Tiered Link Building Explained
Tiered Link Building is still a strategy used in 2020 and it still works very well but a question I do get asked is “Can you explain what tiered link building is?”. With any link building strategy, the main job is to get good quality relevant links to your main site also called money site by many people.
One of the ways to get a good solid link is to do some outreach or buy some guest posts that point to your website, using a tool like Pitch Box and reaching out to people is the best way of doing this, or you can use a link vendor like www.linksforyou.com who will be able to arrange guest posts for you.
Now some vendors offer tiered links to go with your order and what that basically means is they will build links to the guest post you have just purchased which in turn will give that guest post article a little more power.
The more power you send to your website, directly or indirectly will help your rankings, links pass juice, and whether this is in a tiered link structure or some other way it’s all done with a view to beating the competition. You will want to be building more, or playing catch up with others who are currently ahead of you in the game so you will need to use advanced strategies to catch up.
Some vendors sell multiple tiered links whether that’s tier 2, 3 or 4 tiers of links. It is worth noting that you probably don’t want to do this by the bucket load, buy them whilst getting your guest posts rather than blindly just powering up guest posts and having no real strategy or thought behind it as essentially you are manufacturing a model to pass link juice.
What kind of links are Tier 1 Links?
This really depends on the vendor you are buying from — some use PBN’s, others use web 2.0s and a whole bunch of other places. The key is getting relevant links, some people use tools like SEO Autopilot to build some links to their guest posts, which is a great way of doing it too, but be careful as you can get yourself in trouble if you don’t know what you are doing.
Many vendors will use multiple trusted sources that they have built up over years to be able to deliver a quality service. The aim here is to build some additional low-cost quality links to power up your guest post or PBN. So any link that directly points to the guest post that you have purchased would be considered a tier-one link.
Tier 2 Links
This would be where the volume of links increases, but again will come from PBN’s, web 2.0’s, and any other sources the vendor can get these links and these will essentially be sent on a slightly bigger scale to those tier 1 links with a view to them powering up the tier one links which are powering up the guest post that links to your website.
You can become more aggressive with volume at this level as these links are not pointing at your money site and very often people will use tools like SEO Autopilot again for this or buy direct from your vendor who will set this up for you and build it using the strategies they deploy.
What are the risks of tiered link building?
With any link building there is potential for a website to get penalised if Google thinks you are trying to game their algorithm and tiered link building is pretty much a way that games the system, so avoiding footprints and trying to do this in a sensible manner is the best way forward.
It’s not about volume — it’s all about the quality of links that power up your site. Tiered links or not, I would always try and be cautious, the job when building links is to build a website that is there for the long term.
So, if you are unsure how many links your tiers should have, then hire someone to do this for you. We will always get someone who thinks this sounds easy and runs with it, they might get 6 months, 12 months or whatever out of it, but one day they will wake up and their rankings will be gone, so be careful on who you use.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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