At the moment I don't have money for google adwords, but have found them to be expensive in the past..
Ignore the post about setting up a 301 redirect scheme with expired domains. That is the exact type of behavior that every release of Penguin tries to crush and if you get on the bad side of the algorithm, it's a lot harder to recover from the penalty than by doing things the right way from the start. Other posters are correct: anybody who guarantees you rankings is only promising hot air. What type of content do you have on your pages? How "useful" are your pages from a user perspective? What about the technical side (internal links, site speed, response code errors, etc.)?
This has worked very well in the past and still does, but I wouldn't do it on a main company website unless you build the sites out properly. It's very risky and that's coming from someone that builds these all the time. But yes, it's effective :grin: However, for client sites I would try and get 'natural' links if possible through content marketing. If you have the budget and do this at scale the per link cost is actually lower than a PBN and safer, depending on where you get your links placed. Of course it's much harder to achieve this than just building out a blog network. Keep in mind though that you can get hit with a Penguin update even if you think you're doing supposedly white hat link building. Everything you do is a risk and Google isn't always 'fair'. It's just about making a calculated and informed decision. As others have said don't trust a company that guarantees first page rankings for a specific keyword, particularly if it's a tough one. The reason I suspect your results aren't fantastic are several. Firstly SEO agencies often don't know what they're doing and still send cheap backlinks to your site - often they just order these off some forum. And yes, big agencies do this as well. Watch out for this as it's hard to recover once you've sent out these on a mass scale. Also even if they do know what they should be doing people are lazy and it's easier to outsource to some cheap provider than doing the actual legwork. This is particularly true if you're paying that mid-range bracket where it's decent money but not enough for an agency to actually give a crap about what they do to your site. And yeah, with $400 it's possible to achieve something but it's not necessarily a huge budget. Expectations would need to be realistic for this but don't think that nothing can be done. glynch, if you want me to have a look at your website or if you have any questions just let me know through the board and I'm happy to take a look at it for you at no cost. I run a small digital agency so I should at least be able to point you in the right direction.
I agree with this. For a website that does have good ranking on google it is foolish to do that type of tactics.
Take him up on this, he speaks the truth. Just know it's just hard to conduct a successful PR campaign that actually nets results on a national scale (local is way easier). I got a lot of solid links recently by offering a scholarship. You get "do follow" .edu links from all the major universities + I added a video submission component so it increased activity on social media. But Google can devalue a high number .edu links coming from pages with multiple uses of the word "scholarship" anytime they feel like it. Ace - What's the agency? PM me? I'm always looking for new resources to help with campaigns.
