What does link building in 2020 mean for SEO professionals?
So far, this year has been a stellar year for SEO Autopilot. With new features added and the upgrade (free to all users) to version 2.0.
So we decided – with the help of Mark Smart – who uses SEO Autopilot daily, to run a series of tests to see how the best in class link building tool of 2018 was faring in 2019 and what we might predict for 2020.
SEO Autopilot Link Building Test
The set up
First, we took 3 websites in three different niches
Gaming. A Site focussed on the re-release of the WoW Classic game. A very spam filled niche with a lot of competition, though most of it weak.
Local Business. A trade site. In this case for an electrician. A site Mark had built himself for a client in April of this year. One he was now tasked with SEO activity. While we can’t give the site name, we can tell you that it is based in Birmingham. It’s not hard to find it in Google now with that information
An affiliate site. Selling Amazon products. Specifically, several series of self-help books to do with new forms of diet (in this case the carnivore and lion diets) and products to. This also included Amazon Audible books.
Process.
Each market was assessed, and the 4 best key phrases were brought forward. “Best” in this case were commercially valuable terms with a search level of over 100 per month each (minimum) and competition assessed as moderate or low. These are all new sites and the markets they are in are established. This test was to build enough links and solid content to get them started. We might go after the big fish later
Warcraft Gaming
- WoW Classic Gold Guide
- Levelling New Warcraft Servers
- Crafting Classic Warcraft
- Gathering Classic Warcraft
Local Electrician
- Emergency Electrician [location]
- Electrician 24 Hour Call Out [location]
- Attic and Extension Wiring [location]
- Recommended Electrician [location]
Amazon Self Help Site
- Maintain a Carnivore Diet
- What is a Lion Diet?
- Carnivore Diet Studies and Data
- Is a Meat Only Diet Healthy? *
*This term was already very high competition. However, it has over 10,000 searches a month, so the target was to get some presence for this term over time.
Initial Analysis of Websites
We ran Website Auditor and SEO Spyglass on all three sites to begin with. We did not expect to find anything wrong with them in terms of structure and we had built no links to them. The Warcraft site was a few years old. The other two were brand new domains. So how would they respond to link building in 2020?
Backlinks (At July 23rd, 2019)
| Site | Backlinks | Average DA of Linking Sites | Keyword Positions |
| Warcraft | 124 | 1.1 | None in Google top 50 |
| Local Electrician | 2 | 4 | None in Google top 50 |
| Amazon Affiliate | 0 | 0 | None in Google top 50 |
SEO Autopilot Effectiveness Testing Process
We decided, to test SEO autopilot properly, we would follow a standard diagram from the tool itself
Captcha Service: Recaptcha V2
Emails: 6 bespoke email addresses created in Cpanels for each campaign. 18 email addresses in total – aged for between 2 days and 6 weeks before the campaign began.
For more on Captcha solving – we have a full guide on the topic of SEO Autopilot captcha solving here
Hosting: Blackhat VPS (Solid SEO Newbie Pack)
For more on setting up VPS hosting, here is our full guide on the topic.
We could easily have run this from any Windows desktop, but for convenience, and because Mike was already a subscriber and we could both check status via virtual desktop, we went the VPS route.
Mike lives in the USA and I live in the UK so having a VPS means we can both monitor the campaigns easily via remote desktop that isn’t tied to either of our own machines.
Proxies 8x Elite Private Proxies (Squid Proxies)
We had quite a discussion over proxy use. We discounted any shared or scraped proxies immediately We then went over the contentious issue of when a private proxy is not truly private.
We are not planning to spam any site. This isn’t about creating thousands of links. The initial campaign has 48 first tier links, just over 500 second tier links and an indexing tier per site. We opted for a smaller number of very high-quality proxies.
For more details on SEO Autopilot Proxy use try our complete guide here
SEO Autopilot Diagram Choice
This was actually quite a simple choice. Mike and I both strongly favour quality over quantity and don’t believe in endless tiers of increasingly spammy links to support our direct links.
We went for the following. We have used this before. The priority is the WEB 2.0 sites though. It is a subset of the 112 WEB 2.0 platforms that were available in SEO Autopilot at the time the test was run. It represents 48 out of the top 70 with domain authority ranging from the high 80’s to the low 60’s.
We also sifted out many No Follow sites (which is why it’s 48 out of 70. 2 sites were failing at the time of this test and a further 20 exactly were removed as not transferring link juice. A truth that has existed for years is that follow links provide the power. There is no reason to expect link building in 2020 to be any different.
This did leave some no follow in the target list, but the ratio was around 4-1 in favour of follow.
We take a detailed look at WEB 2.0 sites and their success rates in this article.
Content Sources
Make no mistake. This is where most SEO failures occur.
Let’s get something straight. If you want to rank m 2020. You are going to need decent content. If you want your 1st tier links to get indexed and remain on the sites you place them in 2020. Your linking content must be decent. Maybe not stellar – but decent.
The first jeopardy is getting your links indexed. The connection between index success and content relevance has been established.
See our full content requirement breakdown here
Use Well Written Content on First Tier Links
A backlink on an empty page will not do you or your website a lot of good. While it is possible for some links to live inside poorly written and unreadable content, it is more often the case that they get deleted.
High domain WEB2.0 sites are high domain for a reason. They self-regulate.
It is estimated that WordPress.com deleted several hundred thousand spam blogs per month. Taking the content and links down with them.
You should understand that the content that surrounds your links is both important for your links survival, and better content means the link itself will accumulate page authority over time and pass that down. Domain authority is just a starting block. A good link gets page authority, and that (almost) always needs decent content.
So, with that mini rant out of the way, where do we source content?
For our first-tier links. We write it, buy it and curate it.
I use speech to text to create 500 word articles in about 5 minutes. (edited and optimised)
This is part one of a video I made 7 years ago doing this. The software is a lot better now than it was then. Part 2 is available if you do a quick search in Youtube for my author name and video title.
Sometimes I might spend $30 getting 6 cheap and easy articles written by a service like Iwriter. I might mix in some curated articles on the subject, making it clear they are curated
I will spin the unique using WordAi set to the highest setting.
I start with 12 articles per project of unique content and each one creates perhaps 12 more maximum. The average once I have given them a “once over” to avoid any nonsense is perhaps 10 articles from each piece of unique content.
Getting all this together once you have the tools is a couple of hours work including the writing, editing and spinning. It might seem like a chore, but it is well worth it. This video might be years old, but whether link building at the time of Google Penguin or link building in 2020, the road block of content support is a universal truth.
SEO Autopilot Settings
You can set yourself up for failure in so many ways if you rush to complete a campaign quickly. Speed is the number one killer of success in any automated link building.
Use your proxies too often and they will get banned, hit your captcha service too often from the same site and the site will ban more attempts to solve. Have too many emails hitting your servers and the provider will flag your email accounts for spamming.
These are the three biggest killers of success in any back-linking process. Our reports on proxies, emails and captcha services linked to above detail the safe stings we recommend avoiding getting poor success rates.
The Process (an overview)
We started the campaign running using the diagram below and the assets and setting above on the 23rd July and decided to give the process a review after 6 weeks, then again after 10 weeks. These should give time results for link building in 2020.
We have given the process 11 weeks at the time of writing and took the updates today giving us 3 points of reference for every keyword. The initial position when no keywords were ranking, the interim position taken at the end of August and the position they are this morning.
| Keyword (stop words removed) | Initial position | 27th August | 8th October |
| WoW Classic Gold Guide | Not ranking | 41 | 28 |
| Levelling New Warcraft Servers | Not ranking | 22 | 4 |
| Crafting Classic Warcraft | Not ranking | Not ranking | 11 |
| Gathering Classic Warcraft | Not ranking | Not ranking | 31 |
| – | – | – | – |
| Emergency Electrician [location] | Not ranking | 38 | 7 |
| Electrician 24 Hour Call Out [location] | Not ranking | 9 | 5 |
| Attic and Extension Wiring [location] | Not ranking | 1 | 1 |
| Recommended Electrician [location | Not ranking | 1 | 1 |
| – | – | – | – |
| Maintain a Carnivore Diet | Not ranking | Not ranking | 50 |
| What is a Lion Diet? | Not ranking | 44 | 18 |
| Carnivore Diet Studies and Data | Not ranking | 16 | 9 |
| Is a Meat Only Diet Healthy? | Not ranking | Not ranking | Not ranking |
11 weeks is as short a timer from as I’m happy to look at. I’d prefer a full 3 months minimum and 6 months for some of these established and competitive markets would be better.
However, given the relatively short space of time the results are extremely good overall.
Gaming Site
Going from top to bottom. It’s clear that the suffix or prefix “Classic” was a vital component in getting us a chance to rank at all in this very well established and highly commercial market.
The site is on target to get between 600 and 800 visitors per month via search and has had 2 small sales so far totalling under $50. Nothing spectacular. But a start.
Local Service Site
The local service site has exceeded my expectations. The specific region we are targeting has a population of around 160,000 people. To hit number one for some phrases that contain action imperatives has been nice, and to see the call out term reach page one (albeit below the fold at the moment) is also excellent. It achieved an average of 22 visits a day in September and so far looks like exceeding that in October.
That sounds like small numbers, but these visitors are a very high percentage of people looking to hire the site owner for his services. The targeted keywords suggest action and contain buying and action imperatives.
We don’t know exactly but the business owner reports 8-10 phone contacts per week generated from the site and he is very happy with that. Reporting that his bookings have more than doubled as a result.
The site is being leased to a trader for a fee which I’m not at liberty to disclose here. Mark informs me the site, domain registration, privacy hosting costs as well as, its content and his effort have been reimbursed inside 2 months of the site being branded out.
Affiliate Site
The Amazon affiliate site, while ranking in Google’s top 50 for 3 of the 4 terms we have chosen to focus on has not sold anything yet and is expected to achieve a visitor level through search referrals of around 300 in October.
This last site is going to be the subject of further work. A new linking effort. This is another of Mike’s sites and diet is perhaps the spammiest and most congested market on the internet. Th products themselves are also (we learned later) quite controversial. There have been quite a few comments on the site raising objections to the diet, mostly from a moral rather than health standpoint.
I think we might have seen that coming.
All that said 2 out of 3 sites in very competitive markets. 2 of them ranking very well and making money, the third pushing towards success in a highly competitive market after less than three months? So far it appears that link building in 2020 will have many of the same characteristics as we have seen in the last 3 years.
Conclusion?
That’s a decent success rate and a win. A win that will keep paying out long after the initial huge effort to get the sites up and running and linked to is over. Semi regular content updates and a link refresh every few months is all that is required now.