[smalboy]

Am a SEO guy here- been doing this thing since 2-3 years ago. To myself from what can be seen from the post itself it appears that the SEO company that the OP's been using is actually doing a pretty good job- Drop on 80% of traffic with anchor texts that don't vary that much. What the SEO company have probably done is probably to just go ahead and blast links directly at the site with automated tools[SeNuke and the likes] It could have been easily averted had there been layering and tier-ing of links done and varying anchor texts and keyword variations. Your aim of getting links that also drive traffic is actually a very good idea, since it'd definitely boost the credibility of the site itself.

However I see people on here clobbering the idea of having link farms. Of course nowadays Google have been on a roll de-indexing major link networks (ALN, BMR and the likes). Public link networks can be used, but they cannot be seen as a long-term solution. A more sustainable option would be to build your own blog farms and link those to your main sites as funnel. Those could also serve as a very good platform of tier 1 links to do automated blasting to.

Just sharing my link strategy. And OP good job at doing a relaunch. Did you manage to use the Disavow link to take away the similar links with similar link anchors?

Nice to see a SEO article around here from time to time.

[bmilleare]

Please don't call yourself an "SEO guy" and then tell the OP to build what is effectively a very poor, easily identifiable, link wheel.

If you think that's a 'sustainable' tactic then I suspect you won't still be in the SEO industry in a further 2-3 years time. All you'll be doing is waiting for the next Google algo update to kill your clients rankings.

[smalboy]

Linkwheel? Did I tell him to interlink any of his web properties? It's a pyramid structure that have always worked for me, and of course I do vary a lot more factors that I have listed here. I am, however, really curious on your definition of a linkwheel.

[bmilleare]

It's pretty telling that of everything I said, you get hung up on the definition of linkwheel.

It's still a crap tactic regardless of whether it's a pyramid or a wheel. Here's an idea - why don't you work on providing actual value to your clients instead?

[smalboy]

Aha. White-hat all holy guy detected.

I care about value as much as you do. Value is important as far as things goes, but if one does go all holy about providing value and "somehow" the visitors will come, forget about it mate. They won't unless you pay through your teeth for PPC/PPV traffic or you do SEO. White hat SEO? People say that, but do they really know what "white hat" means? White hat means you do nothing more than spreading your links on social networks. If you do ANY form of linkbuilding it's grey/black. No two ways about that mate.

[bmilleare]

Where did the colour hat conversation come from? I didn't mention anything about white/grey/black or whatever. It has nothing to do with it. There are lots of innovative black hat (according to Google) tactics that are killing it right now, but they're a million miles away from anything you're talking about.

The fact remains, you're advising somebody to use poor tactics that will only lead to wasted time and eventual loss of rankings.

And as for this: "White hat means you do nothing more than spreading your links on social networks". You serious or just trolling? I really can't tell.

Either way, this conversation is getting boring. You continue doing your 2008-esque blog pyramids and let me know how that goes for you.

[smalboy]

As a matter of fact it works really well. 2008-esque? I really don;t care mate. They word pretty damn well for me with link diversity. It's not the how you build links, but what kind of links you build, and the anchor text and the sort of links. It's all just making it look natural. You're probably just trolling here so I don't really care. Good riddance.

[spiredigital]

Hey smalboy! OP here.

To your question: Haven't started using the disavow tool quite yet, no. When we really went through and did our initial clean-up, it was before the tool was released. I need to go back through the audit we did and tag / disavow links that are potentially hurting us.

But it's still difficult: which links are hurting, and which are providing great link juice? You can guess from the anchors given that's the majority of the problem / penalty, but sometimes it might be a better approach to build new links with varied anchor to a page and - once you start ranking again - have it be even stronger as you haven't hashed all your backlinks.

And I agree. I'd love to see more SEO posts here on HN. :-)

[smalboy]

Hello OP! :>

I'd suggest since you have already had a nice amount of links built to the site and with only 1 type of anchor text then just build more links at a steady pace to the site itself with varying anchor texts and link types (hxxp://www.website.com, www.website.com, website.com) and ther variations. Vary dofollow and nofollow too. While doing all of this don't forget to build backlinks similar to he ones that you have built previously. Stopping to build links with a certain combination of anchor text will seem to Google as being very very unnatural.

Also, begin building your own blog network- and then build links to the blogs in the blog network. I like to call those sites "Buffer sites" since they will be taking the load of my linkbuilding efforts. Load these sites up with content, full on blogs with regular posts, privacy policy and the works. Have content that is valuable to visitors and hen funnel the visitors on to your main site. You would then be able to have a bunch of blogs that bring in traffic to the main site itself since the blogs would've been jam-packed with content and would funnel the users into your ecommerce site. This would have a couple of benefits: When you rank the blogs you get them up for your keywords, and since the blogs link to your ecommerce store the store climbs up there too. So basically using this by doing 1 set of linkbuilding you can dominate the whole of page 1 for your keywords.

Would be awesome if we could connect. You seem to be a very interesting person to talk to :>