I can pretty much prove that with my cooking site

I can also prove that and that backlinks will kill businesses in a single swipe. I also disagree with anyone promoting backlink services, one of my main beefs in the industry right now.

BTW, your cooking site makes me hungry every time I am on it!

yeah back link services really tick me off, they promise results, but end up costing people a lot of headaches, and making all of their hard work for nothing.

I need to get some new recipes added to that site, my wife cooks every day, I should have dozens on their by now lol

Exactly, unsuspecting "businesses" owners who don't know any different, yet are trying to pay for rank improvement but in most cases are losing rankings altogether and in some cases, completely deindexed.

I'm confusing him more... I get people backlinks and he knows it. He just did not want to bother with what and why.

For instance, last week I got an insurance agent who focuses on car and home insurance a backlink from a mortgage broker's site.

The backlink comes from the mortgage broker's home page. It's surrounded by words that say, I paraphrase, "This is a good place to get home insurance... You know you have to get that, per your agreement with your lender."

Most business owners I meet either think that there's no way in hell you can get traffic from Google, you have to pay for it (as in adwords) or you buy backlinks... The thought that the site should, first, convert doesn't cross their minds. They seem to go around thinking, "Must buy backlinks. Must buy backlinks. Must buy backlinks."

Very few of them say, Lemme find out what works in internet marketing. And, if they did, they'd still find tons of sites talking about backlink popularity that have packages... For bronze, you get a whopping 2k type x backlinks, 250 type b.... If they're lucky, they might get across the still rare one that talks about making your site backlink worthy, about getting backlinks because people want to backlink to you, about there are backlinks that will kill your site.

Also, a lot of them want to cut corners and/or don't think they have anything valuable to offer their customers. It always amazes me when I talk to a mortgage broker who says he/she has no information his/her customers will find useful except the rates, or a mechanic who thinks what he knows, everyone knows, so why bother and put it on his/her site.

Yeah, there are safe ways to do it and there are far more "unsafe" ways to do it. Unfortunately most in the backlinking business are doing it the unsafe ways because it can be automated (it is the easy road).

You say "I don't even use this type of stuff myself" and yet you blatantly promote this on your site.
I think the wires are crossed somewhere.. :)

Please know that I say this in the utmost respectful way possible, but you need to decide which hat you want to wear.. white or black.

I have not done tests on this, but I do have opinions based on observing how what I do works.

It used to be that too many links at once, too much of the same anchor text, etc. did not hurt your pages let alone your site.

The above is no longer true.

SEO nuke, creates tons of links... you can drip them but they're from all kinds of pages, not only pages in related niches or industries, generally speaking, they're also from pages/sites that are low quality.

Do they help?

Don't know, haven't tested them but, based on what Google says, they wouldn't. On the other hand, things that Google said would not work did work.

If your tests find that they work, use them.

But they're not what Google likes, so, presumably, like with blog networks, they'd end up hurting your site sooner or later.

I worked on a guy's site almost two years ago, worked for 3 months to rank him on 10 keywords, local seo, city + keyword. 3 months into it, he and his partner had a fight and closed the company.

However, I got several of their keywords on page 1.

Six months ago, I was hired by another company for seo. Two of the keywords were keywords I'd worked for the previous company.

The 1st time I did article backlinks, bookmarks, squidoo, blogger, etc. Did a couple of hundreds of backlinks per keyword.

The 2nd time, the domain name contains one of the keywords and for the 2 keywords I'd already worked for, I got 1 backlink each from the homepage of 6 sites in the same industry I own. I got 1 backlink each from someone else's site in the same industry.

One homepage had a PR of 1; one homepage had a PR of 2.

That by itself got me to #8 and 9 within a week.

Did 2 press releases, tweeted once (used 1st keyword), got one of my nieces to 'facebook' about the company 6 times, created a facebook page for the company.

That got me to #5 and 6.

The site has only 2 indexed pages, 9 total (disclosure, contact us, apply now, some tools pages). For the 1st keyword, I have zillow and bankrate to beat. Zillow.com is #1 and it's got 594 backlinks to that page and over 66 million to the site. I've got 109 to the site and the page.

I've gone very slowly because I did not know how Google reacts to new sites getting backlinks now... In the past, I've created a lot more links by this time. So, I do something small, wait to see what happens.

By the way, I got some bookmarks, squidoo, blogger, etc. backlinks... So, now I've got 109 backlinks.

Did you notice that a handful of backlinks got to #8 and another handful from 8 to 5 but it took dozens to get from 5 to 3?

I got the most boost, as far as I can tell you, from the half dozen backlinks per keyword I've got from my own, self-hosted, sites and the 1 site in the same industry. I think if I'd have 30 or so sites in the same industry, I'd have been #1 a long time ago.

Another by the way, the oldest of the 6 sites is 2 years old, 2 of them were created a month before I used them, the others are 10 or 11 months old.

I'm working on 2 keywords and have 6 on page 1 and 2 more on page 2... Good keywords.
By the way, for one of the keywords, the #4 site has no backlinks to the page or the domain. It's a nice site but not nicer or more useful to people than tons of other sites (it's owned by a guy who works for a large bank but it's not the bank's site). Why is he ahead of the bank, whose site is even more useful... but ranks on page 4? It shouldn't.

I agree. You are promoting the very services that you are disagreeing with here Seth. As Jay said I think you need to consider what hat you are wearing, the good guy truly seeking to help someone or the guy trying to promote "things" to make money. There is a big difference and the latter will lead to a diminished brand very quickly.