Don’t worry, you can let your guard down, you haven’t been clickbaited. Not long ago, I
realized my tiered link building system and many others such as Matthew Woodward’s

is completely broken.

Upon my initial discovery I felt a mix of emotions; frustration, shock, and all around

discomfort. I realized in a single moment that I had been literally banging my head

against the wall for over a year with almost zero chance of success.

There is a fundamental flaw in the tiered link building systems that essentially

renders

the process ineffective.

Yeah you heard right, if you follow my

link building empire

or Matthew

Woodward’s

ultimate guide to tiered link building

you will probably never rank a site,

ever. You will just

make us

affiliate commissions.

In this post I am going to show exactly why the systems are flawed and how to run

things correctly moving forward, once and for all.

This has shaken me up so much that I’ve taken over a month to write this post, almost
not sure if I would even write again. But I couldn’t remain quiet because of my mistake

and allow more and more people to be misinformed and banging their heads against the

wall as well.

The First Problem

– Link Types

The problem is not with tiered link building itself, this is still working quite well. So

breathe

out a sigh of relief if you’re like me and have invested quite a bit into this

method, both time and money.

The flaw is all in the set up and the type of links we are building on each tier. Myself and

Matthew have been advising the following link types for your tiers:



Articles



Web 2.0s



Wikis



Doc share



Social Bookmarks



Directories

Sound familiar? Well the devil is in the details as they say but in this instance the devil is

in the link type, specifically social bookmarks and directories. And in lies the

fundamental flaw breaking our link building efforts.

Social Bookmark and Directory Links Should NEVER Be Used in Your
Tier Structure!!

That is if you like ranking sites at least. These link types are

not

what we want in our tier

structure, they are not contextual links and will essentially break our tiers starting with

T1 moving out to additional tiers.

Here is the image from Matthew’s tutorial

In the picture you will see the tier 2 links actually contain bookmarks and comments

which effectively cuts off tier 3 from passing any juice.

If you watch his tutorial though, you will find the specific instructions to use directories

and bookmarks on tier 1.

Now if we follow these instructions, build about 50 of each link type, we will wind up with

150 contextual links, and 100 non-contextual links.

Commence tier 2 with the same flaw and we are lining up very few tiers contextually. In

fact, we have a completely broken tier structure that will rarely get us anywhere.

But I thought you had results?

Yes, I’ve had them, but not the slam dunk rankings like we’ve made it out to be, and

most of my successes were on expired domains with existing authority. This would

explain why the few actual tiered links I managed to build actually had an effect. But in

general I would estimate that building your links this way you will have less than a 10%

success rate. Including the bookmarks, directories, and comments make it incredibly

unlikely to ever line up enough tiers to rank since ~40% of each layer is basically

worthless.

If you’ve heard of

Godoveryou

he has a tutorial that

highlights this on SEOsunite

.

This image from their forum shows using social bookmarks as a secondary link coming

in from the side and not directly in the tier structure.

This is the linking structure that needs to be used for tiered link building to be effective,

with primary and secondary links.

Primary Links

Articles

Wikis

Web2s

Secondary Links

Bookmarks

Directories

Comments

Guestbooks

Image comments

Trackbacks

With a primary and secondary structure the primary links make up the tiers and the

secondary links come in from the side allowing us to build contextual authority.

Passing contextual link authority is the primary goal of tiered linking, with non-contextual

links we’ve effectively shot ourselves in the foot.

The Second Problem

– Dofollow vs Nofollow

The second problem which is also debilitating to our link building, is using nofollow

platforms in our tiers.

Before you get all up and arms about nofollow links still passing juice and being

important for diversification, know that I share your sentiments as well.

But I can tell you from experience that using platforms like Jcow in your tiers will get you

a one way ticket to never rank shit town.

Platforms such as Jcow and Mediawiki are ALL NOFOLLOW but before we completely

write off these links, I’ll paint the extreme picture to understand why nofollow platforms

are killing our tiers.

Depending on your site list and the sites you are actively scraping, your list could

heavily skew towards nofollow platforms. So if over 75% of your site list is nofollow and

you build that out over three tiers, you’re basically fucked. To compound the problem

further, most of these nofollow platforms are extremely popular making it very likely that

your site list skews towards these platforms.

Building nofollow non-contextual links for your tiers is no bueno bros.

The Solution

The solution is using a primary and secondary link structure and setting up separate

tasks to group and keep track of your links. The focus is on passing relevant contextual

dofollow link juice.

The Real Weapon of Choice

The last order of business is to clear the air

about what is really the best link building software, because it sure as hell isn’t Ultimate
Demon. Yes I’ve promoted UD in the past but I was wrong, for that I can only apologize

and hope this post makes up for it. The truth is,

GSA Search Engine Ranker

runs circles

around Ultimate Demon and you could build out three tiers on GSA before running

10,000 sites through the UD site detector.

SER can be a bit overwhelming at first, and this is why many people gravitate towards

tools like UD or Senuke XCR, but when you realize the power of SER there is no

contest. And for the record, there is no reason why SER can not be used for tier 1 link

building and the entire tiered link buildin

g process, it’s just the unknown that has caused

people to peg it as a solely tier 2/3 tool.

My assumption is that the monetary incentive to promote UD over SER is just too great,

so we never hear about it much on SEO blogs if at all. There just isn’t that much money

in promoting and teaching about it.

That and an updated version rolls out practically every day so it’s tough to produce long

lasting tutorials. But this makes the software even more kick ass with the changes being

recommended by real SEOs every day in the

GSA SER forums

.

Without going all fanboy on GSA, here is how to setup campaigns and avoid the

problems I outlined above. We will create additional tasks for our secondary links

keeping things separated so the tiered links remain contextual and dofollow.

This takes a little more work but by the time you’re done Ultimate Demon will still be

trying to save your first task ;-)

If you’re just learning SER then YouTube, the official forums, and hands on experience
are your best bets for getting up to speed. So in this explanation we’ll assume you

already know your way around SER.

Engine Selections

Start by creating a new task. In the left hand column you will see all the different types

of links and engines that can be selected. Right click in that area you will find some

options that might have otherwise taken you a month to discover.

Click check all, then uncheck nofollow links, and uncheck non contextual links.

Congratulations, now you’re on your way to building some tiered links. Another cool

thing to note here is you can save your engine selection, so save that badboy as

“Contextual Dofollow” and just load engine selection when starting new tier tasks.

Now we will set up 7 tasks in total for a full campaign.

Primary Links

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Secondary Links

Secondary links to Tier 1

Secondary links to Tier 2

Secondary links to Tier 3

Secondary links to Money Site

The setup looks like this:

Now we have isolated our contextual dofollow links as part of the tier strucutre and

we’re linking in from the side with our secondary links. The final piece of the puzzle is

building your own site lists.

Now the beauty of GSA is it will go out and find sites automatically using footprints and

the selected search engines. But if you want to truly run the software to its fullest

potential and have more control over the link building, using your own premade site lists

is key.

So start

scraping your own sites

and building footprints outside of the default ones in

GSA. Now that you know exactly what you’re looking for the game should be easier.

That last thing I’d like to mention is that I have built a script that sets up this entire

campaign automatically. You drop in anchors, keywords, templates, emails, and hit go,

then in under 10 minutes you have the above campaign completely set up. If you’re

interested in

getting a copy, sign up for the newsletter below

to get a notification

when it’s 100% complete and ready to share. Good luck everyone!