- Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel here
for another Q&A Thursday.
This is when you ask a question, and I answer it.
I'm here with Adam from viewership.
- Hey, everyone.
- And today's question is:
- This is from vishvendra, and this is
"Hey Neil, can you tell me, is there any limit
of building links in a day, and if there is,
then how many links should be built in a day
to avoid looking spammy?"
- I wish I could tell you how many links you should build
per day, but it's different from each website.
What I will do is teach all of you guys
how to figure out how many links per day
you should be building for your website.
The simplest way to think about it is,
if you have no links and you all of a sudden
have an influx of links, is that natural?
Of course not.
Google will be like, hmmm, these guys may be buying links,
they could be doing something to manipulate.
If it's all natural that's okay.
But in general, slow and steady wins the race.
With SEO, it's not about how fast you can build your links,
because you're not gonna get rankings tomorrow.
You get them over time.
Here's what I recommend that you do.
You go to ahrefs.com.
You put in your URL, it'll show you
how many backlinks you have.
You put in your competitor's URLs who rank above you.
It'll show you how many links they have.
Now you'll get a good understanding of how many links
at the maximum end you really need to build.
Because even if your competitors have a thousand links,
you don't always have to build
a thousand links to beat them.
You could just build a hundred higher-quality links.
What you want to do is, when you're starting off,
start slow, building one link a day.
You're a brand new website,
trying to build one link a day is good enough.
After you do that for a month, try to ramp up
to two links every single day.
And you probably won't hit these numbers right away,
and it probably won't be consistent,
where it's like one link each day,
It may end up being like, oh, this week I built five,
oh, I built zero the next week,
oh I built seven or eight the next week,
but overall in the period of a month,
shoot for 30 in your first month,
then try to double up to 60,
and you don't need to keep doubling from there.
You can try to go to 90, and once you get
a few hundred links that's indexed by ahrefs,
you can build links in decent quantity.
One month you can end up saying,
hey, I wanna build a hundred links.
The next month you could say, I don't wanna build any links.
Then after a few months, you could be like,
I wanna build three hundred links, and that's okay.
As long as they're natural, you can build as many links,
you just gotta start off the ramp very slow.
If you already have hundreds and hundreds of links
or thousands of links, you can build as many as you want.
Now, building a thousand links in one month
isn't gonna skyrocket your rankings.
What we've noticed is, with Google,
whatever the links you build, it takes roughly
a year for them to fully kick in.
Sometimes even longer, like a year and a half to two years.
Once you build those links and then they kick in,
boom, your traffic picks up, and you just start crushing it.
But it takes a long period of time before they get
really picked up, and they're to their maximum strength.
Google sometimes can pick up a link within a day.
Sometimes it takes them a week or a month
depending on what website
and what page is linking to you from.
But, the point I'm trying to make is,
start off slow and steady.
After you've been doing this for roughly six months,
you can have fun and do it at whatever pace you want,
or if you're already a popular website,
go at whatever speed you want.
And when you're trying to build links,
it's not about quantity.
If you built one link from a highly relevant site
that has a high domain authority,
you're better off than building 10 garbage links.
So go for the most relevant links,
go for links that are in content, not from resource pages
or sidebars or footers, it needs to be within text,
it needs to be contextual, not just the article.
Yes, the article is more important if it's contextual,
but ideally, if you can get a relevant site
to link to you, that's even better.
So the dream would be a high domain authority site,
a page that's very relevant, an in-text link,
and a site that's also super relevant.
Now you won't always get all of those factors,
for example, a link from Forbes is amazing,
but Forbes writes about a lot of stuff
about business, marketing, entrepreneurship,
and it's not just about one specific topic.
Sometimes they write about ICOs and Bitcoin,
and whatever may be the latest trending topic.
If you do that, and you do it consistently,
like you build links over the period of a year,
you may not see great results in the first 12 months,
because you have to remember, the day you started
isn't when you got all of the links.
You built up those links over a period of 6 months,
a year, or whatever it may be.
But if you fast-forward a year and a half
from when you started, that's when you start
seeing really good search engine rankings.
- Right, I remember the first time
I started my first website eight years ago.
I think I went to like fiverr.com,
and bought like a thousand links.
Worst decision of my life!
Don't ever do that! (laughs)
- Oh yeah, yeah, don't buy links.
We didn't discuss that, that's a good point.
Don't buy links, don't go to fiverr, don't look
for the quick solutions. - No
- You will get you banned or penalized.
- That website's gone. - Avoid them at all costs.
- That website's gone for sure.
- Anyone who's trying to sell you links,
if they're buying them, don't buy them.
If someone tells you, oh we're gonna give you
this many links in this domain authority,
Y links in this other domain authority,
and here's what we're gonna get you and buy,
they're probably buying them,
even they tell you they're not.
So avoid those people as well.
- One other quick question when it comes to link-building,
I remember another SEO person who was trying to sell me
SEO services years ago, said get .edu or .org links.
Are those better, or .gov links,
are those better than other links?
- I've tested .edu, .gov, .military, and I've found that
whether you have those kind of links or normal
kind of links, either way your rankings are gonna go up.
A lot of people started doing resource pages on edu sites
or paying college students to link to them.
Still not as effective as getting a good link
from a solid sites that's within your industry,
a page that's relevant, in-text link,
and high domain authority.
Combine those factors, the link does better.
It doesn't matter if it's the .io, .com,
.gov, .edu, or whatever it may be.
- So basically, Google's not dumb.
Don't try to trick it, and don't try
to trick the Google god.
- No, and everyone used to do hey,
let's do free scholarship giveaways.
- [Adam] Yeah, yeah.
- [Neil] And we used to do scholarship giveaways
so we could more applicants for jobs.
- [Adam] Right.
- But what we found is, a lot of people were doing it
at the same time to manipulate Google rankings.
And we would tell people when they linked
to our scholarship, nofollow them,
so that way it doesn't pass Google juice.
And funny enough, we stopped doing that,
because too many people were manipulating it,
and we didn't wanna cause a risk of getting banned,
even though, our links were nofollowed,
and just didn't wanna be the guy who got made an example of.
- Right, okay.
- That's it for this week's Q&A Thursday video.
Thank you guys for watching.
If you have a comment or a question
that you want answered, leave a comment below.
Maybe we'll pick it for next week's video,
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I'm not trying to monetize them in any way.
I really just am looking to help
other people out with their marketing.
So thank you for watching.