How long it takes for backlinks to work?

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  1. ishwarya_p profile image40
    ishwarya_pposted 13 years ago

    I am building backlinks to my hubs, already reached 35 backlinks which are all been indexed by Google, still no SERP boost. Typically how long it will take to see effects and boost in SERP?

    1. dablufox profile image57
      dablufoxposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      I like the set and forget method as there is no set period for Google to do its thing with backlinks and give you a leg up.

      One thing I will say however is keep your backlinking as organic looking as possible.

      It a bad habit to spend three hours backlinking to a single page whether it be a blog or hub or whatever, its much better to spend an hour a day or every second day creating one or two backlinks for each web asset you have.

      This way Google is more inclined to treat the popularity of your content primarily due to its quality rather than your promotional efforts.

      Try too hard and things can backfire, and you will be ignored by the Google monster and you will only get frustrated and quit.

      Patience and quiet perseverance is the key, though most people are in short supply in both.

  2. Will Apse profile image88
    Will Apseposted 13 years ago

    If your back links are low quality, blog comment spam you could find yourself getting penalized rather than rewarded.

    I see your account with hubpages has been active for 5 weeks. In internet terms this is hardly any time at all. Most hubs reach their full earning potential after a year or more.

    Concentrate on hot topics like new technology or new games and you can find rewards overnight, of course.

    Backlinking will help you a lot less than good articles and good keyword choice.

    1. leahlefler profile image94
      leahleflerposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      I don't usually backlink (new at this game), but my organic internet searches have been steadily increasing. I did do an "experiment" with backlinking to the comments section of an article containing scientific errors, and I received some traffic from that backlink. It does work, but don't overdo it!

    2. Peter Hoggan profile image69
      Peter Hogganposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      If that were the case all that you would need to do to damage the rankings of a competitor would be to fire some dodgy links at them. If Google decides that a link is of dubious nature it will ignore it. If the links comes from a spam blog etc the site in danger of being penalized is the spam blog.

      1. Will Apse profile image88
        Will Apseposted 13 years agoin reply to this

        Spammy backlinks will be ignored by Google up to a point (in other words you are just wasting your time) or they will be penalized if they are excessive.

        Also, Hubpages may un-publish deliberately back-linked pages since they damage the site as a whole.

        The fact is, Hubpages is a great way to earn money if you learn how to use it. That means learning what it can do for a writer and what it can't do.

        If you think you can muscle in on well established websites and rank above high profile blogs you are wasting your time.

        Forget weight loss and wash board abs- they've been done and no amount of promotion will help a hub on that subject. Find subjects you can write about before they are oversubscribed and you can be successful quickly.

        In other words be a writer not a half baked SEO expert.

        1. Peter Hoggan profile image69
          Peter Hogganposted 13 years agoin reply to this



          In this we are in complete agreeance big_smile

          Quote from original comment before it was edited.

        2. profile image0
          frantiicposted 13 years agoin reply to this

          Backlinking from low quality websites or websites with poor taste will not penalize your website. If it were that easy, everyone would make adult websites to link to their competitors. Google realizes that neither you nor I can control what websites link to our websites. As a result, you CAN NOT be penalized in any way whatsoever for having too many low quality backlinks.

          Please don't confuse the already confused with false information.

          There is no such thing as too many backlinks. But too many backlinks will not help you as much as a few high quality backlinks here and there.

          1. Will Apse profile image88
            Will Apseposted 13 years agoin reply to this

            Try reading what Google has to say, before suggesting all backlinks are wonderful.

            http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. … -spam.html

            You might also note that hubs can be flagged for using spammy backlinks- a recently added feature.

            1. profile image0
              frantiicposted 13 years agoin reply to this

              To be fair, I didn't say "all backlinks are wonderful." Quite the opposite, I said that fewer high quality backlinks are more beneficial than a lot of backlinks. Please don't twist my words, thanks.

              Do you want to see what Google REALLY targets when they say "link spam" and "paid backlinks"? If you think they mean spamming your link on forums and in comments, then you are WRONG and need to gain a little perspective.

              Here's what real link spam is...

              Screenshot: http://d.pr/oIhw

              I have developed software that detects hidden links and reports them to Google. These are the types of "paid links" that Google often references, and they are dead easy to spot.

              I don't think anyone was questioning HubPages willingness to ban bad backlinks, granted I think that policy is flawed. In fact, I know a certain someone who makes a lot of money from HubPages and only has 21 posts (not saying any names) who has a lot of these bad backlinks. In fact, it was HubPages that added this person to their series of blog posts about success stories. Again, nobody can control the type of backlinks they get. If it was that easy, I could backlink spam any articles of yours that compete with mine and boom, there goes your income! If someone were to do it enough times, does that mean HubPages will ban you? That would really ruin your income then, eh?

              Do you honestly think Google is that naive (or HubPages for that matter)? Search is, after all, a billion dollar revenue stream for them (and is also where more than half of their current engineering staff are dedicated).

              Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google, pretty sure he knows what he's talking about) has clarified a plethora of times that we have no control over who links to our sites and our pages (as recently as this month on YouTube). Negative backlinks will not help you, but they CAN NOT hurt you.

              1. Pcunix profile image91
                Pcunixposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                I don't disagree with you except that you missed the issue of sites like HubPages deciding to disable your hub because of excessive spammy linking.  They HAVE done that (and by all rights SHOULD do it to that certain someone whose name you don't seem to want to mention but who will probably show up here anyway because he thinks what he does is perfectly fine).

                So - at least on the face of it - you could go create enough spammy links to cause me trouble with HubPages.

                In reality, I think HP would be (and has been) very careful about that and would want to be double dog sure that it really was me engaging in the spamming. 

                That doesn't say that some other site would be as conscientious.  I could easily see sites overreacting out of fear and haste, too.  But those would likely be unimportant backwater places.

                So, consider this not as a disagreement, but more of a parenthetical note.

                1. profile image0
                  frantiicposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                  tongue I don't like calling people out very much, but it was unfortunately an obvious example.

                  But if you trace said persons backlinks, most of what you will find is websites like that. Most people don't operate at a scale that large, because most people do backlinking by hand... Even if you spam by hand, the amount of damage you can do is exponentially smaller than when you use automated programs, which I think are the worst of the worst, and paid backlinks, which I honestly can see Google killing very soon (because they're so obvious).

                  I also agree that HubPages should have that extra termination right, but I do hope that it is one that is rarely and selectively used. It's similar to AdSense sabotage... You can't control who clicks your ads. If you make the wrong person angry (say you take over a niche they were profiting in; we've all known of people to kill for less), 1 malicious person shouldn't hold the ability to do so much damage. Having your AdSense account disabled can be more than just devastating; for some people, it's like losing a well paying job after (often times) spending years getting promotions and raises.

                  Regardless, I think we can all agree: Don't get backlinks that aren't relevant, quality, and organic. Aim for high quality backlinks related to your hubs that will not only benefit your pagerank, but also the users who stumble upon the link on the originating website. Oh, and create high quality, original content that users will WANT to share and link to.

                  1. Pcunix profile image91
                    Pcunixposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                    Unfortunately, we have people who don't agree with that - or who agree in principle but still go on to create mountains of fakery to fool Google.

                    They have their excuses: it isn't illegal, their competitors do it, and so on.  That's all true, but the question remains: should a site like HubPages encourage and even glorify people who do that?  I don't mean it as a moral question (it is that for me, but HP is a business), but as a matter of policy. Are they ultimately risking Google's wrath?

                    If the answer is no, then that's the end of it. Spam away and why bother even pretending otherwise? Add "How to trick Google" articles to the Learning Center and let's really ramp it up! Sure, there's some danger, but smart people like the unmentioned one know how to avoid that. Why not just go for it?

                    Right now, it seems to me that there is some hint of hypocrisy present.

        3. Brooke Lorren profile image60
          Brooke Lorrenposted 13 years agoin reply to this

          "If you think you can muscle in on well established websites and rank above high profile blogs you are wasting your time."

          That's not always the case.  I have ranked my pages above well-known web sites several times.  I currently hold the #1 ranking over a certain television personality's own web site, and have for months now.

          That being said, it's not easy, and creating lots of low-quality backlinks won't get you there.  You didn't say what kind of backlinks you have.  Even then, your anchor text, whether the page with the backlink holds related content or not, and many other factors matter.  I'm not sure if Hubpages is your first site you're producing content before, but if you've only been doing this for six weeks, there's probably a ton of information that you have left to learn about SEO.

          1. Brooke Lorren profile image60
            Brooke Lorrenposted 13 years agoin reply to this

            First site you've produced content with before.  Drat these grammar mistakes!  It must be time to go to bed.

    3. topseoservices profile image61
      topseoservicesposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Yes Will Apse i totally agree with you.

      1. Peter Hoggan profile image69
        Peter Hogganposted 13 years agoin reply to this

        I am not advocating comment spam as an effective SEO tactic. However, I feel that the idea you could get a site penalized (perhaps a competitor) by posting dodgy blog comments is somewhat naive.

        I would love to be corrected on this point and believe the web would be a better place for everyone, not just writers, if it were so.

        I hope in the future that Google cleans up it's act - they have been rattling their sabre recently and  have promised to take action against link spam. But at the end of the day it's Google who set the ground rules and its the interpretation of those rules and how they are implemented that seem to cause the problem. Links are the number one factor in gaining rankings, not grammar or writing ability unfortunately. Yet links are a poor quality metric and always have been. So until the brains at Google get of their rich fat asses and provide a better ranking system its open day as far link spam is concerned.

        Buying links, link networks, article spinners, auto blogs, splogs and link wheels are regularly used to promote content but none of them have anything to do with the quality or the effectiveness of the content or message they are promoting. This is the game that legitimate content owners have to play if they want their voice to be heard above the noise around them. Sadly, this goes some way to countenance spam and the reason why it is so prevalent in search results.

        Not a good time for Google.

  3. profile image0
    awesome77posted 13 years ago

    I gave backlinking my hubs because Hubpages does a very good job at it!

    You just need to pick very good long tail keywords and build your hub around it!

    Select good tags and your hubs will increase rank in organic searches. Hope that helps!

  4. Will Apse profile image88
    Will Apseposted 13 years ago

    Anyone who is interested in making money as a writer should start to see the SEO industry as the menace that it is.

    A lot of SEO is a legitimate attempt to make sure sites are easy to access, navigate and useful to visitors.

    Plenty of SEO, unfortunately, is an attempt to undermine Google's search results and get second rate pages to rank. Recently, Google has been getting bad press for offering poor results for a whole range of searches. SEO engineered pages have been pushing useful pages aside.

    For anyone reliant on adsense earnings this is bad news. There are plenty of places for online advertisers to spend their money- Facebook,Twitter, Mobile ad apps etc. The more Google fails to deliver what users want, the more danger there is that adsense will stop attracting money and the less online writers will earn.

    Content farms like Demand media are being accused of pushing trash onto Google's front pages and may be targeted by Google to improve quality . Hubpages really doesn't want to be identified as a content farm and dubious promotion of pages won't help.

    1. kephrira profile image59
      kephriraposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      The problem is that high quality content may attract some natural links, but it rarely gets a large number compared to the many places where a person can build links themselves. So seo people don't need to fool google with many links they built themselves to go past the good content with no self promotion.

      Of course you can get some earnings from just writing quality content. But I doubt if there are many people who have ever made enough to live off from writing online without doing at least some seo and link building.

    2. lrohner profile image67
      lrohnerposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Um, HubPages IS a content farm. And as I have mentioned in another thread, Demand Media supplies content to sites like Hotels.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, LiveStrong and others. You have probably read many articles by Demand and don't even know it.

      Each and every one of their articles is proofed by a professional editor with several years of professional experience. While many of the articles on HubPages are of absolutely the highest caliber, just as many are barely readable or completely spun articles -- something you will never see on any of Demand's sites.

      I would also like to point out that there are a lot of SEO experts on HP that are not what I would call "writers." There are also many people here that are writers, but not SEO experts. And then there are folks who have both skills.

  5. Peter Hoggan profile image69
    Peter Hogganposted 13 years ago

    Another interpretation might be that any GOOD writer should embrace SEO as a legitimate way to promote their abilities as a freelancer and improve their potential earnings on quality sites like HubPages.

    1. ThomasE profile image70
      ThomasEposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      I agree. Certainly, a lot of onpage SEO comes down to giving search engines and real people what they want. For example, keyword research is really about understanding what people want to find out, and providing it.

      Backlinking is a force for evil or good... people were doing backlinking before Google ever existed, in order to get people to visit their site. It is good when you backlink from a relevant site, to help people answer real problems.

      I guess SEO starts to become a problem when it is done for purely selfish reasons.

      The irony is, my experience things are getting quite a lot better. So the problems are not new problems, and it is not a new menace.

  6. profile image55
    SolarDeckLightsposted 13 years ago

    Back linking is a great method to promote you page and yourself as and expert in your niche. Developing backlinks to your page or domain isn't a strategy that you can definitely say will work within a specific time frame. It is dependent on Google and how often Google parses the site/sites where you have placed your links. Consequently I have found links I have created not appearing six months after submission and some showing up with a week. If you can get your links on authority sites you have a better chance of seeing link results much quicker.

  7. Will Apse profile image88
    Will Apseposted 13 years ago

    I hope Hubpages doesn't qualify as a content farm.

    Quoting from PC World:

    'Google engineer Matt Cutts on Friday posted on his blog that the search giant will be increasing its efforts to rid user results of "search spam" generated by aggregation sites, automated blogs and content farms.'


    http://www.pcworld.com/article/217447/g … _spam.html

    Also

    'Google ready for action against content farms'

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20029140-265.html

    And from the Wall Street Journal blog

    http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/01/21/d … in-demand/

    As I said before, anything that harms Google harms Adsense and harms online writers.

  8. skyfire profile image81
    skyfireposted 13 years ago

    Hubpages & Demand media content farms huh ? roll

    I wonder if not them them then who is going to showcase their merchant ads. Publishers with 500 imp/month traffic ? yeah sure wink After some point almost every site becomes a content farm in terms of quantity. CPC advertising needs content farms to get results, plus they just need a content farm which is written and maintained by humans. If not demand media then they'll move to blogcritics or infobarrel or hubpages etc. Google never hits on sites where they get social signals, no matter how much so-called writers post their frustration against marketers regarding quality of content.

    There is a huge difference between syndicated content-farms and human-generated content farms. Google is taking down autoblogs (syndicated content farms, bookrmarking sites etc.) and to our surprise top positions on google are STILL dominated by autoblogs. It's easy to be paranoid and make train wreck replies wink

    1. ThomasE profile image70
      ThomasEposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Yes, hubpages.com IS a content farm, but google hasn't said anything about going after content farms... just low quality content farms.

      Many of these reforms haven't come in yet, as far as I can see they are talking about introducing user feedback, so individuals can say whether the page was useful or not.

      Yahoo tried it in the 80's, without much luck.

    2. lrohner profile image67
      lrohnerposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Skyfire, I agree with you. I do believe both HP and Demand are content farms. Do I think either one of them is at risk of being Google-slapped? No. I never said that. But a few reporters have mentioned Demand specifically in their recent articles, and people who don't even really know what Demand is are now spouting the same cr*p. As you know, I write quite a bit for Demand and I know the editorial process we are subjected to there all too well.

      Again, I personally don't think either site is at risk. But those who think that Demand would be at risk and not a site like HP has their head buried very deeply in the sand.

      1. J Sunhawk profile image67
        J Sunhawkposted 13 years agoin reply to this

        I'm embarking on my first concerted backlinking effort to see what works and what doesn't. The info everyone supplies is most interesting. I feel like I'm jumping into a dark pool at midnight with my eyes closed.

        Should be fun. Hope I don't meet the Monster From the Black lagoon.

  9. Will Apse profile image88
    Will Apseposted 13 years ago

    A content farm, as far as I can tell, is characterized by a big pile of writers paid to write articles around keywords supplied by the management.

    It would be hard to say that Hubpages was better or worse, as far as overall quality of writing goes than eHow or about.com. The crucial fact that Hubbers choose their own topics probably saves it from being a content farm.

    I notice the suggested keywords feature disappeared a while ago from Hubpages, which helps the argument.

    I wonder a little about the competitions. Hubpages uses competitions to persuade people to write on high value keyword subjects- health, finance etc. This is still a way away from an eHow type operation, though.

  10. skyfire profile image81
    skyfireposted 13 years ago

    There is so much backlink paranoia going on hubpages lately so it's easy to spread misinformation or even misunderstood each other.

    What type of content farm is the point of discussion here. Almost any site which consistently produces content on single niche or multiple niches gets a crown of content farm once it crosses threshold of posts. Static mini sites don't qualify for content farms and they're easy to monitor and penalize for google or any SE. But when any site has lots of user input with revenue sharing option then it's really hard to put hammer on it for many reasons.

    Google is after autoblogs and similar automated content farms which are giving garbage results as per their current algorithm.

    1. ThomasE profile image70
      ThomasEposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Er... what type of content farms? Low quality ones! What Google means by low quality is when you type into Google "How to install solar panels" and get those awful pages where the content doesn’t actually help you out at all.

      Google has been aiming to reduce the total spam results in its rankings, according to it with some success, but it is going after substandard articles that are not obviously spam, but are...  well... not very helpful to whoever clicks the link.

      The spam back links and so on is not new, Google has been going after that for years, with some success.

  11. Peter Hoggan profile image69
    Peter Hogganposted 13 years ago

    There is definitely an aspect of truth in this as long as you are publishing content to a site like HubPages. The development of HubPages has been expertly done and automatically creates backlinks to your content from related content. However, if you move away from HubPages the exact opposite is often true. Although good content and keyword choice are important without sufficient quality links you might get more traffic if you were to Blu-Tack your articles to a tree deep in the Amazonian Rainforest.

    I guess we will just have to differ on the idea that poor quality links can harm a website, in saying that if everyone shared your viewpoint things would probably be a lot better.

  12. thisisoli profile image71
    thisisoliposted 13 years ago

    Just to clarify here, Google is targetting LOW QUALITY content farms, in particular they mention content farms which scrape content, duplicate content, and use article spinners.

    Back on point, SEO is about giving visitors what they want.  There is no point in creating a fully optimized SEO page and tehn teh visitors arrive and find nothing to click on/buy.  I am an SEO consultant, and I do work hard to inflate a pages rank in Google, but I target keywords that are highly relevant to teh services provided by my clients.

  13. skyfire profile image81
    skyfireposted 13 years ago

    I already explained what type of content farms are being targeted by google despite of their quality.



    Nope. Not low quality ones. If the low quality ones were to be punished then hubpages and squidoo will get big hammer because of uncle/aunty and celeb content as that type of content falls under MFA. 

    Content farms which are syndicating content from other sites (in short autoblog) and are ranking high in SE do contain 'high quality' information in every way. But still they violate guidelines in terms of plagiarism and black-hat manipulation and duplicate content farming. This is what they're tracking down as of now.



    Google is complex algorithm and not a set of dedicated team flagging sites off the index as per their wish. There is no way it can take articles out just because they find it substandard. Scraper, spun articles are still in index if you can search for it. There are things like LSI and LSA but looking at the quality of search results you can see they're not implementing it for plenty of reasons.

    1. Peter Hoggan profile image69
      Peter Hogganposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      skyfire, do you think article syndication sites will be affected by Google's move to clean up duplicate content farming?

      1. skyfire profile image81
        skyfireposted 13 years agoin reply to this

        Google Slap ? No.

 
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