think, personally, is giving Google too much credit; I think they still primarily rely on inbound links as an indication of the value of a site, and the value it can pass).
The balance here is impact vs time to get links, which varies by industry and by the contacts and skill level of your outreach and PR teams. Everyone will probably have a different sweet spot. :)
I quite agree with your point. At the same time i think its enough data to determin.
Hi Kristina,
Thanks for sharing your results. I appreciate anyone who shares their results because it's how we all learn and evolve.
Obviously, as others have pointed out, there are some flaws here but there are going to be flaws in any SEO test as it is impossible to have a controlled test.
However, I think the floors in the test would less important if you changed the wording of some of your headings so that it doesn't sound like you are claiming these to be blanket rules, and instead, reported these as your results.
Saying "It takes 10 weeks on average to see 1 rank jump" from 1-2 links to the page is a real stretch. I think it would be better if it said "It took 10 weeks on average to see 1 rank jump".
"The lower the rank, the more effect a link has" should be updated to "The lower the rank, the more effect a link had".
"Higher DA will move the needle faster" should be updated to "Higher DA moved the needle faster".
I think these three small changes have a big impact on the overall feel of the article and it stops a lot of people needing to poke holes in the test because you are only reporting on your findings.
Thanks again, Kristina! I look forward to reading more from you!
Cheers,
David
I understand where you're coming from, but my results closely matched what I'd seen when I was working for an agency (but, unsurprisingly, I can't use that data now), and what I've heard from other SEOs. I considered writing this as a case study, as you're suggesting, but I was concerned that would make it less impactful if SEOs share this with their managers to get support for their long term link building plans.
Plus, I enjoy the discussions we're getting as people "poke holes" in my post! :)
Thanks Kristina!
I've been working in-house for about 8 months and from my experience, the timeline is really similar to what you have come up with.
1-3 months hiring an SEO
1-2 months doing competition analysis, what links to target
1-2 months figuring out what links to build
1-2 months building links
1 month see increase in MOZ DA or Ahrefs Domain Rating and URL rating
Ah, good point! I focused most on the rankings effects, but keep in mind everyone: Moz DA and Ahrefs is going to take awhile to reflect the changes as well. In my experience, Ahrefs is much quicker than Moz, probably because they're constantly adjusting, while Moz rolls out updates in one big swoop every month or so.
I've been using HARO a lot recently to build backlinks. I've had quite a bit of success, probably 5-7 links (good for a small local cleaning service that started in October!). I'm competing against mostly companies with DA of 25-45. I'm still on the 3rd or 4th page depending on the search query, and that's a bit frustrating. Patience is a virtue! Hopefully I'll be on page one by the end of 2017, with link building and other SEO things I'm working on. That will really help my customer acquisition cost.
Thanks for the data backing up your link building analysis. 6-12 months to see ranking improvements? No wonder why so many are opting for PPC and not dealing with such a long wait time. Of course, a few powerful links and it can cut that time way down, but it takes years of knowledge of how to get them that quickly, unless of course you have great connections or just plain luck.
Yep, that's why they do it, but they shouldn't! It's a lot easier to win SEO if you start with it. Otherwise, once your competitors are solidly outranking you, I think you need more links than they have to outrank them.
Great research Kristina, well done!!
It's provide a lot of advices of how to start a link building strategy or how to manage a started one. Thanks for sharing
Very interesting!! Thanks!
Interesting post! Obviously there's a lot of variables to consider here, but I like how you tried to standardise as many of these as possible across the pages. I agree with others on the low-DA vs Relevancy, but at the same time, it's good to have guidelines.
Personally I tend to have 'soft limits', in that if I find an outreach prospect that's lower than my usual target, but has, say, a super-relevancy (to my audience or the audience of a resource I'm promoting, not necessarily just relvant to the website, as I like to get traffic as well as ranking improvements... this is an important distinction I like to make), or has a decent social following or mailout list that they can use to promote the content, then I jump on it despite the lower-than-ideal DA score :)
Good point on expectation setting. I've turned down work a few times when I've felt it unrealistic (if I've been unable to explain the realities!), so definitely agree with you on this one too!
Again, good post Kristina :) - So... When can we expect a post about your varying approaches to outreach? ;) :D
Glad you enjoyed the post! I'm planning on doing another post a bit later (when I have more data) when I can better discuss the effects of topical relevance vs DA. :) So, keep a lookout for that!
Cool, would be interesting to bear in mind other factors, such as engagement levels of potential traffic too perhaps, as relevancy can have an added benefit here. Most boards, if given the choice of work that improves ranking or work that improves ranking and drives traffic & sales would be happy to opt for the latter I think. Obviously a high DA site whose audience matches one of your customer profiles is even better :D
I must admit that with a low DA site I tend to be very strict on other issues - do the comments on their pages look real, same with their social interactions etc.
I'll keep an eye out for your post Kristina! :)
Wow kristina, Look forward to read your next Article. By the way, you posted a nice Article on the Link Building Strategy, It'll also help us to Understand the SEO to our witty clients.
Very useful post, Kristina! My experience shows that if you're working with a firm/store that wants to rank for local keywords, it's relatively easier and quicker to get it done. As you've mentioned, links from trustworthy sources with decent DA get discovered quickly and thus it helps rankings move up faster. Therefore, it's a very good idea to invest in building digital assets for your followers and community, and then launching an outreach campaign for sites whose marketing campaign could benefit from your digital assets. As I see, building quality digital assets will always take way longer than getting others link to your assets.
Thanks for sharing, Kristina!
It's actually really difficult to find solid link building case studies on the web. Too many are either packaged with other tactics or just promote a specific type of link building. Neither of those is bad by itself, but it ends up being too broad or specific to answer this simple question, which you've answered so well. I'll definitely be pocketing this resource for future use.
-Tylor
Happy to help! This is exactly why I wrote this article. It's really hard to go to your managers and say, "I'd like thousands of dollars a month for a project that will probably work out in 6 months to a year" without some sort of external source backing you. Hopefully this can convince some execs to be a little more patient with their SEOs. :)
Linkbuilding is so challenging. I usually prefer to focus on generating good shareable content and relationships, and make sure to request inbound links as part of that process.
Hi Cynthia, shareable content on it's own is always going to under perform. All content, even the good needs promoting. I think you may be underestimating your mention of "relationships", as that is link building in real life :) Just want to try make sure people don't misinterpret your post that content on it's own is good enough.
That's super interesting! At my office, we have a rule that you should expect your current efforts to pay off 6 months to a year from when you start. It's all about time and letting all the components marinate together.
Very nice post!
Good rule! Is your office all other SEOs, or do you have people working in different industries with the same rule?
Kristina,
Well done! This will be a great resource for SEOs to use to show clients and marketing managers why SEO takes so long and how important a long-term strategy is. Great research, thanks for sharing. Interesting breakdown of links with DA below 25, very notable piece of info.
Hi, Kristina
Love the post, and it adds some real credit to what we tell our clients about how long it can take to get results. Just a quick question, were the links you were monitoring from relevant niches to the company you were building the links for, I'm going to guess yes. If not, it would be interesting to see how the keywords moved from non-relevant websites, but still had high DA. Do you have any data on this?
Thanks! The articles were always relevant to our company, but not always relevant to our specific keywords. We're a sharing economy site that offers pet sitting, so the target keywords I was looking at rankings for were all around pet sitting, but a good number of the articles were about working in the sharing economy.
I agree that separating out links from sites/pages that are specifically relevant to the targeted keyword would make a great study! That's actually what I'm working on next. I was concerned I didn't have enough data yet for this article, though.
Google has to develop better technologies for distinguishing natural and unnatural link building. It takes 10-20 times longer to make SEO & link building than preparing your content. It becomes a torment after some time. Webmasters has to spend their time on their content, not on how to promote their content by semi-spamming.
To Google's credit, they're trying to distinguish between natural and unnatural links! They'd love it if you only focused on creating content and not getting links to it. But the fact is, Google's crawler is a robot, and it can't tell how cool or reliable content is (plus, those are subjective, so a human couldn't do that definitively either). They need some indication of which content is more valuable. And they do that by seeing how many other sites think that your content is awesome enough to link their readers to.
And because of that, we're always going to have to build links. If you think about it, we even "build links" to convince humans that we're awesome by convincing news organizations that we're worthy of an article. The future of SEO, I think, is much more savvy PR teams, or many more outreach teams, so technical SEOs can do their jobs, and link builders can do theirs.
Ever changing process...
The best thing about SEO is there is no certainty.
I am doing link building especially for one of my webpage that is ranking at 2 and 3 position for my business keyword since last two years but still we are at same position. Yeah, I know there are many other factors that do matter for search ranking and that's why I am asking how one can be certain about which factor influenced the ranking. May be the reason behind why ranking is stuck at a position is that others/competitors are also doing there best.
Well, nice study, thanks for sharing Kristina!
Yup, true! If you're stuck at a certain ranking, I'd compare my own stats against my competitors:
OK Kristina, what you think about PA, as now PR is gone, is it time for DA/PA to be gone?
PR was always an oversimplified version of how Google values pages, and I think that oversimplification got so far from what was actually going on, Google removed it. I don't think that says anything about how much Google values links in its algorithm.
I will try and explain this to my boss who always asks me "When will we see more traffic?". Great article, learnt a few new things here. thanks.
The challenge that every SEO experiences in their career :)
Hello Kristina, I really enjoyed learning more about your findings and I would like to ask you a question. If these links would come from sites with high Link Influence Score (SeoProfiler.com), would the results be the same in your opinion?
Probably! I haven't worked with Link Influence Score, maybe someone else here has better insight into that metric?
One question: what if we remove those links? Do we go back to the same ranking as before? Does Google algorithm work in reverse?
It can definitely work in reverse, although it may take awhile for Google to notice that the links have been removed.
Hi kristina,
I liked your strategy to work on link building..
But i have a question for you, being seo consultant we can not say our clients to wait for 6 months and there are lots of competitors who are working well to rank any industry. Then being a smart seo geek we should rank the average keywords in 2-3 months. Its not good to rank a business in a year. ??
Am little bit confused about it
There are a lot of factors other than just links! If you optimize your page to target a keyword better than your competitors, the impact should be faster.
That said, keep in mind that as much as clients may push you to promise more than you can deliver as an SEO, it's better to tell them upfront that they're unreasonable than it is to lie and then dissappoint them!
Hello Kristina,
really thanks for this Great Article. It will help us to make our Customers more sensible for our Work!
Greetings from Germany
Now It is clear that we have to wait atleast 3 months to get link building effects. Appointing a In-house link building expert is a really a great idea to achieve ranking effects in the long run.
Great things to learn here about DA, PA and other things.
Thanks Kristina for such amazing article. Sure this information it will help our marketing team to improve the link building campaign results. I'm agree with you that to see results you have to spend month, and sometimes it's a bit frustating
Kristina, thx for this post!
I have a question thought : how many outbound links do you need to post/ day to not get penalized by Google?
Thank you!
I don't know! I don't think that anything you do that's a Google-approved tactic will get you penalized, though.
There are too many variables to measure which makes it hardly possible to make any predictions. Another important thing - Google algorithm updates.
Remember what happened in the end of 2015?
Barely any movements for about a month (despite continuous linkbuilding taking place) and suddenly everything started shifting in SERPs after the New Year as if Google started counting those links added for the past 1-2 months.
That's the nature of SEO. :) I like to compare my job to being an alchemist - our industry is fairly new, and the rules are always changing, so we don't have enough background knowledge or time to do good scientific tests. We just have to find correlations and infer causation where we can.
Cool article, thank you, Kristina!
Great article, hit the nail on the head. It also depends on how much internal and external resource is available. Particularly on more technical campaigns where it can take longer to secure the links.
Great article Kristina! I don't remember seeing it...was it mentioned what anchor texts were used from each of these inbound links? Were they all the same or were some exact/partial match versus some were branded? I think anchor text can be a key 'influencer' in rankings depending on what you're tracking.
They weren't all the same, but they were all relevant to the brand or the page. I agree that anchor text can have a big impact - that'd probably be a good follow up! Maybe I'll do that for my next article. :)
If content is unique then you can easily increase your ranking. So make sure content is high quality.
I think It can take 8 weeks on average to see 1 rank jump.
Thanks interesting, the serps do look fairly static at times maybe this is why.
The title of your post certainly caught my eye, Kristina! We get asked this all the time.... Thanks for putting this post together, very useful and interesting insights. We have certainly found that high PA links have a faster impact, especially for sites languishing on page 2 or 3... and in particular, if the page the links are on are getting a good amount of social activity and traffic. One other thing that has recently been mentioned is the use of anchor text. This combined with other on page factors or the site being linked to can have a huge impact on how much and how fast a link will move the dial. And the degree to which this impacts things as I am sure you aware is ever moving as Google continues to test. Look forward to a follow up on this!?
I think google is getting more effective nowdays and backlink data gets updated at an average 8-10 days or even less sometime 3 days... this is my own experience with my blog.
But I think Google is still not capturing all the backlink data... I have foound other sites which shows more backlinks than google search console... and those site are with decent PR...
Thanks for the post! I'm learning a lot about SEO currently to be able to offer the services to my website clients. I appriciate detailed/informative posts like this one.
So it will take me several months to rank on 1st or even 2nd page for a new site.
It depends entirely on your competition! The other day, my company posted a blog post that targeted a phrase that only really had one other article answering the question. Within a day, we were ranking #3. On the flip side, I've been building links for years to try to rank for my company's primary target keyword, and we're still hovering around #7.
The message that I'd more like you to take away from this post is: when you start building links, give yourself some time to see effects.
Good luck!
Thanks for the post Kristina,
What would you do if Google does not count some links that you got long time ago?
Build more links! :)
Thanks for great article Kristina..!
We are going to plan a link building strategy for our new website. Can you suggest, what are the best tools and strategies you used for your sites. Cheers.
Haha, link building strategies is an entire career in itself! I'd recommend you take a look around Moz to find some link building strategy blog posts, and maybe dig into some Q&A that relate specifically to your site's problems.
Good luck!
I dont know which is true, I think it is more on what type of forums or link build you are buidling. You need to choose what is the right sites to link build or audience.
Link building is interesting at the same time tricky as well.
Hi Kristina.
I want to say that what you have presented is an excellent case study. Throughout my career, I've noticed a similar pattern with ranking increases occurring over a 12 week period. (It is good to see that your case study shows ten weeks, so it is within a similar timeframe).
I worked on numerous campaigns between 2012-2014 that were only link building campaigns and the links that were acquired were usually from brand new guest blog posts. We would have to wait for the new pages to get indexed and to age in their authority. Then it would take around 12 weeks to really start seeing improvements in the rankings.
There were some other interesting cases that I saw.
One was when we acquired a link from an existing web page (resource post) and the site had a DA of 50. I cannot remember what the PA was, but it was fairly high. Within 2 weeks, all of the client's keywords except 1 jumped onto the first page of Google (UK market).
Another client had a similar experience when we added their link to an authoritative page on a very authoritative industry directory (I think that site also had a DA of 50+ and a high PA). There were several outbound links to other relevant businesses on the page, but adding the link to the page actually made it's rankings increase onto the first page of Google for about 50% of their keywords at the time. I published their case study on my blog https://businessgrowthdigitalmarketing.com/many-lin.... They were able to get ranked within 7 months and one of the interesting things was that only 1 of their keywords was in the top 100 when we started the campaign.
Another thing that you mentioned was that you targeted sites that were relevant and that had a DA of at least 35. We adopted a similar strategy by going for sites that had a DA of 40 or more across most of our campaigns. It was challenging to acquire the links, but it did have an impact. Although the drawback that I would say is the ability to get those links indexed quickly. In an ideal world, having the links placed on web pages that are already established would have been much more favourable and I think we could have seen a quicker impact on rankings.
Thank you for sharing this insight. It was really valuable. I hope that you can share some more insights in the future.
I got 200 Backlinks indexed today, but i witnessed no improvement in My Site rank. Please guide me, will it take time to have influence on my ranking?
Interesting article. On a related note, how long does it take Moz to register or show any increase in rankings?
Great Article Kristina yes very true on the High DA comment you mention +25 - i too see the same effect on plus +25 DA in SEO rankings. Getting harder to partner / get attention from +25 DA these days! thanks for the info.
Had 2 new back links (DA 28 and DA 31) go live on August 4th - SERPS up this morning 27 places to #13 on Google. Finding this typical if the link quality is there. Long content, well-written, add imagery.... works for me. Gotta be natural tho.
Hi Kristina
SEO should never be good results in a short space of time., But must be in a much wider space of time. We can not expect the best results overnight.
Also building links pointing to our website must be from reliable sources. Only in this way we will achieve this visibility that we all desire
Hi Kristina good article. A few questions for you.
I have been debating on hiring an agency vs a freelancer/employee for our company. I have had a hard time finding someone who is a reputable link builder/digital marketer and someone I can trust. Do you have any suggestions on where I could find someone with talent who may be looking for a position?
As well as possible compensation recommendations?
These would be very helpful.
Just curious, your profile says you are an SEO but you have a link to a dog sitting site? Are you an SEO agency or do you own Rover?
Any advice would be very helpful.
Thanks,
Brad
Hi Brad,
Agency vs individual hire is up to you. An agency is less of a risk since you can hire and fire them quickly, and they bring a lot more knowledge with them, since they can work with their peers to solve your issues. That said, I think an individual can be a better representation for your brand, and eventually be cheaper and less effort for you to manage.
If you're looking for an agency, I'd recommend asking around. I'm working with Citation Labs and Terakeet, which offer two very different types of link building options. Citation Labs is more about resource link building and scale, Terakeet is more about link building through blogger relationships.
If you decide you'd like to hire in house, I'd recommend poaching your first hire from an agency or company that already does a lot of link building so they have experience under their belts.
Good luck,
Kristina
P.S. I'm an SEO at Rover. ;)
Thanks for the Great post Kristina !
I am handling 2 projects both are related to education, doing SEO for both projects, building links in a niche websites only. Started doing SEO for my websites from last 4 months and it's PA:: DA is 1::1. At what interval of time the PA::DA will increase and ways to increase it.
Please any suggestions, it could help me & my company a lot. Thanks.
Hi Pooja, this question is a bit off-topic in this discussion thread. However, you are welcome to post it in our Q&A discussion form. You may even find a similar discussion in the forum that will point you in the right direction -- and the forum is free to search and browse. (Posting requires a Moz Pro subscription.) :)
Best of luck!
I also used the technique of link building, and the result was very satisfactory.
Thank you for this great review. GOOD JOB
Wow, great post!
Even if we exclude hundreds of influential factors, an experiment always produces some useful data. Thanks for sharing your experiment.
Good research Kristina. I have a question. Usually we treat >25 DA sites better, is there any such criteria for PA also?
Hey Kristina - to start, THANK YOU for sharing your data. You could have held onto these numbers and not taken the time to share and I'm grateful to anyone who wants to help all of us get better.
We have some clients hungry about linkbuilding and we'll constantly push that conversation in the direction of revenue. I can't put an exact revenue number on moving keywords from 14 to 11.
For a number of clients, linkbuilding is a very very small part of the project. One specific client we've gained less than a dozen links YTD. Those dozen links have contributed 2-3% to their bottom line and the traffic that comes from them converts above 15% when the site average is at 2%. Better believe those links are super relevant when they convert at that clip. Sticking to that conversation makes sense all the way up the chain vs looking at why it's taken 6, 8, 10, 20 weeks to see any movement in rankings that might result in some increases in traffic that hopefully converts.
I love the research, I hesitate to talk about linkbuilding without mentioning revenue. Thanks again for sharing the research and for all the followup to comments.
I have some doubts to ask from@ Kristina Kledzik .suppose I am owner of some company say abc ....and I have created a profile by my company's name on Quora https://www.quora.com/ (Q&A ) site ,so can I answer some questions on quora related to product/services I am promoting /selling and giving link to my website
will I be penalized by Google for doing that ?
Nope, you're in the clear!
After reading articles like this you realize why SEO is not cheap. It is not an easy thing and it is clear that large multinationals have the best link building experts to place their brands in the top positions. I still think internet and e-commerce in general is a big cake from which we can all eat with a good strategy, patience and perseverance always thinking long-term results.
Thank you for this valuable information.
Couldn't agree more with you Alvaro! Well said! We all have a chance to get a piece of the action, but for small - medium companies with smaller budget the right strategy is to go for the long run. Do everything one at a time, and focus on the bigger picture.
I would prefer number 5 in the SERPs in a year and stay there, rather then busting a lot of money and energy in suspect strategies and loose my positions. :)
Excellent post thank you! It our experience it seems that the quality of the link is everything. A top notch link will provide results within a few days. A sorry to be alive link wont take anytime at all. Also relevant sites competing for that same type of link will determine how quicky results happen.
Kristina, thank you for sharing your study with us. your content is very use full for Quality full link building.
for those who are very good helpfull topics related to SEO.
I hope to get from you the better topics.
Very Nice Posting!!!!!!
Thank you for this lovely article. We are working on a link building strategy with the team, so this article came handy. Cheers.
Laszlo
A well-structured SEO campaign should have results in 6 or 12 months, I doubt that in less time we have results
Thanks Kristina!! Great way to see how long your links are going to increase you web. Link building is not a immediate SEO technique, but if you work your SEO, you will notice results after 6 months, sure! So intereseting seeing your graphics :-)
Great article Kristina; referring to the bigger jumps in ranking from sites with Good DA. I would say higher DA usually means a better Trust Flow thus better ranking jumps than sites with lower DA. In this competitive environment with Google's wrath getting harsher everyday, I would suggest relying heavily on the content marketing and getting links naturall instead of hiring a link builder to build links.
totally agree with this.
What a great resource not only to set correct expectations but also the various avenues we can all take to get link building done and done right. It used to be a link is a link but finding those quality connections is really what helps drive those rankings. Thank you for the data and overall report wonderful job.
Excellent Post, Kristina !!
I loved the study you have done and now I would like to ask you a question ... if these links come from penalized sites varies also the time when the links begin to bear fruit?
I wouldn't recommend getting links from penalized sites! You should actually disavow those links, to make sure you don't get a penalty as well.
Interesting post Kristina. We know that Link building is always necessary for organic promotion; primarily and also it gives good vibes for over all marketing (influence). While building a link I keep just one thing in mind which is, "Link building should not look natural..rather it should be natural."
Keep sharing..
This is going to vary hugely depending on the sector you are in and the on-site technical performance of your site. Research is always interesting but it is extremely important people take note of the caveats the auhor mentioned about this being a very small data set.
Yes, please do! This is just what I've seen. Hopefully it can help set expectations until you can link built for 6 months or so, then I recommend doing the research yourself to set your own benchmarks.
Thanks for the information Kristina
Link building is an investment for sure and anyone hoping to find gold after 1 week of work can become a dangerous customer (I say this not being an agency myself but believing I am reasonable in what I would ask and expect from an agency myself)
Interesting post to read hard to get are the links which will give you long term results Kristina Kledzik you put good time to come up with the post really appreciate your hard work.....
Thanks Kristina for the post I think that its great example of how linking can influence rankings, and though this forum is for SEO/ digital marketing geeks its good to see when a experiment can demystify SEO methods.
I would like to share with you some thoughts that you may or may not consider valuable. I have found from my experiences that rankings improvements can also be influenced from the 'theme' of website that is link comes from. So if the link to a cooking school came from a blog that was all about food it seems to have a positive effect.
I would love to hear your opinion on this.
Cheers,
Andy
Agreed! Both by me, and a lot of other commenters here. I'm planning on looking into the increased value for both a highly relevant site, and a highly relevant page (on a less specifically relevant domain).
I am looking forward to get reply for my answer from you
thx
Hi Kristina,
This is a really nice post to show to those clients that are constantly asking how long will it take to see results on an effective way in a really clear way.
On my own experience as SEO, It takes me from 2 to 4 months to get results... Is it too much or is it ok according to you?
Sounds pretty similar to what I saw!
Hi Kristina,
such a great effort you have put together. I am little surprise with your findings. Really helpful and worth to read it.
Thanks Kristina for the post.
Most clients just need to understand that legitimate ways of doing things will take time. And of course as you stated the time can vary depending upon certain factors. Mostly how much time you devote and what tools you use. I wish we had more of such articles demonstrating that internet marketing is no magic which can produce overnight results.
Its always heartening to have these articles on sites like Moz. Though I would still love to know what percentage of weight you put on content for the link building exercise? How much important is it that content submitted for link building is fresh, or if already covered then written with a fresh perspective or approached in a new way.
Sorry, what do you mean about content for link building being fresh? Are you referring to the content on my site, or the content on the page that's linking to my site?
Content that we use for guest blogging, for outreach. and anywhere else on 3rd party sites which can provide us back links.
And, are you asking if it's fresh (meaning, a new page) vs adding a link to a page that already exists? Or, are you asking about writing articles on a topic that already has a lot of content out there, or is already on your site?
Thank you for the great information in this post. It seems to be well researched and can be useful to many people. This is a loaded topic and any ACTUAL research that is done is greatly appreciated instead of "theory" which is most of what is flying around out there. Thanks!!
Hi all
recently i bought a package from black hat world for my eCommerce clothing store. He said that ill see the effect witin 1 or 2 months but i am seeing any differences. I knew that the package is not so great to get the benefits but still i bought and tried it.
But know i want to have a good link builder or an agency which offers wuality link builidng for small buisness. Usually its very expensive to get an agency.
So do u guys have any good guys or company who offers quality link building in an affordable price. ?
I think the key here is, what's an affordable price for you? I think it's going to be tough to get anyone who's good quality for under $5k/month, and you're going to have to keep working with them for at least 6 months to see an impact.
This could be different if you're not in a particularly competitive industry, but that's what I've seen, from my experience. Is this something you could budget for?
Hi Kristina, This is a nice post specially to showcasing and convincing to top managements how long it will take time to get result if you start working from today towards link-building project. Now a days business not only demanding more result out of seo effort but expecting quick result as like other marketing campaigns. Secondly with the evolution of SEO and continuous algorithmic changes, some times upper management loosing their hopes specifically to link-building activities, though it is true that it is too difficult to remove or ignore links or value of links by Google in near future.
it was wonderful, I'm applying this method for my website. I have received positive signals, let me ask factor moved from http: // to https: // of what many influential bloggers, I see your query more change
I have some confused about keyword Difficulty Rating. Please can you share lot of things about this topic.
Does this help?
https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/keyword...
:)
Kristina, thank you for sharing your research with us. And as a Link building expert in my company I can say that Link building is the toughest job in SEO. And Every Month I also build 30 links from my content outreach.
Another great post on moz, thanx
Thank you Kristina,
Now I can easily explain to my management and clients also....they think ranking results will come in days.
Its totally depend how we follows the search engine white hat rules...!
Very good article on SEO. Here in Brazil it is hard to find quality contents on SEO. Thanks for sharing your informações.Estou trying rankear my site novocpconline.com but is hard to find good SEO techniques .
Don't forget that there is always low hanging fruit that you can immediately act on.
Dear Kristina,
Thank you so much for this interesting reading. I find this article very helpful and I am counting on applying your points to my own site.
Kind regards
Peter
Kristina,
Actually the management once hires SEO guy thinks that results will come in days. Its really difficult to educate them on how SEO works in this century. Thanks for coming up with a great article.
Awesome read thank you!
Tôi nghĩ khoảng tám tuần để xem một hạng nhảy.
Very Very good
Great to read a blog post actually sharing their data showing the results of link building.
Very good thanks
Thank you for sharing your study with us Nice Info
Link building takes time. I am an SEO expert (at https://www.aplus.net.nz/ ) and I know that knowledge, hard work and patience is the key to succeed with link building. This is a very informative piece, especially for people who are unsure about how much time the process will take. I especially agree with the higher DA part.
And this is why you mentioned your website link in every comments, but dude Moz is much smarter than you..Stop spamming here..!!
Thank you !
The article is very nice and effective.The ideas shared are helpful related to sales and marketing.I also want to introduce to a website where more effective and valuable articles are there https://smstudy.com/
Great posting!
Some agencies are doing unnatural link building. How does this will affect the seo ranking?
Depends on if they do it well. :) If Google thinks it looks natural, it'll help! Otherwise, they're setting themselves up for penalties.
Yes, Only High PR Manual SEO backlinks help in quick SEO ranking.