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Tiered link building is a tactic used by advanced SEOs for a few years now. Even I haven’t played much with tiered links because the repercussions from Google aren’t clear yet.
Regardless, I’ve tested this tactic and it seems wildly more successful than a plain old white-hat link-building campaign. Which is why I’m breaking down how to do it in this post, so you can reap the benefits too.
What is tiered link building
Tiered link building is the practice of building links to your own links.
I know. It sounds confusing. Let me visualize it for you:
I’ll explain this a little more in detail:
- You have your money page, which could be a homepage, category page, blog post etc.
- You build links to your money pages. These are your first tiered links
- You then build 3-5 links to your first tiered links
If you’re adventurous and have the budget, you build links to your second tiered links. I’ve never done that and cannot substantiate the results.
Why build tiered links
Only serious SEOs take this route, because it requires that level of skill. It’s also one of the reasons for building tiered links to begin with- upping that skill level.
Of course, the main reason for building tiered links is to get faster search ranking results.
You’re doing this by building authority to the links, which link then back to you. It’s kind of like a popularity contest.
What could the results look like?
I don’t want to toot my own horn, but all of the projects I’ve worked on have seen success with link building.
Here’s just one example:
Here’s another example from a top SEO/ digital marketer (who shall remain nameless for their sake):
This one URL has many tier 1 and 2 backlinks and continues to rank in the top spot for the focus keyword, even several years after its publish date.
What types of tiered links should you get?
I am not going to sit here and tell you to get web 2.0 links and PBNs for your tiered link building campaigns.
I spend the money, time, and energy on our tiered link-building campaigns. This means that we source and request backlinks from credible lower authority websites.
For example, my first tiered links are always from websites with a DR of 50+. My tiered two and three links will be from websites with DR between 20-30.
We do everything naturally. We’re in this for the long-run and don’t want any trouble with Google.
How much is this going to cost?
The cost of tiered links depends on a few factors. Here’s a couple of questions to ask yourself:
- Do you have the resources in-house for an outreach campaign?
- How much are you willing to budget for tiered links?
In our case, we do mix it up. Depending on man/woman power, we might outsource some of this work.
However, all backlinks with a DR 60+ get tiered links built to them for that extra power.
An example:
Let’s look at a popular website like https://www.mining.com/ and study their gold category (https://www.mining.com/commodity/gold/).
Here’s a tier 1 link to the gold category:
And here are some tier two links to the tier one link:
Final thoughts
This was a short post.
I had to share what some of the advanced guys and gals commit to when they want to rank for competitive keywords.
Every once in a while, I’ll share a few secrets like this post to get you thinking outside the box.
Let me know if I’ve missed anything or if there is a strategy you want me to go over.
Until next time, see you all on my next post.
