Does Dofollow links from forumn profiles, blog comments, business directories or article directories etc have any impact?

[sydneygardening]

Hi guys,

So looking at my competitors in my city a lot of the people ranking on 2nd, 3rd pages and so forth have little or no quality backlinks, instead, their links are all from business directories, forum profiles and blog comments. I saw google employees saying easy to create links hold very little value and it's easy for the algorithm to distinguish been easy to obtain backlinks and difficult ones.

From what I see on my competition backlink profiles, they may not get them to the front page but they do get them to pages, two three and four.  I was wondering if creating say 20-30 easy links per week and also focus on obtaining high-quality backlinks. Would they be any penalties for 20-30 easy to make links a week from Google?

Cheers

[Chris.Menke]

OMG! NO!, Syndey. There are so many reasons why not to do that and like, zero, why you should.  It's a trap many marketers fall into--"Well my competitor did it and look at their rankings." And then you become the next casualty in the SEO wars. At least you asked first.  Many throw the spaghetti at the wall first and then ask questions about their penalties later.

I try to push people to read the Beginners Guide to SEO (and everything else you find) here because it is solid, whitehat information and that can be hard to find out there on the web. (And while I'm thinking about it, do pay close attention to the dates of anything SEO-realted that you read--if there is no date or it's more than a year old, don't waste your time)  Fundamentally, it goes like this be patient and learn everything you can for a couple of months before you even think about making changes to your site. The reason is, if you do something wrong, the recovery process could put you/your site into a tailspin that you might not recover from.

Now, back to your competitors' links. Firstly, do you really know that those links are helping them rank, or do you just see them there and assume so?  Remember, correlation is not the same as causation,  as they like to say here. Secondly, it's not always or necessarily the links themselves that are of value but the pattern of link acquisition that Google pays attention to. If there was a way to view things as Google does, even someone relatively new to online marketing could probably tell the difference between a whole bunch of low-quality links from obtained in a relatively short amount of time (yes you would burn out of your tactic within a few months) and a strong link profile of slow, steady link acquisition from reputable, complimentary sites.  If you were Google, which backlink profile do you think you would reward?  Thirdly, do you know how many good links it takes to outweigh a bunch of bad ones?

It only takes ONE.  Focus on getting that one and you and your site will be way ahead of the game--and your competitors.