What is left ethical? What is working for offpage SEO? Very long write up in here and my take on things.

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Hello,
Please ignore misspells and grammar, this was typed quickly as I am spending my time researching not writing a perfect book on it.

My goal is to find ethical very hard to get links unlike guest posts which are now dead according to Matt Cutt's blog here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/. My journey started with a quick message to Rand Fishkin, he responded the following

"Hi Matthew - thankfully, there's literally hundreds of link building methodologies that are still completely legit. Check out http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and you'll find tons and tons of them. The key is that none are easy, none are particularly scalable, and all of them require doing work that will add value for searchers, for your brand, and for your overall marketing - which is exactly what Google wants to count.

Wish you all the best,"

Thanks Rand Fishkin!

So I started my search looking for links that are hard to get other than those that are directories, forum links that are dead and spammy, blog comments which are overused, guest posts, or any type of black hat link.

I figured I would start to check what other popular SEO companies were doing and that have been at the top through many of the updates.

After running an analysis on the term SEO services I found the following

Test 1. I analyzed Main Street Host to start with. If you type in SEO services in Google you can see they are rank 1 for it. After a quick analysis it's easy to see that they have 100's of footer links on clients that they have, some with exact match anchors and some without. My question is, is why is this a viable tactic?

Lets take for example the following. If you pull up their http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ stats and look at the inbound links you will come to an exact match anchor right away that says SEO Marketing Company. I went to the weebly link that they have and found that they have put their name at the bottom of this page.

Issue 1 - Why is it ok for this type of link, but it's not ok for a template link? Aren't these links suppose to be penalized?

Issue 2 - Nothing on the page is even relevant to their link at all. As we have read before, you need to have links surrounding relevant text.

Take a look at their backlinks you and you will find almost all of their high quality links are exact match anchors coming from their clients surrounded by irrelevant text.

Why is this working? How is this different than a network? What stops someone from just starting a network and dedicating 1 footer link to a full site and putting up dummy info... Anyone can go to Godaddy and purchase a DA 40+ site or so and throw up $20 of content and a footer link.

As I dove deeper into finding what is ethical and working I discovered many of the top SEO companies use this. Not just one, but over 20 of them use this same method.

Lets use another example. So I started to look at what they did for their clients. How did I know who they worked for? Simple I assume that since they have their link at the bottom of the page and claim that they do SEO for them, they are indeed working for them. So I analyzed the site we talked about a while ago on the Weebly that they had their link on. It's the Valley Art Weebly link if your checking yourself. I quickly found that they are using a network to rank up some of their clients as well. For example http://firesidebookshop.com/index.html Take a look at the link on this page leading to the art place. At first glance the site doesn't look spammy, but try to buy a book, or even order one. Who has an online book store, but doesn't sell books lol? Who also puts interesting links on their home page? This screams network to me.

I am willing to bet the following will happen - Matt Cutts and his spam team will ad something like the following to the algorithm or whatever you would like to call it "ignore link if total outbound dofollow links on full site = x amount or higher" = internal Google disavow tool = bye to guest blogging. So what is everyone going to do? Okay it's time to figure out what that number is right? Lets do some tests and lets say that magic number is 5 to 10 links on a whole site.

What does this do? This drives the price of quick SEO up again evening the playing field for others using ethical SEO like myself. How do I figure this? Lets face it black hat SEO will never end as long as someone is able to do it. Now since guest posts are gone, the quick link on quality sites surrounded by enough text to count is gone. This means that it will cost extra money, because everyone will be forced to put a max of x amount of links to be safe and for the links to get noticed on a website. So now they have to purchase an established domain that is high enough quality to pass the correct link juice through to a clients site that they want to rank up. Lets figure a few dollars for a unique IP, another few for the hosting, $40 to $100 for the domain if your lucky on Godaddy auctions, and then $40 for the content to make it look realistic if your getting it for $0.01 a word. Plus the time it takes to setup your site. This price of that $30 Odesk guest post backlink just went up to a min of $100 or so.

Diving deeper into what's working and moving past the networks, because I feel this will only work temporarily as well if you are brave enough to use this and I know I am not. It doesn't seem to ethical to me at the end of the day even though some may argue, you are just creating more relevant websites which can maximize your traffic streams.

The problem is I have stopped here and am stuck. Sure I have looked at http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and read the most recent post where it talks about 31 types of links. Most of those links don't apply or are outdated and you shouldn't use them. Some of them talk about forum links,directories, bookmarks.. Those have been tactics for years and sure you may find 1 out of 1000 that are good, but the rest are just spam. I have been over to search engine land, and a handful of other sites. I have talked to many other SEO's as well. They are emailing me asking what they should do after guest posts, because they are unsure.

The question is, what is ethical? Let say you have a plumber, or a roofer, .gov links are nearly impossible for them and quite frankly that seems spammy to me to even post them on one.

I know what many are going to say, build links as if your not worried about Google and you will grow.. Where are you going to build the links to if everything is unethical? As we know clients will walk if they don't see improvements quickly. What's quickly? I would say around the 3 to 6 month period using ethical SEO. Sure there is onpage, a great blog, etc., but what is there left truly ethical for offpage SEO besides some good press releases, some social profile links like a pinterst, and the normal? I must be missing something! I am not looking for the easy way, I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and work hard.

If anyone can show me a quick example of a truly ethical link I would be grateful to see this. I can't seem to wrap my head around something that I can do that will last at this point. If you don't want to share it to the world, please PM me.

[edited for formatting by Keri Morgret]

[MoosaHemani]

WOW!! This is indeed a very long question!

Let me start with the bad news that Google is tightening the space for low quality link builders and website that are using low quality spam but they are not finished and you will see some websites here and there (even in some busiest niches like SEO) that websites are ranking on money making keywords on the basis of low quality spam.

The websites that are ranking for the terms “SEO Services”, “SEO Company” and related keywords sometimes contain hidden links in their link profile (not one or two but tons of them). If you notice these SERP positions over the period of time you will notice that these websites does not stay there for a longer period of time and results will change after every few months.

The website, I was noticing 5 months back is nowhere for the term “SEO Company” at that time it was ranking on the first page somewhere above the fold for this keyword.

Ok, so now your second question simply divides 2 type of SEO the unethical SEO and the ethical SEO. Both works well but one is short term while other is a long term game. Now it’s up to you, how you want to play!

About Guest Blogging, yes Mat Cutts said its dead but, I have my personal opinion on this and I still believe if you can create value from your guest posts, you should go for it! I shared the detailed review on my site: http://www.setalks.com/guest-blogging-dont-panic

What are the high quality links that required hard work?

There are actually tons of examples but I would love to share few of them!

-          http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-get-on-national-tv This talks about how to get on National TV and obviously this much have given him tons of links as well.

-          Here is the post that will talk about how you can get links naturally to your website: http://www.setalks.com/natural-links

-          This broken Link Building guide links are hard to achieve but valuable: http://moz.com/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible

-          Read this, where experts are sharing that best link building tip ever: http://digitalphilippines.net/link-building/

Hope this helps!!