From The Vault - Should You Pay For Backlinks?

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

ARTHUR: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SEO Show, the first one for 2022. As always, I'm here with Michael. How are you going? Yeah, I'm excited to be back. How are you going? I'm pretty good. Are you the new and improved 2022 version of Arthur? I wouldn't say improved or new. I'm just the 2022 version of slightly older and less improved. I wouldn't say less. I'd say the same. Okay. Well, not much has changed since last month.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Six, six weeks or so. It's been, I think since we did it, we, we did say at the end of last year in our episode that we'd be back, you know, mid-Jan.

ARTHUR: And here we are.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And early Feb. But anyway, you know what, in Australia we've been back at work. Yes. But it really officially kicks off after Australia day, which was two days ago. So now we can get stuck into things. It's official. Let's do it. And we're going to get stuck in, aren't we? Cause we've got a big topic today. Your favorite topic. A one of. Well, I'd say my favorite in general is SEO. Just love talking SEO. But then within SEO. Link building. Link building is a big topic. And within the topic of link building, a big topic is. Should you pay for backlinks? Yes. Cool. That's the end. We'll see you next week. Hope you got some value out of that. But look, Should you pay for backlinks? It is a loaded question in the SEO world because, well let's say first Google don't want you paying for links and they make that clear and they put propaganda, so to speak out there in the world to say that you shouldn't pay for links. Then you have like agencies muddying the water. Some will say, we don't link build. No, we don't. That's the right way to do it. Or others will say, we only get free links. We don't pay for links. And then you have the reality of the way the world really is. Exactly. Which is, you know, in some occasions you should be paying for links. Other occasions you shouldn't be.

ARTHUR: Yeah, definitely.

MICHAEL: So we'll jump into that today and chat about when you should be paying for them, when you shouldn't and what our thoughts on that topic are.

ARTHUR: So where do you want to start?

MICHAEL: Where you shouldn't pay for links or maybe let's start with why people do pay for links. Okay. And let's have an honest chat about the landscape when it comes to link building. And that is, if you own a website now, like a good website, when I say good, it means it has links, it ranks in Google, it gets traffic, you have readers, it's a real website.

ARTHUR: A real blog, a real site that people actually visit.

MICHAEL: You would have been over the last five years or however long you've run it, harassed by people trying to buy links from you. So you know your website's worth something. Chances are you've already sold stuff before. You've sold links. You've been given money for a link. So you know your site's valuable. So when you're trying to link build, that's the world that you're going out into. These website owners expect to be paid because they've been paid many times before. So when people say, you know, only free link building is the way to do it, you're pretty much cutting off the vast majority of websites out there because if you know you've been paid for your site before and that it's valuable to other people for SEO purposes, you're not just going to give it to them free because they ask for it.

ARTHUR: I mean, why would you, why would you go out of your way to do something for free?

MICHAEL: Yeah, you wouldn't. And it's not even just doing something, you know, the value that you're giving to the person. So that's the world that we're all working in. If we're trying to do SEO, that's the sort of baseline. when you wouldn't pay for links in my opinion is when you're big, if you're a big brand.

ARTHUR: Yeah. If you can acquire links naturally. So if you're like you said, a big brand like David Jones or, you know. Kogan, any big website that gets links naturally from PR websites, news websites, just websites in general.

MICHAEL: Or you are interesting enough that that PR angle works, right? Like you gotta be like, cause PR is hard. Like people say, I just do some PR. Like you've got to have an angle or some sort of hook that's going to make it interesting for these journalists to write about and link to. Yeah. And you need to know the right people as well. Like let's say you are a accountant. You're not getting PR.

ARTHUR: Unless you do something incredible that will change the world.

MICHAEL: No one's going to care about it. Exactly. So there might be one or two outliers that do that. then there's thousands of others that want to rank. So then they can't rely on just accumulating free links, but like a big tech brand, like a startup or something that's getting pressed because they've taken on heaps of funding or they've got a cool product. Yes, they can get links that way free of charge. The other way is, I guess, directories, 2.0s, citations.

ARTHUR: Free links that you always like to say, don't move the needle.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Which they don't know. They're good as a, like a foundation if you're starting out from scratch, but they're not going to, you know, put you to the top of Google.

MICHAEL: No. So let's say you're not a big brand. You're just a business. You're a professional service business. And, um, you want to rank in Google. You're going to need links. Google says not to pay for links. You're talking to a few agencies. Some are saying we don't pay for links. You just, you know, we go out and try and get them for you and we'll report on it. Others might be upfront and say, yes, we pay for links. It's a bit of a minefield. Like what do you believe? What do you go with? What's the right approach?

ARTHUR: Yeah. I personally, I think the agencies that say they don't buy links will probably still buy links. They're just trying to mask the fact that they're buying links because they're worried that potential clients might know that Google basically in their guideline says you shouldn't be buying links. So it might be a red flag for them. So they just flat out lie to the client. Yeah.

MICHAEL: The other thing they might do is run a private blog network. You know, like they own the websites themselves. And then build links that way. And link off them. Yeah. Great for the agency because their costs are low because we'll get to the cost of link building, like buying links in a minute and they control the whole thing. But that too is against Google's guidelines, like operating a network of sites. Even more so. Yeah. So yeah, if you are coming back to that example of a professional service business wanting to rank on the first page, your competitors all have 400 backlinks, you have 200. You can do all your onsite, you can do your technical, but you do need to blink build. The algorithm still works this way. I know things like, you know, matching intent of the search and the content and all that's important, but links are also a vital massive aspect of it. The business in that scenario does need to build links. And we find that for a business like that to do it at scale, to close the gap between them and the competitors each month, the easiest way is going to be to go out and pay website owners who know their websites valuable directly for the link. Yep. That's sort of unavoidable.

ARTHUR: No. I mean, yeah, we've done this for a long time and I can, it's hard to count how many times we've gotten a free link. It's very hard. You have to have the right client, the right brand, the right angle, a little bit of luck, a lot of time. So yeah, if you're just a small service business, there's no way it's scalable.

MICHAEL: So really it's inevitable that you pay. The better quality your site is, the more expensive it will be, generally speaking. Yeah. Some website owners don't truly know the value of their sites. Others dramatically overestimate the value of their site. But we find typically a link will cost anywhere between, let's say, 200 AUD to 1,000 plus AUD. So that's one link from one domain and you need to go out and get 10, 20, 50, 100 of them. So that's sort of where if you're working, it is tough because let's take a step back. It does rely on your risk appetite as well. Risk versus reward, like profile as a business, but some people will be terrified of doing any form of paid link building because it's against Google's guidelines. And they'll stick to onsite and sort of not ranking basically. Other people will be like, I don't care what you do. I just want to rank, you know? So if everyone else is doing that and that's the way the world works, then I'm going to be doing it. So you do need to be, as long as you're going into it as a business owner with your eyes open that yes, I'm going to invest X amount per month in paid links. I'm going to get Y return in terms of number of links. And I'm okay with that. The sort of, you know, I know that ranking, I'm going to get all these leads and sales. So it's worth doing on the off chance that something happens with the penalty.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I like that you said off chance because it's been a very long time since I've personally seen a client's website or anyone's website be penalized. I feel like gone are the days where your whole site would be wiped from the search results. Because I remember when I first started doing SEO, maybe 2012, 2013, sites would get penalized and would be completely removed. And it was a pain in the ass, for lack of better words, to try to get that penalty removed. I just remember, you know, situations back in the day where you'd have to keep manually requesting Google to review it, could take weeks, longer, and you might find that, you know, it's still not good enough and you still have to go and disavow more links.

MICHAEL: So- They'd make you crawl across broken glass and like sort of beg and plead to get- Pretty much, yeah.

ARTHUR: And I like, maybe it's luck, maybe it's just because we're great SEOs, but it hasn't happened for a while, so yeah.

MICHAEL: A lot of the stuff in like link building, were you going to say something?

ARTHUR: No, I was just going to say, I find that the risk, the reward outweighs the risk by far.

MICHAEL: Risk, risk, risk. Yeah, it outweighs the risk. They're pretty light generally, risks. Yes. It does. Like, and we're seeing things like stuff that used to happen back in the day, like if you over-optimized your anchor text profile, you could be like algorithmically penalized or sort of manually penalized. Now, in a lot of verticals we go into, we're just seeing super aggressive, like just pure exact match anchor text, link building on sites that are obviously link building sites and no punishment or problems for years. Well, for now, yeah, for now. That is a caveat. Yeah. Things always change, but you know, if you can get a couple of years of like super strong rankings and traffic and sales and like grow on the back of it, the problem is if you grow and then I think scale up and then it goes backwards.

ARTHUR: I think the problem is it's, it's too hard for Google to algorithmically figure out whether a link's a real link or like something that's been purchased at scale. So unless they're manually going through and finding footprints or, you know, looking at websites to see if, you know, looking at the backlink profile to see if they actually are. Oh, what I'm trying to say, sorry. Basically manipulating the search results by buying links. It requires a human.

MICHAEL: Yeah. That's what I was trying to say.

ARTHUR: I lost my, your camera beeped and it distracted me.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We're actually recording video footage. That's what we should have spoken about that at the start. Yeah. New year 22. For the first time. Not just our voices you'll hear, it's our faces you'll see. Awkwardly looking around at the cameras in here.

ARTHUR: It's a bit distracting, but. It's okay. You'll get used to it.

MICHAEL: I'll get used to it. Yeah. Um, so let's assume that that's the case. We don't even need to assume because we're seeing it out there in the world. Coming back to the topic, should you buy links? In my opinion, it's unavoidable. Yeah. And in most cases you probably should because your competitors are. anyone ranking in any sort of competitive space generally would be. If you're working with an agency or a link building service, normally they should be upfront. Well, like let me rephrase that. A link building service, if you're investing money with them each month, you're normally going to be charged a per link price and you know what you're getting back by way of links. But if you're working with an agency where they say they don't build links and you know, they've got their own, tactics and approaches and they do it all in-house but they don't actually pay and blah, blah, blah. You don't really know what's going on there. I kind of like the appeal of transparency. Transparency and clear link building budgets so you know what's going into it. Like if you are comfortable with paying for links and using that as part of your SEO campaign. Yes. Which we would say you should be if you really want to get results.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, would we work with someone that wouldn't want to do a link building if we knew that we wouldn't be able to get the results without doing it? I mean, that's, I know.

MICHAEL: Well, that becomes like an ethical thing, right? Like, yeah, we could take your money each month just to write some blog posts for you, but it's not going to do anything.

ARTHUR: So yeah, we wouldn't be working with them in the first place.

MICHAEL: Yep. And we regularly do say that, like at our agency, we have a minimum investment that you're going to need to spend each month for it's even worth working with us. And that gives enough budget to do everything we need to do. And if you can't afford to invest that, then you probably shouldn't work with any agency because the ones that do take your money are going to be doing nothing, nothing or just blog posts or nothing, probably nothing. And on the link building to me, going out and building links, paid links, but on quality sites. Because there's so many metrics that you look at for quality, like as we've said in previous episodes, there's over 20 different things that we'll run every site through before we decide if we want to link from it. Paid links on them is going to be much better than a really cheap and nasty agency building either PBN links or just spun junk crappy cheap things. And that is the option. Like if you're spending $500 a month on SEO, $1,000, $1,500, you're not going to get very far because as we said before, links on good sites, anywhere from $200 to $1,000 per link. Yeah. So yeah, for me, the paid links on quality sites is better than that bottom of the barrel, low end of the range there.

ARTHUR: I think it also comes back to the client and you know whether or not they understand how link building works because you know you might be pitching to a client and they'll ask how many links we build a month and you tell them four and then they'll go back to you and say oh this other agency said they'll do 20 links per month. Yeah. So, you know, they don't understand the value of link building, what a good link is not realizing that the links that the other agencies building are probably free directory links or, you know, the links that aren't going to move the needle, so to speak. So making sure that the client understands this at the start of the campaign, when you're pitching to them, that, you know, it's definitely quality of a quantity when it comes to link building.

MICHAEL: And so what is a quality link? We've covered that in other episodes, but for mine, like the ones that you're paying, it's a website. It's going to be run by a person, or maybe it's run by a company or a publishing brand or something like that. They might have a couple of authors or something like that, but they're a real brand. They've been around years. They have social profiles. They have traffic to their site. They have rankings themselves in Google. They themselves have a lot of links. So it's just a real website. Yeah. That is a good link. And we do this all day, every day. We have a whole team that deal with publishing, you know, publishers, website owners. When you reach out to them, you're dealing with the person you're talking to them. And it's like a business deal. Exactly. Every little link acquired is a little mini business deal where you you sort of talk to them, you pitch the content you want to put on there and negotiate a bit of back and forth. And you can't do that for cheap. You just think about it as a business owner.

ARTHUR: Exactly. And also I'm glad you touched on that because that's another thing that you kind of factor into the cost of link building is the time it takes link builders to actually find these sites, get in touch with the blog owners or webmasters and then start that conversation and probably have, you know, a dozen back and forth emails before any content is even placed on the site. that takes time, you know? So doing that at scale takes a lot of time. And that's something that a lot of people probably don't think about when, you know, when you're sending a report and they see four links or, you know, I can understand on face value, they're probably scratching their head saying, oh, this is what I paid two grand for, but they don't understand everything that's gone on behind the scenes to get that link live.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And conversely, they might not think, you know, they might just see dollars and say, well, this one's 500 bucks. I'm going to go with this and not even think about it. Well, okay. They're out there talking to website owners and trying to get stuff placed on a website that the owner knows is valuable. How can it be 500? Like, am I getting good links for this? it's you can't be. So I guess you need to sort of look at it through the lens, that lens, like both sides ends of the spectrum.

ARTHUR: I guess that's where the transparency comes into place where, like you said, you know, being upfront and letting, letting them know we do pay for links and this is what's involved from, you know, finding the sites and writing the content and, you know, the publishing fees involved.

MICHAEL: Well, not even like, I guess it's, they just need to know going into it that they could pay for links. Well, like I said, your risk profile, like this, there's stuff that should be fleshed out with you when you first start talking to an agency and they're proposing a strategy. If you want to go the free route, sure, but it's going to take longer. You might get less links. It's more up and down, like sporadic, the links that you do get. You don't have as much control over things like anchor text and the pages that it's linking to. And you have to use tactics like PR. Like, are you interesting? Are you just specializing in like commercial litigation? If so, what's the PR angle? So there's that. And then the paid side is, yep, you can go out and pay for them. It's going to shortcut everything, but it's going to cost X amount per link to do it properly. And there is the, I guess the elephant in the room that Google doesn't want you to do that. Yeah. Who cares what Google wants. Yeah. Because really there's what Google wants and what they reward and they reward sites with lots of links. So yeah. But as long as that's made clear and you're on board, then you just need to think about it. Like you could spend 500 bucks on links. You could spend five grand. What's probably going to be the better outcome for you as a business. Like are you going to get game-changing rankings that propel your business to new levels of growth of a $500 a month investment or five grand? In a competitive space, probably the answer is pretty clear there, right? Yes. Five grand. I'm doing a sales pitch. So anyway. I don't really think there's too much more to really dwell on. Like the answer to the question, should you pay for links is most of the time? Yes.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's unavoidable. Unfortunately, like, like you said, kind of recap, unless you're a huge brand, unless you already have a very strong backlink profile and acquired links naturally, then you're going to need to at some stage pay for backlinks. If you want to do SEO properly and you know, getting free links is fine, but, you know, it's probably something you wouldn't engage an agency to do, especially for a small business just starting out because it's not going to, it's going to take too much time. No one's going to want to dedicate that much time to get free links because it's not scalable. You know, there's, it's not going to work. You're not going to get links. You're not going to get results and it's not going to work out. So yeah.

MICHAEL: There's time pressure, you're paying them every month and my links are coming in in dribs and drabs. Yeah. Now you could always go out and hunt down website owners and negotiate back and forth with them and pay them direct and cut out an agency. Do you want to do that? I don't know. Most businesses probably don't. And you're talking to an SEO guy, so I've done.

ARTHUR: No, you know what I'm saying as a, as a someone that, you know, if you're engaging an SEO agency, then obviously you're not going to get out of your way to say, I'll handle the link building myself, not understanding what it is because you won't know what a good link is. You have to teach yourself SEO. And then at that point you might as well just do the whole SEO on your site rather than just the link building.

MICHAEL: So, and you want to be spending your time working on big ticket stuff. Exactly. It's not negotiating links. Yeah. That's where agencies come in, really. That's where they add the value. They know where to go. They have relationships. They have the resources, the tools, all the software subscriptions that go into it. Sure, you can go do it yourself and cut out whatever margin the agency makes there. That's fine too. But it really just comes back to what are your goals? What market are you in? Is free going to work for you? Unlikely in most cases. So probably go down the paid route. Sounds good. That's this episode done and dusted, isn't it? Sign you up. Okay, done. I'll have my people talk to your people after this call.

ARTHUR: Well, we have the same people, so we do.

MICHAEL: All right. That's enough from us for the first episode back for 22 next week. We are going to give you a little free link building tip.

ARTHUR: Hang on. We just told people we should, they should pay for links.

MICHAEL: I know, but, but what we thought would be cool is There is ways of doing things free. It's going to be sporadic. It's up and down. We'll talk about it next week, but we thought following on from this one where we've just banged on about paid, it would be cool to give you a little free link building. Looking forward to it. It's a new one we haven't given before, so we'll see you next week. In the meantime, happy SEOing.

ARTHUR: See ya.