What is Tiered Link Building
Tiered link building involves building backlinks for your backlinks to increase the amount of link juice being passed from your backlink profile to your main website. A few tier 2 backlinks point to the main website, then a few tier 3 backlinks point to each tier 2 backlink, and this is how it works:
Tier 1 backlinks are the best type of backlinks. You can get tier 1 backlinks from blogs, forums, article marketing, directory submission. Or any other place that you can get a direct link to your website. The reason why this is a very important and valuable type of backlink is because it is the most powerful type of backlink because it is getting you a lot of incoming links from a site that has a high page rank, which a website with a high page rank can do several things for your online business.
The first thing it can do is allows you to get indexed in search engines, so you will get a lot of incoming links from the search engines. The next thing it can do is allow you to get traffic from the search engines, because the search engines rank websites depending on the amount of traffic they get from the search engines.
What Link Types should you start?
I suggest you start using the tier 1 techniques first because tier 1 can get you ranked very fast in search engines, but tier 1 backlinks are not as effective and you will need to wait more time before you start getting traffic from the search engines. Tier 2 backlinks are also very important because tier 2 websites is very important as it helps you to establish your credibility in your niche and you can get very valuable backlinks from websites with high page rank.
Some website owners are not aware of the fact that tier 2 backlinks can be used to get a lot of traffic from their website. Tier 2 websites are also a very important step in your website development process because when you start to use the tier 2 techniques to get a lot of traffic form your website you can be sure that your website will get indexed in the search engines.
When you have tier 2 backlinks, you will need to make sure you are always using the exact phrases. Or words in your anchor text or link text because when you have the exact phrases in your anchor text or link text. The engines will use that anchor text or link text in the search results and you will get a high volume of relevant traffic.
When you are using the tier 2 techniques, you need to make sure you are using the exact phrases and words in your anchor text or link text, because the tier 2 backlink building will produce a lot of traffic for your website.
What are the benefits of tiered link building?
In the beginning, tiering your links may seem like a silly idea. Instead of having backlinks point directly to your website, why not have all of your links point there? Do you really need second- and third-tier backlinks? Here are the major benefits to having a tiered backlink profile:
Cheap Link Juice
The process of obtaining high-quality backlinks is time-consuming and expensive. For example, suppose you want to write a guest post for an industry-related blog. There’s a good chance the cost will be between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. I haven’t factored in the time it would take to write and edit the post. It is likely that you can only afford a certain number of quality backlinks.
You can solve this problem by building lower quality backlinks to your original backlinks. It doesn’t take much time or effort to generate backlinks of lower quality. The cost will be a fraction of those of your original backlinks, thus amplifying their effect.
Easy Link Risk Management
The ability to separate your main website from your low quality backlinks is actually very convenient. Suppose that certain links from second or third level backlinks are causing your website harm. You only need to remove the backlink leading to your website one level up. Hundreds or even dozens of backlinks are removed from your profile in one clean cut.
More Room For Error
Third- and second-tier backlinks are less influential than your primary backlinks. Even if they violate Google guidelines, they won’t affect your website, since they are not pointed directly at it. Not right away.
Therefore, you can experiment much more with your tiered backlinks. You can use different tools to build different batches of backlinks, to create profiles and post comments on various platforms, and to be as arrogant as you want. You can try different strategies and see which ones work and which don’t, and you can remove any backlinks that pose a threat to your site.
Hidden Self-Promotion
Self-promotion is strongly discouraged in the majority of online communities. You’d often have a limit on how many times you can link back to your own website, even if you do a paid guest post. Therefore, why not leverage one of your tier 1 pages as a link instead of linking to your own site? By doing so, you’ll send some link juice your way and avoid the risk of being called out for self-promotion.
Believable Backlink Profile
Creating artificial links can be a challenge, as can making them appear natural. Having a combination of dofollows and nofollows, high-quality and low-quality links, and links from different websites, including blogs, forums, social networks, etc., is the best way to maintain an appropriate balance. Also, backlink profiles will need to become more sophisticated as Google becomes more adept at identifying link schemes.
In this case, a tier-based backlink profile gives a variety of backlinks. You can somehow introduce an element of disorder into your linking scheme, which can throw Google off course.
What are the Risks of Tiered Link Building?
Link building on a tier is at best a gray-hat SEO practice, meaning that it does come with certain risks: Side note it’s in my opinion that you follow Google’s guidelines and future proof your website. Using whitehat link building strategies will yield you the best results.
Opportunity Cost
Tiered link building could take quite some time and a small amount of money to implement on your website. Even so, second- and third-tier backlinks have very little influence on your rankings. You are at risk of investing your resources in the wrong way here, so that’s the biggest risk. Before you waste your time on tiered link building you should go through a long list of SEO tactics.
Penalty Risk
It takes art to create a credible backlink profile. Getting carried away will put you at risk of violating one or more Google guidelines, including those against link schemes, automatically generated content, and scraped content. It is possible that Google will ignore a portion of your backlinks if this happens. The worst thing that can happen is that your website will be de indexed or slapped with a manual action.
Future Losses
The majority of black-hat strategies and link schemes are considered short-term. If Google catches up with your tricks, or if you get bored with constructing fake backlinks and you start falling apart, then eventually the whole thing will come tumbling down. Depending on your other strategies, you might have to start over from scratch. In other words, make sure that tiered links are just a part of your overall strategy, even if you decide to try them. I would prefer one that is small.
How to Build Tier Links?
A general rule is that your links’ quality and cost drastically decreases the farther you are from your website. So in order to get the most link juice build as many high quality tier 1 links naturally.
First Tier Links
Links pointing directly to your website are considered first-tier links. There should be no reason to question the integrity of these links. It is important to place first-tier links within unique copy, as well as meeting other criteria for quality backlinks. Focus on having a diverse anchor text profile with your first tier links.
In order to build first-tier links, you should find established websites in your industry and inquire about guest posting. Searching for first-tier prospects is easy with any SEO tool like SEMRush or Ahref. Using Domain Comparison > Link Intersection, add some of your competitors. Your backlink profiles will be compared to your competitors’, revealing which sites not link to you yet, but link to your competitors:
It is a good method for finding prospects because you find people who are interested in the niche you are specializing in, who are open to collaboration, and who are not in direct competition with you. All of these factors increase their likelihood of considering a guest post from you.
In addition to creating your own blog on a platform that permits dofollow links, the second best way to build first-tier links is to create your own website. There are no entry barriers with this method. Content placement does not require you to pay anyone, and you do not have to undergo an editorial screening process. It is labor intensive, which is a drawback of this method. A few minimally viable websites would have to be built and then they would have to be loaded with content.
Black Hat still works
According to black-hat experts, a maximum of five first-tier links should be created. If you are writing content for your fake blogs, we recommend writing a couple of original articles and rewriting them manually afterward. You should link to several industry websites – not just your own – in your articles in order to avoid suspicion.
Second Tier Links
Second-tier links have more relaxed requirements. It is ideal to place your second-tier links in your guest posts on highly authoritative websites. Everything else is fair game as long as it isn’t spam. A good source of second-tier backlinks might be an article directory, a profile link, social bookmarking, or a web 2.0 post. Creating a second-tier backlink for every first-tier backlink is recommended as long as the context is intelligible and you place the links manually. Diversify your sources, contexts, and anchor texts.
Third Tier Links
The third tier is where you can let your guard down. To generate backlinks at scale, it is perfectly fine to use GSA or RankerX. Besides low-level blog comments, you can also look at low-quality directories, bookmark websites, and web 2.0 sites. There is only one rule for third-tier links: they should point to second-tier links only. Neither your primary website nor the first-tier link partners should be compromised.
It should now be possible to link to a great number of third-level pages. In the first place, only a few of these automated links will be indexed by Google and most of them will soon disappear. Secondly, third-tier links pass very little authority to your website. As a result, you would have to build thousands of third-tier backlinks to move the needle.
When Should you use Tiered Link Building?
The practice of building links in a tier is considered to be gray-hat SEO. Link-building schemes are so difficult to fool Google today because the algorithm has become so good at identifying them. The blackhat community now recommends building 5 to 10 tiers of backlinks and using only strict automated settings and the best PBNs. So, constructing a fake backlink profile is now nearly as difficult as constructing a real one. However, there are still some instances in which tiered link building is appropriate:
When you Have no Other Choice
When you enter a highly competitive market, building legitimate backlinks may not be possible at scale. You can achieve some initial momentum with tiered linking in this case. Nevertheless, bear in mind that it is a very short-term strategy that may lead to a penalty, which is why it is crucial to carefully weigh all your options before proceeding.
When you have Organic Opportunities
Whenever there is a chance to include a link to another one of your guest posts in your guest post, take it. Let’s say your guest post just got published – help them promote it via your channel and you could end up getting a couple of organic second-tier backlinks from your audience. Always look for ways to create backlinks organically, not just for you, but also for other backlink partners.
Final Thoughts
Tier link building is an interesting concept. The Penguin update prompted the creation of this tool – an attempt to remove the risk while keeping the juice from low-quality backlinks. Tiered links are said to be a thing of the past by some in the SEO industry, but others maintain that they are still beneficial.