I always get emails from those link traders who sell links- duh! Well, they send you an Excel sheet or Google Sheet with a bunch of attractive DA urls and some metrics. I’m hoping you know what I mean so you’re the right audience for this SEO post about backlinks.
Are backlink gigs on Fiver any good? NO.
It concerns me that I see the same kind of rubbish for sale on Fiver. Worse than the 5-star reviews roll in- more on that later. You are actually better off just throwing your money down the toilet or sending it to me because I will spend it better.
What are you missing? Those of you just trying to jump on the SEO bandwagon which isn’t a great bandwagon but I suppose for scammers it is. This is especially for you. Learn about indexation and how to see if a page can be indexed.
View a pages source code and check for the following:
<meta name="robots" content="follow, index, max-snippet:-1, max-video-preview:-1, max-image-preview:large"/>This meta tag tells crawlers who obey robots such as Google (bad bots don’t care) that this page will be followed and indexed. In fact, the default is follow and index so you don’t even need these directives. So what you need to search for on the page’s source code is “nofollow” and “noindex”. If you find these or either one by itself, the page is not good for links.
A non-indexed page is not thought to be counted because of the likelihood of not being crawled and the importance of the page is low, so noindex is bad.
A non-followed page discounts all of the links- in terms of passing link juice however there could still be some benefit for these links in the sense of a diluted vote. We simply don’t know how Google treats them. The nofollow vs follow conversation is one to watch. It is beyond the scope of this rant.
Here is the complete Google specification of the use https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag
What the links are missing is a key point of INDEXATION, and therefore TRAFFIC. These pages where your links turn up are typically profile pages the high DA sites like sony.com (it doesn’t matter who) allow anyone to create. These member pages or similar are blocked from being indexed to save SEO for the domain. If they were indexed then Google would see the ‘Link Farm’ which these pages become. Do you pay for links on Facebook or on Twitter? NO for the same reason. There could be a social effect if they were influential pages but not an SEO benefit.
When a page isn’t indexed the links are worthless. Google is maybe allowed to crawl the page (if the crawl budget ever allows it) but it isn’t going to assign any value to these links.
Stop buying these kinds of backlinks. And absolutely stop rating these providers 5 stars on Fiver.
This is why people invest in guest posting on blogs and websites with traffic in relevant niches. I also like link insertions into articles that already have traffic through being indexed and known by Google and other search engines.
Link building is time-consuming and therefore expensive. So better to aim for a few links drip-feeding alongside onsite SEO and get your site technical SEO approved too. The rate at which you build links should appear natural. Another reason why getting even 10 links all of a sudden is a red flag. It’s easy to spot.