What is Tiered Link Building? Is it safe?
Tiered link building is a strategy used to increase the number of links pointing to a target website with the goal of improving that site’s search engine ranking. The idea is to create a “pyramid” of links, with the target site at the top and other sites linking to it, forming the tiers. There are many benefits of tiered link building, including improved search engine visibility, increased traffic, and higher conversion rates. However, there are also some risks involved, so it’s important to understand both sides before deciding if this strategy is right for your website.
What exactly is Tiered Link Building?
Tiered link building is a process of creating links to your website or blog from other websites or blogs. The links are created in such a way that they form a “tier” of links, with each tier having more links than the one before it.
The purpose of tiered link building is to improve the search engine ranking of your website or blog. By creating more links for links that point to your site, you are increasing its “authority” in the eyes of the search engines, which can result in higher rankings.
There are two main ways to create tiered links:
1) Manual Link Building: This involves manually finding websites or blogs that are relevant to your site and asking them to link to you. This can be a time-consuming process, but it is often the most effective way to create high-quality tiered links.
2) Automated Link Building: There are many software programs that claim to be able to automatically create tiered links for you. However, these programs often produce low-quality links that can actually hurt your ranking rather than help it. If you choose to use an automated link building program, be sure to research it thoroughly before using it.
Does tiered link building boost ranking?
There is no guarantee that tiered link building will immediately boost your ranking. However, it can certainly help improve your ranking over time if done correctly.
There are also some risks involved with tiered link building. If you create too many low-quality links, you could actually hurt your ranking. Therefore, it is important to only create links from high-quality websites and blogs that are relevant to your site.
In a nutshell, tiered link building is a way of increasing the number and quality of links pointing to your website. By creating multiple tiers of links – from low-quality directories and blog comments to high-quality guest posts and editorial links – you can gradually improve the overall link profile of your site, helping to push it up the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The 5 Simple Ways To Boost Your Website Traffic
What are Tier 1 Links?
Tiered link building is a process of creating links to your website in a systematic way. The first step is to create links from high-quality websites, also known as “Tier 1” links. These are typically websites with high PageRank and domain authority and the link they give you is a do-follow.
These websites generally have high domain authority, a strong backlink profile with lots of incoming traffic. For example, Guest Posting and Press Release.
Here are 2 tools which I use to generate high quality content for guest posting
What are Tier 2 Links?
Tier 2 link building is the process of acquiring links from mid-quality websites. These links are less valuable than links from high-quality websites, but they can still help improve your ranking in SERPs. In order to obtain these links, you can submit your website to online directories or create profiles on social media sites etc.
These websites are generally social media, podcast or micro blogging sites. Please note, the backlink type is generally a no-follow.
What are Tier 3 Links?
Tier 3 link building is all about building links from low-quality websites to your mid-quality websites. This may sound counterintuitive, but it actually works really well. The reason is that Google puts a lot of weight on links from high-quality websites. But they also don’t want to penalize you for having low-quality links. So, they give more weight to links from low-quality websites if those links are going to high-quality websites.
This is why tier 3 link building can be so effective. You’re essentially using low-quality links to boost the authority of your mid-quality links which are boosting the authority of your high-quality links. And this can help you rank higher in search engines and get more traffic to your money site.
These are web directories, article submission sites, blog commenting or a private blog network (PBN)
What is a Money Site?
A money site is a website that is used to generate revenue, typically through advertising or ecommerce. In most cases, this is the website for which you are going through the pains of tiered link building.
To help you visualize, it looks something links this below.
Pros of Tiered Link Building
1. Cleaner and easily manageable backlink profile.
High-quality backlinks are tough to get and since these fall under Tier 1 category they are less in number but hold high value.
2. Safe link building strategy
Only the high value or high authority websites are directly pointing towards your domain which reduces the possibility for a penalty. (link spam)
3. Increased referral website traffic
By building Tier 2 and Tier 3 links you are improving the quality (authority) of the Tier 1 link which increases it’s rankings on SERP. Since the Tier 1 link is pointing towards your domain, you can generate tons of referral traffic on your money site.
Cons of Tiered Link Building
1. Takes too much time
Planning and executing a tiered link building strategy is time consuming which can be better spent in acquiring high-value backlinks.
2. Frequent Google Updates
Google has become more aggressive in identifying link spam and frequently makes changes to their algorithms to identify and de-value low quality links/websites. Although your site is safe from any penalty however, after an algorithm update, do expect a decline in your rankings.
3. Referral traffic dependency
If the website (Tier 1 or high quality) decides to remove the webpage from their website or add someone else’s links to the existing post, then, there is a decline in referral traffic as it’s now being shared with someone else.
Tiered Link Building Best Practices
1. Publish “Good” Quality Content
Ensure the links built using tier 2 and tier 3 aren’t down right horrible. If you’re writing content for tier 2 and 3 links ensure that they have some value for the reader.
2. Relevance matters at all levels
Links built using Tier 2 and 3 should come from relevant websites. If your website is about electronics and the tier 2 or 3 links are coming from pet store directories, then, Google is smart enough to understand it’s irrelevant and no authority is passed.
3. Be smart with 3rd party link building tools
People generally get excited and end up generating 1-2K backlinks within a week for their website. Google identifies this unnatural speed of link building as spam and won’t let any authority pass to your Tier 1 links.
4. Tiered Link Building should be a part of your SEO strategy and NOT your SEO strategy
You can just scroll up and read the 3 cons of TLB again and you will have the answer. It’s time consuming, website traffic may constantly keep fluctuating and Google’s algorithm update my end the traffic completely. Period!
Conclusion
To make the most out of tiered link building you need to ensure that your website has a strong internal linking structure. A good internal linking strategy bundled with tiered link building strategy can sky rocket your website traffic and rankings.
