Summary

• How to choose a spot for a backlink : Criteria Tier list

• Anchorage rate and Backlink repartition

• How to negociate backlinks with a outreach freelancer : Daryna Case Study

• example of non-listed sites

• Find a lot of more spots

The backlink criteria tier list

(additionnal information here about website metrics and here to know the step by step method to buy a link)

Based on these KPIs, i can :

1. Decide if a backlink is worth the price

2. Try to negociate a different kind of links, like homepage /menu / category

Few analysis of backlinks from the team

ex 1 : https://www.millwallfc.co.uk/commercial/official-club-partners/

Price : 1500 € a year

What do you think about it ? Expensive / cheap / Correct ?

ex 2 : https://www.hullcitytigers.com/teams/first-team/defender/festus-arthur/

Price : 1100 € a year

Anchorages rate and Backlink distribution

In order to provide a strong result for all of our sites which have results, and to avoid issues as we have met before, the recommendation of the backlinks repartition, with flexibility is :

• 70% BL to the homepage,

• 30% BL to internal pages,

• Never more 30 backlinks on an internal page.

When we compare our backlinks repartition with all our competitors into the SERPs, we are the only ones with sometimes 30, 50, or 80 Backlinks targeting an internal page of a site, with sometimes less backlink on the homepage.

Moreover, competitors reaching the TOP3 have never more than 30 to 50 links targeting the promo code page (except EMD site which are ranking the homepage), and a few exception.

Anchorages rate

The second essential optimization we have to do in our strategy is to create more natural baclinks / anchors profil.

here is a really interesting post from OnCrawl: https://www.oncrawl.com/oncrawl-seo-thoughts/how-to-calculate-the-perfect-anchor-text-ratio/

To resume: Create anchors as your competitors have.

It says that we should always check anchor rates of concurrent into the serp we want rank.

For example, we are going to check "William Hill promo code", for the US market.

1st competitor : promocodekings

The exact anchor has a 7% rate based on referring domains, and the main anchor is URL, with around 50% of backlinks on the URL.

There is a lot of anchors containing keywords. We create a category for these keywords: "Partial".

Observe that each "partial anchor" is used only one time.

If we group them by category, we have :

• 25% partial achor,

• 50% url,

• 7% Perfect match,

• 12% non-optimized,

• 10% Others (non optimized BUT related, like "a free bet bonus").

Competitor 2 : Lineups.com

This competitor is not using any URL anchor. But as we can see, his strategy is based on full partial match anchors used only one time.

It has the advantage to seems natural.

The perfect match anchor rate is 7,5 %.

If we regroup by categories :

Partial anchors represent 50%,

Image 30%,

Related 2%,

Non-optimized : 12%.

You don't need to go so deep during the creation of your link builing strategy.

Just keep in mind that :

• Perfect match anchor should be around 7%;

• You can use a lot of anchors on URL

• partial anchor, related anchor, but use them only one time to looks like natural.

Kind of anchors

Optimized : Exact match anchor

Partial-optimized : contain at least on work of the keyword + some related words

URL : URL of the website or the landing page, which can be write with different protocol (http / www etc.)

Non-optimized anchor : There is two ways to work with this kind. You can write anchors like "Click Here" "This website".

In another way, you can choose to use related words, not including keywords of the page.

Be careful: If you are targeting "William hill promo code", it does not mean that "sports betting" is a non-optimized anchor. Check semantic to get ideas, and create anchors with at least 3 / 4 words when you are working this way.

How we are going to work for now

• Creating a lot of trusted links to homepage, on URL anchors, then natural non-optimized anchors, then some partial optimized anchors

• When the website starts to rank, you can create few links on every internal page of the website, but you must continue to create links to your homepage.

• Try yo get several kinds of backlinks, from partners / footer, homepage.

• Negotiate the price of your backlink by working with an outreach. All brokers are asking for more than the real cost of a link.

• Pay links for their real values. If you find a link too expensive or if you have any doubt for another reason, ask advice from someone in the team, exchange with others help to make good choices.

Template for Outreach Freelancer : Daryna's Case Study

Templates :

Preselect websites for outreach : you can use my template and add all potential spots to the Spots tab. Either I use website bases from my brokers or I can also get all backlinks from competitor's websites via Ahref. I paste all interesting spots into Google Sheets file online, so that the outreach specialist and I could access it in real time.

Spot confirmation : you decide on which spots are interesting in terms of price and conditions

Ordering off-site articles and payment : as always, via Asana. I also created folders with paid and pending where my outreach specialist adds ready invoices. Same for articles. I created published and in progress folders, so that my outreach specialist can send articles to the media once they are ready.

That's it!

My results as of 7 Jan 2021 (37 hours worked with Igor) :

114 backlinks negotiated from 43 different websites

Broker's price : 400 euros but if we reach out to the website ourselves, the price is 180 euros

12 articles published, others are either awaiting payment or to be written by our freelancers

Example of non-listed sites

Example with : https://www.sportingfree.com/

Relevant menu on the sport thematic. So interesting. But first red flag :

Here, we have a betting article on the homepage!

second red flag :

4 days between 2 publications, long delay, can let think of paid guest post or article with link. If only evergreen articles, not annoying at the time. But no news, that can also be an indication.

to remove our doubts, we will check some metrics :

• stable organic traffic. And 100K, interesting traffic.

• TF = 25 and CF = 44, so pretty good

• DR = 504 (> 100 min)

But very few P0 and P1, and very low traffic on these pages.

So, let’s go to see the outgoing links number compared to the orga traffic of the website. On 21/06/2022, there are 593 outgoing links for 100K orga traffic. The average seems correct in proportion.

Next, see the type of links pushed (ahrefs with filters) : from the first page, a lot of betting and casino links. ⇒ No doubt about it, this site is a link farm ! so, NO GO to buy links.

Conclusion: although the metrics are favorable, we can easily guess the website is full guest post in link farm mode. To be convinced if you have any doubts, you can check 2 -3 platforms or lists of brokers to see if the site is listed on them. This is the case for this site referenced on all platforms selling links!

Find a lot of more spots

Please read all these case studies :