Has anyone ever shared a list of all their backlink sources?

[Dr-Pete]

I'd some point you have to start going for the harder links, and that really means content marketing, pushing social forward, and building industry relationships. The lists and competitive analysis will get you most of the low-hanging fruit, but then you do hit that wall.

Personally, I find I never run out of sources with content marketing. There are always new people to discover your work. The great thing about content marketing and building strong social profiles is that they're self-perpetuating. I've got posts that are 2-3 years old and still get new links, without me doing any additional work. It's more work up front, but it pays off by 10X-100X in the long run, IMO.

[UnderRugSwept]

I don't want to sound lazy; after all, I blog three times a week and do guest posts. My problem isn't that I don't come up with fresh content; it's that nobody cares when I do. The content strategy is great if you get loads of traffic on your site and people who want to share it. I could come up with the coolest piece of content ever. It doesn't do me any good if no one sees it. I could post it on Facebook. We have 400 fans--probably 40-50 will see it. Out of those 50 one or none will 'like' it. Same goes for Twitter. Content marketing is great if you're a large company. Don't get me wrong, I do it all the time--I just never see pay-off. But I'm not giving up!

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry - I didn't mean to sound like I think you're lazy or creating low-quality content. It's just that I see this stage as a natural evolution in a site's success, and a critical decision point. When the low-hanging fruit is gone, you have to start climbing, and that's going to take some more effort.

I just want to say that every big blog started off as a small blog. Granted, if I post on SEOmoz, I get a lot more attention than other places, but SEOmoz started as Rand's blog and built up over years. My own company blog has about 1,000 subscribers (not SEOmoz's 100K), but I've had some major content marketing success over the years, and some of those still generate traffic/links 2-3 years after they were written.

In most cases, those successes not only took an investment in the content (I estimate about 20-30 hours for a really good piece of content), but it took pounding the pavement. I had to build relationships online, find my audience, and generally promote myself and my content. That goes well beyond just posting on FB/Twitter. You have to seek out the people who are the right audience for that content, even if it's one by one at first. It's tough, but once you've built that base of relationships, they'll keep paying dividends.

[UnderRugSwept]

I agree with everything you said, and I don't think you were accusing me of being lazy; I was just concerned I was coming off that way. SEO is an uphill battle as it is, but it's even worse when you work in-house for people who don't understand its value. And even worse when no matter how hard you try, you fall in rankings because your competitors are employing shady black hat tactics.Both are things I am grappling with.

[Dr-Pete]

I do understand - when you don't control the budget AND your competitors seem to be getting away with every trick in the book, it is frustrating. It's tough when you believe white-hat really works and also realize Google rewards too much bad behavior at the same time.

[denimblog]

so did it work for you.  Did you end up submitting to a number of those sites and getting quality backlinks?  Did any of your keywords go up higher on Google?

[UnderRugSwept]

I tried many of them. A lot were no longer in existence, changed to nofollow, or made no sense how you could get a link--ie, Huffington Post. I think it needs some updating, but overall it is a good tool.

[Dr-Pete]

Just a heads up - there's chatter across the SEO industry that Google has been targeting (penalizing) blog networks the past couple of weeks and may be getting more aggressive. So, be careful out there.

[UnderRugSwept]

Good! That's what all my competitors are doing to outrank me, and what I refuse to do! And I think I can see some evidence of this, because I was an idiot and used a link-building company for one of my sites and I found that's how they got most of the links, and interestingly enough, that site's rankings have gone down.

[UnderRugSwept]

I think I'm seeing the results of this in action! We just moved up to number 3 and outranked two of our competitors who we're putting backlinks all over blog networks. These competitors were previously outranking us. It's nice to actually see some payoff for doing things the right way. it's so rare!

[Wallander]

Hi Marissa, I see its been a while since you bought the $27 link building source, I would love to get an update on whether you think it was worth the money. Did you get any higher rankings as a result of any of those links at all?

[UnderRugSwept]

There are good and bad things about it. It is very well-researched and pretty complete. Whoever made it put clearly put countless hours of work into it. On the downside, it needs some serious maintenance. SOOOOOO many of the links are outdated or completely dead. Others seem irrelevant. I.E. The Huffington post is one of the things listed--how are you supposed to get a link from them? Also, a lot of the sites are listed as giving followed links when they're really nofollow, and pagerank is pretty much wrong for the majority of them.

My advice would be if you could buy it with your clients money, go for it. If you have to use your own . . . meh.