Are Backlinks from Free Blogs Effective?

You have set up some new sub domains on free blogs like blogspot/blogger or wordpess and keep posting articles with backlinks on them around a month or more. Now the question is Are backlinks from these blog platforms effective? and should this be used as a link building strategy.

Online SEO Tools for Links, Keywords and Rank Tracking

Suggestion #1

The problem here is that you have created new sites which on day one have zero authority, zero traffic and do not rank on the serps. Backlinks from such sites are weak.... It will take time for you to grow your tier 1 sites which done correctly over time will provide beneficial link juice... One approach to strengthening your tier 1 sites is to create tier 2 sites which provide backlinks to tier 1 overtime as well as sending other signals e.g. social shares, bookmarks etc... and again rinsed and repeated with tier 2 and perhaps tier 3 level.

With that said done wrong with G detecting unnatural link building and you'll find such links will be discounted or worse could contribute to a penalty e.g. penguin....

The best links you can get are from well established sites which are ranking, have traffic and possess a level of authority/trust - ideally on the home page.... My recommended approach with getting such links is either through guest posting or that you develop a PBN with purchasing old domains which have great metrics plus with resurrected content and valuable backlinks which for sure provide much more link juice than what you are doing currently...

How Google Defines a Paid Link: Link Building Strategy

With PBNs you are looking for websites/domains for sale which already have what you are stating e.g. great quality backlinks, gets traffic and has authority/ranking indicators e.g. MOZ DA/PA, Majestic CF/TF are some third party metrics which can help with assessing a domain for sale... A few years ago PR would of been relevant - but its no longer updated and has not been for a few years now so dont bother with that...

PBNs is similar to what you did above with web 2.0 like Blogspot and Wordpress, but you've to grab the customize domain for your PBNs blog.

Suggestion #2

Yes of course, free blogs are effective when you are publishing fresh and unique content weekly or daily basis and count as back link for website.

Any backlink that is not on a spammy site is going to help. Creating your own sub-domains and backlinking to the main domain isn't going to hurt but it sure isn't going to help that much, especially if they are brand new and that's what is sounds like. You want backlinks from established trustworthy websites. That's what is going to help you the most. Creating blogs on free web 2.0's or any other place isn't going to help as much as if you put the effort into getting 1 decent quality backlink from an established blog.

The key is not to expect to dump awful content onto a new sub-domain site and rank or get a decent link. Same with everything online now - build quality and nurture it.

How To Rank Your Content Even With Lesser Links Pointing To Your Site 

It works but it should be used in conjunction with other types of links. You should really test those thins instead of asking it here. A lot of people have a lot of opinions and I had a 100 times to do something that other people said it can't be done. It's all up to you, use other people info. just for directions but not as a guide. I use free blogs as important part of my LB efforts but I do it for my type of promotion, for someone else it maybe won't be so effective. I create daily 30-50 new blogs and promote 1 web 2.0 site with 50-100 links from free blogs. I don't know why you say blogger.com may be less effective than example.com because I see it completely the opposite. Blogger already has some authority where example.com is new domain that has no authority at all. 

I use free blogs to rank I use free blogs to link. You should really test it and see the results and take conclusions from those results. I have analyzed some domains and looked at the type/structure of backlinks some sites have. I saw some sites rank with 90% using just directories (and people say that those links are useless) I saw some sites rank using only a lot of blogger and WordPress blogs for backlinks. I saw people rank very good using mainly hi5 profiles backlinks and I saw people ranking with only couple of blog farms. Just try something and take notes  And remember, you can make 10000 backlinks but if you target wrong keyword phrases and too competitive area than you will fail. So work smarter not harder  But you do need to work. 

And one last note that I always tell, if it's for authority site build links slowly and mix a lot of types(sources) of links.

SEO Tips: One Page Two Or More Links Pointing To The Same URL

Personal Tip: They are effective. I'm trying to make as much as i can from them.

Are there any other problems I'm overlooking? I get the feeling i am missing something major here and i hope that some one considerably cleverer than me can let me know in the comments.

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Home › Link Building Strategy › Are Backlinks from Free Blogs Effective?

How Google Defines a Paid Link: Link Building Strategy

Webmasters and Google have such a love-hate relationship when it comes to backlinks. Webmasters know they need great backlinks in order to rank well, and Google knows they need to keep on top of how to determine if a link is paid or not, so they can react accordingly.

Paid links are an incredibly gray area. What exactly is a paid link? How can Google figure out what is paid and what isn't? Google's Matt Cutts dove into the topic of paid links in his latest webmaster help video.

Now, 99% of the time, Matt Cutts said it is clear if a link is paid or not. It is a clear transaction that the link on a site was paid $X for. But sometimes it is not clear. Matt summarized it on Google+ these are the other criteria Google uses to determine if a link is considered paid or not. Google asks these questions when looking at a suspicious link:

• What is the value of the gift, product, or service?
• How close is the gift, product, or service to actual money?
• Is it an outright gift or a loan?
• Who is the intended audience?
• Is the intent of the gift to get links?
• Would the gift be a surprise to third party?

When Does a Gift to Your Site Become a Paid Link?

Google wants links to be created naturally. They want a link from one site to another to exist because the linking site thinks something on the linked-to site is of real value to the relevant audience viewing their page.

For that reason, Google outright bans any exchange of money in order to get a followed link from another site. But what about if you link to a site that sent you a gift (perhaps a sample product to review) or gave you some free service? 

In a longer-than-usual Google Webmaster video, Google's +Matt Cutts explains the criteria by which Google determines whether a link was "paid for" by such gifts.

Incredibly Clear Paid Links

There are definitely a lot of cases where it is painfully obvious to trained SEOs when a link is paid, even when some webmasters think they are being pretty clever about it.

"The vast majority of the time things are incredibly clear: people are paying money outright for links based on PageRank, flowing the PageRank, trying to get high the rankings," Cutts said. "Ninety-nine percent of the time it's abundantly clear that these are links that are being bought and paid and sold and all that sort of stuff."

But then there's the gray area. What if someone isn't paying someone for a backlink, but instead the company takes them out and buy them pizza and beer in exchange for that link or story? Does it become paid then? Or where is that line? Cutts continues and tries to explain the differences.

1. Value of the Item

Is it swag you picked up a conference, such as a T-shirt or a pen? That likely isn't going to sway your opinion on what you write about the company.

But things range in value from cheap pens all the way up to things of high monetary value, and that's where evaluating paid links gets tricky. Cutts said:

Sometimes people might say something like, "Hey, I'd like to send you a gift card." You know what gift cards are pretty fundable you can convert them to money and back and forth... On the other hand, something like "I'm going to give you a free trial of perfume" or "I'm going to buy you a beer" or something like that, that's less of a connection.

But we do look at how close something is to actual money when we look at those kinds of things. If somebody goes and buys you a dinner and you write a blog post four months later, and the dinner wasn't some huge steak dinner with 18 courses ... that's probably not the sort of thing we worry about, as you would guess.

2. Loan vs. Gift

What about if an item is simply loaned for that review versus an outright gift?

"Another criterion we use is whether something is a gift or loan," Cutts said. "So imagine, for example, that somebody loaned out a car for someone to try out for a week versus giving them a car. There's a big difference there."

This is actually quite a common practice for loaning out high ticket items, because not many car bloggers, for example, would be able to afford to outright by all these cars every year to review, and car companies are looking for the publicity that goes along with reviews, not to mention the price of a new car would be worth so much more than a few paid links on a car blog or news site.

"If somebody's giving you a review copy, and you have to return it, that a relatively well-respected thing where people understand, 'OK I'm trying this out (I'm a gadget reviewer or whatever) and then see if I like this camera, but I do have to send it back.' Whereas if someone sends you a camera and said, 'you know what, keep it,' that's something that's much closer to material compensation in our opinion," Cutts said.

3. Intended Audience & Intent

Cutts said Google also looks at the intended audience, noting it can be hard to judge intent, "but bear in mind the vast majority of time the intent is crystal clear when someone is giving you actual money to buy links," he said.

Cutts gave the example of being given a free trial of a product. The intent generally isn't that they are going to be giving links in exchange for trial, but rather they are looking to make the sale after the trial is over and for then that person to tell other people about it.

"The difference would be where we've encountered people who are supposed to be reporters, who would say if you give us a laptop then we will write nice story about you, and it's giving me a laptop not borrowing a laptop," Cutts said.

4. Is it a Surprise or Expected?

Cutts next discussed whether it would be a surprise to learn that there was some compensation in some regard.

If you're a movie reviewer, it's not a surprise that somebody probably lets you into the theater and maybe you watch the movie for free. That's not something that's going to be a surprise. If it was a reporter for a tech blog and they said “give me a laptop and I get to keep it”, that would be a surprise, and it was for something not reviewing a laptop, it's “I'll write about your startup if you give me a laptop”.

Cutts also noted that they reserve the right to take action against other manipulative or abusive techniques trying to exploit people's trust that aren't explicitly against Google's guidelines.

He also suggests that webmasters review the FTC guidelines regarding compensation if they still are unclear whether something would be considered paid link due to the compensation.

While this clears up the issue surrounding at what point compensation goes from not being a paid link to being a link, there's still a lot of gray area in the middle, and it will come down to what Google can determine algorithmically or manually when it comes to evaluating what are paid links.

"Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file."

- from the Google webmaster guidelines

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