One of the areas of SEO where I’m super fussy and selective is backlinks. I have a team to manage my own PBNs because my experience with outsourced services has always been pretty poor.
I tried doing the same with guest posting, but I quickly learned that the amount of work and effort involved in outreach, negotiating, content creation, and editing was much greater than anything I’ve done for PBNs.
What was the problem?
Basically, it takes a lot of people to scale guest posting so that you have a large variety of niche-relevant and diversified websites that don’t have an easily detectable footprint.
Oh, and I want my backlinks to impact search rankings like a SpaceX rocket taking off, not a baby’s fart.
Let me explain this a bit more.
My Priorities For Effective Backlinks
Before I get to share my experience with QGP, let me first tell you about the three things I focus on when it comes to guest posting:
- Overall quality of the website
- Quality of the guest post content
- Avoidance of content and network footprints
Let me break that down a bit.
Website Quality
One of the single most important priorities in my backlink strategy is that I only want links on high-quality sites.
What I mean is websites that look great on all types of devices, have professional web and graphic design, only post great and engaging content, have a natural backlink profile, and get traffic from a variety of sources.
This approach makes it a lot more difficult to find suitable sites, but it’s the only way to stay ahead of Google.
See, Google’s algorithm has become increasingly smart and sophisticated when it comes to weeding out SEO strategies that aim to get loads of easy backlinks with as little effort as possible.
Anyone remember mass-submitting spun content to article directories?
It worked great for a while, but then Google took a digital lightsaber to it, and sites got punished.
What I have seen with all backlink strategies that no longer work is that they all aimed at getting as many backlinks as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible.
Even some guest posting strategies that people implemented for years no longer work because they didn’t factor in the quality of the websites.
Guest Post Quality
The next thing I prioritize is the content quality of the guest post that will contain the backlink.
Again, this is one area where SEOs foolishly cut corners by sourcing the absolute minimum quality they can get away with.
If you end up with 20 backlinks, all from content that reads like something a 5-year-old dictated, then it’s a clear sign that you’re trying to game the system.
You don’t need to source content suitable for a PhD dissertation, but it has to be good enough to be something people would be interested in reading.
Footprint Avoidance
I’ve been doing SEO for long enough to have witnessed countless backlink strategies going from success to failure.
The ones that fail pretty much always have one thing in common.
They ignore the importance of footprints.
First of all, there’s the obvious network-level footprint, which comes down to multiple sites having technical characteristics that overlap.
These characteristics include:
- IP Addresses
- C-Class networks
- Domains
- Servers
- WHOIS records
- DNS servers
Here’s the problem: the more websites people try to add to a portfolio of guest posting websites, the higher the chances are that there are some overlapping characteristics.
This can happen completely accidentally, or it’s due to owners having multiple websites that they don’t separate to avoid a footprint.
If all your links are coming from websites that have a clear pattern for one or more of those characteristics, then you’re essentially telling Google to come and investigate.
Another footprint that I try to avoid just as much has to do with content.
What often happens when you use a backlink service is that all of your articles end up getting written by the same person.
That content might be plagiarism-free when compared to what’s on the Internet. But what about plagiarism between the set of new articles?
Most service providers never check for that, but if you end up with ten links from articles that have a lot of overlapping words, phrases, and sentences, then it’s a clear sign for Google to pick up.
Now that you know what my top priorities are for backlinks, you might better understand why I’ve struggled so much to find a great outsourcing service.
It’s why I first started building my own team, but that approach also quickly hit a brick wall.
The Difficulty With Guest Posting
What I did was give my team a detailed list of quality standards and steps for avoiding footprints. They came up with processes and even automated some of the scraping work, but it was still an unbelievably slow process.
Even when we had nailed down the process, it was an overwhelming amount of work. So much so that I worked out we’d need to hire 10-15 extra people just to handle the volume of backlinks my projects require.
Basically, to fully scale guest posting, I’d have to build a huge team, and it wouldn’t have been a cost-effective approach.
So, after years of failing to scale guest posting and testing dozens of service providers, I found only one reliable solution.
How Did I find QGP?
It’s actually quite a simple, even boring, story.
One of the students in my OMG Facebook group kept posting success stories without having his own link-building team. He kept mentioning using QGP, so I reached out to the brains behind it, and it was as if someone had taken my wishlist and turned it into a business.
Kosta is the brains I’m talking about, and I immediately saw that he had the same priorities for backlinks as I did.
I’ve now been using QGP for all of my projects and have ordered thousands of guest post links.
If you think this is just another link-building service where you pick from the same recycled list of websites on a Google sheet, I can tell you that QGP is the exact opposite.
What Is QGP And What Makes It Unique?
QGP is a backlink service provider with one of the largest databases of guest posting and PBN websites available.
What Kosta does is scrape the Internet and then reach out to the website owners and add only top-quality sites to his huge service database.
And I mean, it's an absolute beast of a database containing tens of thousands of sites for guest posts, niche edits, and even home page backlinks.
But having a large database of guest posts and PBN sites isn’t what makes QGP so unique.
What the QGP team does is build an entire interface that allows you to fine-tune what kind of sites you want links from, anti-footprint settings, content instructions, and much more.
It’s probably best if I explain how it’s so unique by showing you how I use the software.
My Personal Experience Ordering Backlinks
Here’s why I like QGP so much. The majority of guest posting services I’ve tried over the years have the same regurgitated lists of websites.
Some give you a Google sheet and tell you to pick from that, and others create a crappy website with a list that you can filter.
My take on all of them was the same.
As Bart Simpson would say, I didn’t think it was possible, but they all suck and blow at the same time.
This is how easy QGP is to use and get the rocket ship-type backlinks I’m looking for.
1 - I Set Up My Project
The first thing I liked about the QGP software is that I could set up multiple projects to make it easier to order and manage backlinks.
It’s been a pet hate of mine with other services where I have to try and manage project backlinks in spreadsheets.
It’s inefficient and a massive pain in the process.
But QGP elegantly solves that by giving me a clear view of backlink URLs, metrics, and anchor text broken down by project.
2 - I Tried Different Guest Posts
Ordering backlinks starts with a simple choice of:
- Guest Post
- Niche Edit
- Homepage Link
With each of these options, you can choose between different quality levels, from PBN link all the way up to Advanced Plus, for the best quality websites and content.
Most of the 6000+ links I’ve ordered are guest posts. But I’ve also sprinkled in some niche edits, which tend to deliver faster results and offer a bit of diversity into the mix.
The homepage links are extremely powerful, but they do come at a cost. For extremely competitive keywords and niches, I have found that they can make a difference to outsmart your competition.
3 - I Defined My Target Site Parameters
First of all, I have to say that even ordering standard guest post backlinks delivers great results, especially when you consider that I can define certain parameters for the sites I want.
I love that I can choose both the monthly traffic and domain rating to get the most powerful backlinks possible in the price category.
But I also prioritize niche relevance.
And QGP allows me to specify a specific site niche and even a word to be contained within the site URL.
Yup, that’s how much detail you can add.
4 - I Didn’t Change The Anti-Footprint System
Remember what I said above about how footprints can quickly backfire?
The good news is that QGP has an incredibly sophisticated system that helps you avoid any kind of easily detectable footprint.
The even better news is that you don’t have to make any adjustments to the settings.
The default settings are perfect for avoiding some of the toxic footprints that so many other service providers simply ignore.
I don’t think I’ve ever adjusted these settings for any of the links I’ve ordered.
4 - I Set The Content And Backlink Info
Not only do I not have to worry about getting content written, but I can also provide detailed instructions about the article.
After specifying the anchor text and link, I can adjust the word count, add more images, set the title of the article, and even add more authority outbound links.
It gives me great control to ensure that these articles are exceptionally powerful and highly relevant to my projects.
5 - I Verify The Domains
The last step I need to take is verifying the suggested domains. I love this feature because I can double-check that the guest post site matches my project requirements.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever turned down a suggested website.
Once I submit the order, it’s simply a case of waiting for the notification that the link is live and then observing the ranking impacts.
Speaking of rankings…
What Were The Test Results Like?
Let’s just say that after ordering just 15 guest post links, I saw those rocket ship ranking impacts.
That was over 7 years ago, and since then, I’ve ordered over 6,000 backlinks from QGP for my affiliate sites, local lead gen sites, and client sites.
With Kosta’s team doing all the heavy lifting, it frees me up to focus on building out my sites, knowing full well that my backlink strategy is in good hands.
