Every business is striving its best to survive in the saturated online marketplace, and only a few are able to get through the competition and rank high on the biggest marketplace of the internet i.e. Google.
It would not be wrong to say that if your business doesn’t exist on the first page of search results, it doesn’t exist for your target audience.
This is where Search Engine Optimization comes into play. Millions of businesses follow the best practices of SEO to rank high on Google and stay in the competition. Tiered Link Building is also one such strategy that is known to improve the SEO of a site.
Before diving into its pros and cons, let’s understand what this strategy entails:
What is Tiered Link Building
Tiered Link Building is a strategy in which the you form different tiers at different levels that are linking to a single website and boosts the link juice of a backlink at a level that eventually adds to the ranking of the website sitting at the end of this pyramid.
The backlinks present at Tier 1 level should be high-quality links with high DA because they are in direct contact with your website to be boosted. However, if you feel that these backlinks do not have sufficient link juice, then you can boost these links by having backlinks linking to them. They would fall in the category of second tier links, and the chain goes on. In border terms, we can say:
This strategy eventually forms a pyramid having various links at the base of the pyramid directing their link juice to the fewer links at the top until it reaches the apex of the pyramid where the website lies.
Purpose:
The main purpose of this technique is to improve the authority of a new website through backlinks that are backed by a number of further links. The high authority backlinks consequently improve the link juice directing to the main website.
Source: SmarterDigitalMarketing
It potentially involves creating a google site that lists all the acquired links and anchors. Embed google maps, YouTube videos, google sheets, slides, drawings anything you can embed to create a tier 1 link to follow to create and pump tiers. Once you have the page ready it’s time to create a profile, comments, forum, and maybe the PBN links pointing to that single URL.
How to Form Tier Links
Following a tiered link building strategy is time taking and tedious as it requires a lot of research and strategic placement of the links. The formation of this pyramid takes place in steps, with each step centered on the formation of a level of tier links.
Before diving into the detailed formation of tiers, it is important to consider the basic requirements that you must follow in order to qualify your strategy as a white hat SEO technique. There are many marketers that consider tier link building as one of the grey hat or black hat SEO techniques, but following the basic requirements will keep you from such claims.
Basic Requirements
Here are some of the basic things that you must tick if you want your tiered link building strategy to qualify as an ethical and registered approach of the SEO, otherwise, it could do more harm than good to your website rankings:
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The site Should be Relevant
The website that you want to form tiers for should be directly relevant to the type of backlinks you are using on it. The authority of the website, as well as of the backlinks, should not raise any kind of ambiguity in the process. Avoid marketing an irrelevant and low-standard website through high-quality links unless you organically improve the statistics of that website.
After confirming the relevance, it is important that you also check whether the links that are backing your main website are ideally placed or not. If the links are placed out of context, all your efforts might go in vain. The anchor text of the link should make it look natural and relevant. Moreover, use the target backlink in the first 100 words or introduction of your content.
Moreover, if your content has only one backlink, it will look promotional in the eyes of Google bots and it might deem your tiered link building approach as unethical. Make sure that your backlinks are in accordance with the spam link policies of Google.
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Content Should be High Quality
The quality of the content that you use to promote your backlink should be at par with the basic requirements of high-quality content that ranks on Google and other search engines. It should be free of plagiarism and should not have any kind of keyword stuffing. Furthermore, your content should be unique, to the point, and full of value. Google has a strict policy in place that makes sure that only the best-written content gets authority.
Now that you have fulfilled all the basic requirements, it is time to begin with, the actual process of building tier links step by step:
1. Step 1- First Tier
The first tier links are supposed to be high quality that links back to a high domain authority website. If you are going to use this strategy, you will want to make sure that you are not making even the slightest mistake that will misguide Google regarding your intentions. Hence, you might have to spend plenty of time configuring the best strategy to form your first tier. You can go with either of the two options:
- Paid Approach
- Unpaid Approach
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Paid First Tier Links
You will want to stay away from the professionals who promise you a bundle of supposedly high DA backlinks for just a few dollars. Do your research and approach a well-reputed outreach agency like Globex Outreach that has years of experience in this field. Book a meeting and tell us your requirements. They will offer you plans for paid high-quality guest posts or infographics that you can use to incorporate your first-tier backlinks.
The unpaid approach would require you to put a lot of your time into creating valuable content that will have your first tier backlink in it. You can use any of the following options to make your first tier:
- Writing a guest post
- Designing an infographic
- Making a research-based case study
- Getting high DA relevant backlink
- PR Posting
2. Second Tier Links
When moving to second tier link building, you can use medium-quality backlinks to serve the purpose. This does not mean that the quality of the link should be completely out of phase with Google guidelines.
You will use the backlinks from average DA and PA but with impeccable quality content that is destined to appeal to its target audience. Here’s how to check the DA and PA of a website to get your tiered link building in no time.
3. Third Tier Links
Next in this strategy comes the part where you form the third tier after tier 2 link building. The number of links that fall in this category should be more compared to the ones used in other levels.
For instance, you can only use a few but extremely powerful backlinks for tier 1 link building, whereas you will need more backlinks for the second tier and even more for the third one. As the number exceeds, the quality might decrease as we go down the hierarchy of the tiers.
4. Fourth Tier Links and Onwards
The hierarchy of the tiers can potentially stop at tier 4 as per your preference. Many marketers go as far as tier 9 or tier 10 to instantly boost the ranks of their websites. But if the quality of the tier link building is not kept in check, it might affect your site and can potentially cause you a penalty from Google. If you struggle to keep up with the quality of the tiers as you go down, it is better to stop the chain and follow other organic link-building strategies for improving the SEO of your website.
Where Tiered Link Building Strategy Shines
Now that you know what is tiered link building and how to form an ethical and white hat tiered structure, it is time to dive into the benefits of this strategy.
Source: Daniel Bocardo
Other strategies that you might want to tap into to improve your SEO include Link Farming, ASO backlinks, and many more. Let’s look into some main points that make marketers take risks and apply the tier technique to improve the website of their SEO:
Buying guest posts from experienced outreach agencies might seem to be an extra expense at first, but with time you will realize that it is an investment for your business when you will start getting organic traffic from the improved SEO of your website.
Improved SEO means more visitors that can be translated into more leads and, eventually, more sales. In this way, tiered link building will boost your revenue, that too for a long period of time. Unlike PPC ads, it will give you consistent growth and a boost in daily visitors that will sustain you longer.
When you boost your links sitting at tier 1, you are directly boosting the link juice of those links. As they are directed towards your target site, your website will reap all the benefits of that high authority link juice, eventually improving the ranking of that page.
If you follow the aforementioned steps and approach to apply this strategy, you will face minimal risk as opposed to following other black hat and grey hat approaches of the same strategy. Keeping your work transparent and ethical will save your site from any kind of penalty from Google. There will be no risk attached to this strategy when you use high-quality content and impeccable information to improve the authority of your website.
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High-Quality Backlink Profile
The main purpose of putting a tiered link building technique in place in to get several high-quality backlinks for the target website that can potentially up-rank the website and showcase a stellar backline profile. This profile plays a crucial role when analyzing the SEO health of a website. Here are some tips that can improve the SEO of a small business.
Where Tiered Link Building Strategy Loses
Having all the potential benefits discussed, it is important to also look into the risks associated with forming tiers and using this to improve the SEO of your website. Just like Private Blogging Networks, it also falls in the grey zone of ethical SEO practices.
Let’s have a look at the most common potential losses that this strategy can cause:
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Risk of Penalties from Google
The topmost risk which is associated with the tier structure in improving the SEO of a site has to be penalties from Google. When you use several substandard, below-the-belt connections to improve the SEO profile of your website, it is sooner or later detected by Google bots.
Once an unethical link-building strategy is detected, Google not only penalizes that website but also ranks it down in the search results in such a way that it never recovers. This has put the future of tiered link building in danger, and hence, it is not considered a reliable technique to get the required results.
You will need to practice patience if you are willing to get the claimed benefits of using this approach. Formation of a website and getting relevant tier links can take longer than you expect. Outreach is an extensive process and can take from weeks to months, depending on the response from the publisher, the speed of the writing team, and other factors that contribute to networking.
Sometimes, the publishing websites take a long time to get back to you on a guest post. Hence, it is best to take help from a reliable outreach agency that will get all things done for you within your deadline.
Tiered link building strategy will cost you a fortune if you are planning to do it using the white hat approach that has been mentioned above in this blog. Formation of each tier 1 link will cost you no less than $150, and you will need at least 5 such connections to make a strong network.
Similarly, the individual backlink price may go down, but the overall price will only go high because as we move down the tiers, the number of links required will increase, making the whole campaign cost you no less than thousands of dollars.
