[Plasterer]

Hi I have posted on here the other day.. I have through lack of knowledge or understanding bought 1000 links online. I believed the sales patter and through having no budget for seo decided to do it mysrlf.

So now my site doesn't even rank in google and I was on page 2.

Can I undo this these stupid links , google is obviously penalising me... Isn't it?

Cheers

S

[daveb]

How long ago did you buy them?

[Lieto]

Buying links may (and eventually will) get you banned in google permanently.
Especially if you are getting it done through some sort of automated process. Much safer if you deal with few great sites personally and pay them for placing you link in context.

Also depends on the keywords you are buying.
I believe getting to top5 with something like "insurance London" will get you banned within an hour.

This post has been edited by Lieto: 27 October 2011 - 03:22 PM

[Plasterer]

Hi I know now in hind site as I have been exposed to the wonders of seo for almost a week now. So as you can imagine I'm a bit if an expert!

I bought them last week. Since then my site has dropped form the top of page two to middle of 3rd. And another keyword has gone completely.

As for your comment about paying for links, where would I start? As per my last post which I am aware this is morphing into- I'm just a plasterer.

I want to write articles but have been told I'll not get much from that as they are dont follow.

I'm lost in this seo stuff , i don't mind hard work I just would like someone to say to rank in google locally for "plasterers in Worthing" do x y and z.

I'm skint but would be happy to pay someone to show me.

Back to the point of this particular post... Can I remove these links?

Ta

S

[Lieto]

I am not a seo guy, just got some working behind my back. They act like they know some sort of secret which they dont wanna give out
To sum it up — your site need interesting unique content and links on that content from different web sites.
How to achieve that is another question, would be better if you google on that subject.

Also yes, you can just find popular site that you like and email them an offer and its rather safe unless they report you ><

This post has been edited by Lieto: 27 October 2011 - 03:31 PM

[terydinho]

Get in touch with the people you purchased your links from - explain the situation and ask politely for a refund and for all links to be removed.

They will probably say "screw you" to a refund, but it is a good jumping off point - even if they come back with no refund, you can then simply ask that all links be removed and not worry about the refund.

In terms of ranking well in google, what you need to do is get fantastic copy on your site - paying for loads and loads of backlinks wont help that much.

If you want some help in ranking higher in google, pm me and we can have a chat.

[daveb]

I've seen quite a few cases where people buy a whole bunch of links and experience exactly what you're seeing.... sudden drops. BUT after a week or so there rankings come back.

So I wouldn't worry too much just yet, give it a little more time and see what happens before taking big action.

If you send me your website address I'll give it a once over for you and a bit of advice as to what I think will help you.

You're also going after how I like to look at it as two different types of SEO, that is Local and Organic SEO. You want people to find you when they're looking for 'Plumbers in Worthing' right? This is Local search. There is a strategy to this all of its own.

Let us know your website address and I, and I'm sure others, will give you some tips and advice that will you put in the right direction for realistic success with SEO.

PS. Re' 'NoFollow' links.... Don't ignore nofollow links and disregard them totally, it's not that black and white, nofollow links should also be part of a long term seo campaign as a natural build up of links will of course be both followed AND nofollowed links. 100 followed links and 0 nofollow will just as likely raise flags with google.

[Jason Dexter]

You'll never get banned by Google for anything that isn't 110% in your own control, because I could buy a million spammy links and bomb my competitors.

You will see a drop as Google re-evaluates your position, power and website as a whole. Specially if there's a huge, sudden surge in links (Not totally unnatural, as viral material has shown us).

Buying backlinks isn't the way to go, though.

Firstly, work hard on your website. Write content for your user first and foremost, as it's customer that will by, not your number one position.

Before ANY intense backlinking campaign, make sure your website is as optimised as you can get it. There's plenty of online SEO analysis sites that will give your site a score and tell where you're going wrong. They're a great start, if you have no experience with SEO.


Local search is organic? You're on about Google Places. Ranking locally is quite an easy process as the your keywords are slightly long "plasterer in worthing" is longer than "porn" and much easier to rank for

[daveb]

Sorry Jason, gotta disagree. Local search results are not organic, Local search results are based on Google Places indeed, but its not to be mixed with organic results. Maybe we're just crossing terms :-)

But I do agree in this case, he should be able to get ranking pretty easily for his terms, there's little competition.

[Plasterer]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the advice.

All over content as want to write articles. But if I post them in the blog... Will that help my results?

Daveb, tganks for the comment... I hope it's not to hard this is doing my sweed in a bit.

I know all the buzz words ice picked up - blog commenting, article submission, social bookmarking etc - but have to be honest whilst I get the gist I don't actually know how to put them into practice and have tried to watch YouTube tutorials etc but my Braun doesn't want to understand it.

Can anyone let me know my next step?

Clearly buying scabby links wasn't smart.

Cheers,

S

[MikeChipshop]

Lieto, on 27 October 2011 - 03:19 PM, said:

Buying links may (and eventually will) get you banned in google permanently.

No. You'll never get banned permanently. It just doesn't happen.
You'll get blackmarked at th. Worst.

You haven't stated exactly how long it's been as there could be a significant drop for a good few weeks.
Give it a couple of weeks minimum an if there is still no improvement then worry.

Saying that, as you now know, organic links are the only way to guarantee decen results, ditch these links and concentrate on proper organic link and decent content.

[roothost]

Organic results are simply results returned by a search engine that aren't paid for, so adwords in googles case. Local search results are organic as these fall in to the not paid for category.

Agreed, local, or geo, search terms are much easier to rank for and help in the long term goal of nationalising your search terms.

[roothost]

This is just a personal opinion but whenever I see paid links on the top (and now bottom) of the organic results it simply cries desperation! Work hard like everyone else has to and if the site/content is good enough then it will get ranked well. Again, just my opinion!

[MikeChipshop]

roothost, on 27 October 2011 - 06:21 PM, said:

This is just a personal opinion but whenever I see paid links on the top (and now bottom) of the organic results it simply cries desperation! Work hard like everyone else has to and if the site/content is good enough then it will get ranked well. Again, just my opinion!

I have never ever clicked on a paid for search result.
My mind just blocks them out (same with ad banners) and i skip straight to the REAL results.

[roothost]

MikeChipshop, on 27 October 2011 - 06:29 PM, said:

I have never ever clicked on a paid for search result.
My mind just blocks them out (same with ad banners) and i skip straight to the REAL results.

I have clicked on a few, probably for all the wrong reasons................

[daveb]

Maybe I need to re-evaluate my understanding then but I've always put search results into 3 categories. (as learned from seomoz & rand fishkin, eric ward)
1. Organic
2. Paid
3. Vertical, be it local or images, video, news etc. etc.
Organic results should be regarded as the standard results we're all used to seeing, not in the ad boxes, not in the (ever increasing) vertical sections. Organic results are the search results derived from googles crawling of the web, delivering links to websites, and sometimes other media, pdfs etc.
It may not be perfect NOT to describe these results as Organic, but they're certainly perceived that way in the industry. You never hear of organic results described as 'standard results' or 'googles web crawler results'.
Either way lets agree to disagree :-)

This post has been edited by daveb: 27 October 2011 - 08:47 PM

[oakleaves]

roothost, on 27 October 2011 - 06:21 PM, said:

This is just a personal opinion but whenever I see paid links on the top (and now bottom) of the organic results it simply cries desperation! Work hard like everyone else has to and if the site/content is good enough then it will get ranked well. Again, just my opinion!

I totally agree with you. I am very much the same, but then again I am in the web design business so I kinda know how this works.

One of my clients runs a taxi firm and pays for adwords and says he gets all his clicks from the paid listings as they come at the top (and the average person looking for a taxi doesn't care how someone appeared at the top, they just click on the first thing they see)

[roothost]

daveb, on 27 October 2011 - 08:47 PM, said:

Maybe I need to re-evaluate my understanding then but I've always put search results into 3 categories. (as learned from seomoz & rand fishkin, eric ward)
1. Organic
2. Paid
3. Vertical, be it local or images, video, news etc. etc.
Organic results should be regarded as the standard results we're all used to seeing, not in the ad boxes, not in the (ever increasing) vertical sections. Organic results are the search results derived from googles crawling of the web, delivering links to websites, and sometimes other media, pdfs etc.
It may not be perfect NOT to describe these results as Organic, but they're certainly perceived that way in the industry. You never hear of organic results described as 'standard results' or 'googles web crawler results'.
Either way lets agree to disagree :-)

What do you regard as the vertical sections? On the right hand side of google? If so they are adwords, paid listings, same as the top and bottom of the organic results.

Localised searches are organic, for instance do a search for web design lewes #9 or #10 is me, that is a local search.

[Ste Hughes]

They normally use blog comments with software called scrapebox to do this. The software is $60..

There is no way to remove them but the numbers will drop off in time as the blog owners see they are spam. Some will stick though.

Did you point the links to your website? normally this is a foolish thing.

When used in conjunction with other networks they can be effective but they are frowned upon.

If you wish to do this effectively set up some blogs on blogger and wordpress ect. Just the free blogs. Set up about 12

create a list and from the top down your going to write an article that is completely different for every blog you have set up. Make sure its related to your niche. Include a link to an external source to do with your niche (like wikipedia) and 1 link to your main website.

Also include a link to the next blog down on the list. When you get to the bottom of the list link to the top one on the list so they create this 'link wheel' with your website in the middle

You then send backlinks to these blogs.

It does not matter that they are not the site you are trying to rank. This is good you're building authority to the blog which means that link to your website means more in laymans terms. These are typically pr3-pr6 links too which are great.

Some will be no follow but these still benefit your main website I believe.

Do this 5-10 times and you should see some results.

You also have a PM coming inbound.

[charliesaidthat]

See this a lot with new sites *shakes head*

Whilst I am not a fan of bought links, sometimes in super competitive industries there is little way round it...

But the safer ways to do this is having links point to a different domain then 301'ing that domain to yours.

[daveb]

roothost, on 27 October 2011 - 09:41 PM, said:

What do you regard as the vertical sections? On the right hand side of google? If so they are adwords, paid listings, same as the top and bottom of the organic results.

Localised searches are organic, for instance do a search for web design lewes #9 or #10 is me, that is a local search.

By 'Vertical' I mean the special search engines that relate to limited data sets such as Images, Shopping, Places, News etc. What Google refers to as the 'onebox' results, Not sure what Bing call them aside from 'verticals', but they go as far as travel and even recipes!

Interestingly there is a real mixed bag of responses I've had so far on this topic as to are verticals classed as Organic or not. Staff at SEOMOZ like to differentiate the same way I have done between Organic and Local. Eric Ward aka LinkMoses has told me he likes to call them 'Local Organic' and there are mixed feelings from other Seomoz users so there really doesn't appear to be a definitive answer. I'm surprised I've never come across this ambiguity before to be honest but due to this, I think I will follow Erics footsteps and for clarity refer to each as either Natural organic and Local Organic results.

Anyway back to the topic.

I would suggest that the Plasterer first concentrates on his 'Local Organic' results, when people search for just 'plasterer' or a 'plasterer in Worthing' they will be seeing these local search results and you want to make sure you are on that list, and it won't be hard to rank well here. There are cases where businesses rank well in local search results without even having their own website! So I would concentrate on your own site after spending a day doing the essentials for local search.

Do you have a google places listing for your business? If not create one, You may already exist in googles index without knowing it, so check first if you show up and then 'claim your business'. There is a guy called David Mihm who IMO is the authority on local search, you can read more about him and what he says on his blog, this particular post is essential reading : http://www.davidmihm...g-factors.shtml

Secondly create profiles in local business directories such as freeindex, brownbook, qype, there is a good list of 20 citation sources here : http://www.seo-docto...ion-places.html - You really should go through as many as you can and create profiles. Be aware though you phone will ring with calls from marketing people from some of these companies behind these sites trying to persuade you to 'upgrade' your profile as you will be missing out on more traffic than you could possibly imagine.. Sometimes they can be quite rude but try and be polite and tell them you are happy with the basic free listing.

Note: Very very important.... Take note of the exact name of your business, address and telephone number you use when creating/editing your Google places listing. You absolutely MUST make sure you use the same details when you create your profiles on the directory/business indexes to give credit to your Google places listing. Otherwise you may find Google creating duplicate listing in Google places and losing rank due to spelling differences.

Hope that helps

[Jason Dexter]

Dave, I understand absolutely what you're saying and it is right, these are different terms for the information being displayed but I see them fall into:

Organic
- Vertical results
- Every other natural listing

Paid
- Adwords

My opinion is that local search is still organic, much the same as images and videos. The images and videos still have to be part of a very powerful website to get the exposure. They are triggered because of search patterns, so when someone is looking for a celebrity then Google understands that they need to display images, and information about that person. If someone adds the prefix "image" to a search then they're triggered.

If I wanted to rank for "plumber in london" using Google Place, it's going to take much more than just creating a Google Places account and adding some details. It has to be linked up with a good, strong, powerful and relevant website.

The reason why Google Places are easy to rank for in very local areas such as "chiropractor in mansfield" is because it has extremely low competition and setting up Google Places is all the user needs to do to rank for it.

So I still see it as organic as it's providing the most relevant information for the local search term. It's much easier to rank when someone has Google Places as well

[Plasterer]

Hi there,

I must thank you fur your sage advice so far, it's rather intimidating and you have been a grea lt help.

I'm afraid I have a future question if that's ok,

With regards to links, I'm about to sit down and approach other plastering companies around uk as well as plastering products and write to them asking for a link and also putting one in my links page - I haven't got one yet but will do.

Is this going to help?

Also I gave downloaded a PDF I found online about write g articles for seo. I will write an article which is relavent to my business and also where the article calls for it insert my key words with a HTML link and the keyword as an anchor. My sons mate is going to show me how. Where do I post it in my blog or as an article somewhere? hope to write something worth actually reading so I'm going to write advice on how to choose a decent tradesman.

I've been reding thought this forum and just dont quite understand about duplicate content.. Do I only submit that article to one place? If so which is the best?

Again, top marks for helping me out, let me know if your roof needs a skim!

S

[Plasterer]

I'm using an iPhone and it's chosen to include different words to those I have typed so sorry about the grammer.

[Ste Hughes]

Quote

..setting up Google Places is all the user needs to do to rank for it.

NOPE!

Google places SEO exists too!

It relys on citations on other company listing websites, reviews, pictures and videos.

in terms of 'real' SEO a citation is about the same value as a link.

videos + pictures + reviews are like the h1 tags ect.

to rank highly you need all these, and ideally you need all these before you open the google places account otherwise it may never get found by google places.

[Lieto]

Quote

No. You'll never get banned permanently. It just doesn't happen.
You'll get blackmarked at th. Worst.

oh, ok, didnt know it.
Probably would be better to say "you ll get banned for a really long time" then ))

[Jason Dexter]

Ste Hughes, on 28 October 2011 - 02:34 PM, said:

NOPE!

Google places SEO exists too!

It relys on citations on other company listing websites, reviews, pictures and videos.

in terms of 'real' SEO a citation is about the same value as a link.

videos + pictures + reviews are like the h1 tags ect.

to rank highly you need all these, and ideally you need all these before you open the google places account otherwise it may never get found by google places.

Your right, but what I said right before that little quote is that in extremely low competition local search keywords, the user just needs to set up a Google Places account and add some details.

Much like a website, I've built sites that rank for stupidly poor keywords with just one link

[rallport]

Very typical actions taken by Google in response to someone trying to cheat and buying highly unatural and crap backlinks. Why do people still think they can fool Google? Hell, they have some of the smartest people in the World working there.

Another thing people are missing is that this drop in the SERPs equals lost potential business. Yes, given enough time if you remove all the naff links your site may recover, but that;s not an instant thing by any means.

Out of the interest, what company did you use?

[Plasterer]

Rallport, I'm not sure so will check when I get home.

Righto, I have written my article, have included my keyword and am ready to post...

Was going to post at ezine articles. When I am putting my links in I'm putting This: is it right?

<a href="http://mywebsite> title="plasterers in Brighton" plasterers in Brighton</a>

Do I blog this and submit it to ezine ?

Is ezine don't follow?

Thanks,

S

[daveb]

Plasterer,

I really think you need to spend a little time looking through some of the other comments already raised on this thread before spending your time on ezinearticles or whichever other marketing effort you've read about.

If you are going to be writing some valuable content... start by putting it on your own website. You have to think long term. An article on ezine, unless one that stands out from the other hundreds being posted on there daily isn't going to do sod all for you compared with the benefits you can get from writing really useful content for your website.

And you haven't yet mentioned whether you have setup/claimed your google places listing... that is critical for the type of search you should be targeting.

[MikeChipshop]

Plasterer, on 31 October 2011 - 09:17 AM, said:

is it right?

<a href="http://mywebsite> title="plasterers in Brighton" plasterers in Brighton</a>

Nope
Might possibly have been a typo but what you actually want is...

<a href="http://mywebsite" title="plasterers in Brighton"> plasterers in Brighton</a>

[zed]

thread locked, attracting SEO spammers