What is the time of impact of a link regarding to rankings?

[internetrepublic]

I own a website in a pretty semi-competitive market (220 000 searches a month for my main keyword). I've been doing some intensive linkbuilding with some good results. I got around 10 links from organisations, schools and websites of city halls, all of them, the pages being at least pagerank 3 or 4.

I let some time pass inbetween, to let Google craw the pages I got the links from and most of them also start to appear in my GWT. The thing is, my rankings havn't improved anything, they are doing quite some Google dancing, staying around position 50. I got the links about 2 months ago (April).

When checking other websites in my market, they all have fewer links and mostly low quality. My website itself is also pretty good, all unique content, updated pretty often, around 100 pages of content. All on-site SEO is done as it should be.

Am I just being impatient? Or should i start digging deeper?
What, on average, is the 'impact time' of decent links on your rankings in a semi-competitive market??

Thanks!

[Danapollo]

Well it sounds like you've been careful on the approach to building the links. Have you analysed the websites above you (with a fine tooth comb) and critically analysed yours as if it was someone else's?

I know it's frustrating, but I'd say remain patient and just remain ethical. It may be the case that these .gov links look good because of their 'authority' but the actual relevance of them to your site may not be ticking boxes. You'd be better getting a natural link from a .co.uk or .net, for example, rather than trying to sap authority.

What's more, if the .gov sites are already linking out to others - remember that you're sharing the link benefit with all those other sites, so it may not actually be that valuable.

Try and explore other ways you can get links in your niche rather than asking for them - the rankings will come naturally then!

[internetrepublic]

Hi there,

Thanks for your answer!

The links are pretty diverse, from the 10 links 4 use the url of the website, 2 use the main keyword, 2 other use main keyword+other keyword, and 2 links are with a 302 redirect (don't ask me why, probably the outdated system of government websites).

The interval of the links from the first to the last links was about 8-9 days. it sounds rather strange to me that I could have been penalised, looking at the quality of the links and that they are put naturally by the webmasters of those websites after I told them about our project in our mail. Of about 50 mails I sent out, we got 10 links, which I think is rather good.

The main reason I'm asking this, is that in the past for other projects in quite the same markets, when getting same quality like links, the next day my rankings improved.. Now, almost 2 months later, and not one good link, but then, and still no change, I am starting to become clueless..

However, what bothers me with our link profile, is a comment on a website someone made with a link to our website, where the content of the comment is shown on ALL the pages of that website (about 800) with a latest comment widget. Those links are all no-follow. I see in GWT that the number starts to decrease as other comments have been placed by other users, but it might be that it affected our website as been seen as getting spam links (going from 1 to 800 links, and then back to 1 eventually)..

[Danapollo]

I see you're at the 'why isn't anything happening stage' of SEO work!

This doesn't necessarily mean that the work you've done isn't helping your website - but you need to analyse your link building strategy.

How did you go about getting the links? What anchor texts did you go for? If you've gone keyword heavy on links, for example, it's likely you've been penalised.

I can't stress how important it is to look natural. What you perceive as natural may be completely different to how Google perceives 'natural'. Remember, a link should look like someone is referring to you/referencing you as the source of information/a product. You've almost got to have an element of paranoia about you when thinking about whether something looks natural.

As for the impact time - this all depends when Google is crawling your site and how often. If you're updating content pretty often - why not stick some news content in there too, or reviews, or offers... something people can share and interact with rather than simply read and click away from.

Good luck, hope your site gets to where you want it!