Authority links. Powerful links from well known brand name websites. A look at the standard link diagrams within SEO Autopilot shows them being used as tier one, powerful direct links to add a huge search engine ranking bonus to your target website.
While this power is awesome, and these links are a real reason to love a tool like SEO Autopilot, there are some issues with these links that need to be looked at. In particular link deterioration and link deletion
It’s all about
Staying Alive
Factor 1. These links are powerful. Seriously powerful. You’ll notice the domain authority of most of the sites is 75 or higher. The links are predominantly DoFollow and the sites themselves are household names.
Factor 2. Although SEO Autopilot makes these links reliably well. Without some TLC, they are probably going to get deleted by the site owner sooner rather than later.
Your average high authority domain is full of automatic spam and account redundancy measures.
It’s not a case of SEO Autopilot doing a bad job or the accounts being poorly made. This is just how it is with most high authority domains that allow user interaction.
They have processes that run in the background, without human moderation, that periodically look for accounts that need to be archived or deleted, and with some of them not using an account for as little as 90 days is a red flag.
If you still accessed the email the account was made with for example you would notice that an email had arrived. Saying something like “We are sorry we haven’t seen you for a while. Let us know if we did something wrong”
All nice and polite. But its the first warning that this bio is about to be deleted – along with the very valuable link it contains. A few days later you might be asked to click a reconfirmation link. A week or so after that the link will be sent again “Last Chance” If it isn’t clicked – the account and your precious link will be deleted.
There is no doubt about this. These authority sites make it clear from the outset that an account and its associated bio will be deleted if left unused for a period of time. Take a look at some actual terms and conditions from a well known authority site that spells it out clearly.
https://www.adobe.com/about-adobe/inactive.html
The message is clear and simple and applies to more authority sites as time goes on. Unused accounts get deleted, along with the profiles and links associated with them. This is not a fault or a problem with SEO Autopilot, this is just what happens
Why Does This Matter?
How much this matters depends largely on your approach. But for most people this is a real issue.
For instance if this is a tier one links, then all the links behind it are now useless, every link and all the authority this link was getting from tier 2 and 3 are now wasted. That’s not a good thing to happen.
Secondly, if this link survived it would get better with age. The DA will eventually become PA and your link will add more and more power over time. But of course that depends on the link existing for this level of time
The biggest issue really, the one that got me into this subject in the first place was just how many authority sites delete these links and profiles regardless of whether they were created with SEO Autopilot or not.
Authority links could be your single most powerful tool in the SEO armoury, and without proper attention, you could end up losing 60-70% of them inside 4 months after you create them.
Rather than the site going up in value continuously. Instead it levels off after 90 days or so, then comes back down in SERPs again.
No one wants that to happen
Remember – Just making more accounts, profiles and adding more links does not solve the problem Older links are better links.
By allowing your existing links to be deleted and just creating more you are starting the process of leeching page authority from domain authority from scratch again.
You would need to keep repeating this every 90 days forever and you would never reach “mature authority link with its own page authority” stage if you did this
The Two Things You Should Do If You Value Your Authority Links
The answers are surprisingly simple. However at this point in time I’d bet no-one does this.
Solution 1. Open the email address or addresses the authority links were created with about 10 days after the campaign and click any follow up links that have arrived. Foursquare, Adobe and Mixcloud among others now often send a follow up link to “reconfirm your account“. Failing to do this can sometimes lead to the normal 90 days before the account redundancy process being triggered being reduced to 60 or even 30 days. This only needs to be done once
Solution 2. Revisit the profiles after 60 days. then again after 120 and 180 days. For now, at this point, this should be enough. If you are creating links for clients give them the login details for their authority links so they can do it themselves. If you are doing it yourself, first harvest the accounts…
SEO Autopilot Manage > Accounts
Click on the account with the authority links, then on the right hand side click the authority links text and a window will open with the site, the email the user name and the password.
I have a small set of very simple macros in Firefox using Imacros. I load the account details into this macro and let it do its stuff. It is very easy. It is only a matter of logging in, staying in the profile for a few minutes in a browser, then logging out.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/imacros-for-firefox/
This only needs to be done 3 times maximum. At that point your account is probably nailed on. Nothing on the internet is certain forever, but this is a good number
Solution 3. Change your bio. That simple. One time when you log in add a sentence or two to the bio. Upload a different bio picture, answer the questionnaire (there is nearly always a set of questions they want you to answer) or reply to another users thread on their forum using this account. Just do “something”. This is a solid way of getting your account grandfathered into the sites “A” list.
But I Do Churn and Burn and I Haven’t Got Time For This!
I get it. This is for those managing a few websites. Offering a platinum standard service. Who want the best long term results. This isn’t a solution for quick fire link service providers or those do churn and burn marketing.
We all know now that there is no such thing as “one size fits all” in SEO and digital marketing. If this solution isn’t for you. If you are getting decent results or creating tens of thousands of links and baby-sitting them isn’t practical for you. Then that’s fine. I can’t argue with that
To The Developers Of SEO Autopilot
We all know that adding content to several of the link types in SEO Autopilot is easy. The profiles are set up to be accessed multiple times on – for example – a WEB2.0 site. This means that keeping them alive is much easier. SEO Autopilot does the accessing and the changes for you “on autopilot” saving a lot of hassle.
I haven’t found a way of reentering most of the authority sites though once the links are created. I get these sites are not about adding content over time, they are a one off hit. But some functionality to re-access these sites using existing account data (user name and password) would be great. Save any messing about with Imacros and make keeping these super powerful links alive.
Final Word
These authority links are a differentiator. They are incredibly powerful. Most SEO link building tools do not offer this link type.
Not only are they incredibly powerful. They get better with age and with tiered linking behind them. They accrue page authority over time, they add more and more value to your inbound link juice month after month
If they are still alive!
Authority links alongside mature content link profiles have been the number one for ranking sites in competitive commercial markets. More than this, because the site owners delete so many profiles over time, your power from a well maintained and preserved profile is even better. Being the one survivor, not archived or deleted after 90 days makes you stand out even more. After all most of the other profiles competing with yours and using authority links will have their links deleted, whereas yours will keep getting stronger over time.