Link laundering is basically a method of masking spam links and links for link farms. This isn’t a new concept at all, but I thought I’d add my explanation into the subject and provide a simple guide to set up sites for link laundering.
Warning: This is not white hat SEO. Google will not like you doing something like I am about to explain. I do not consider it black hat, but it is gray. Its a link scheme that will allow you to mask crappy spam links but still get the juice that bad link methods can provide.
Side note: Scrapper sites, guest book spam, blog spam, directory spam are all low quality links that can be gained in the numbers of THOUSANDS. Google is good at detecting them and discounting them. Google is not perfect, it doesn’t detect 100% of them and doesn’t discount them 100%. So having massive amounts of incoming links that are low quality can build up a fair amount of juice.
The problem: You do not want to use this type of link building on legit sites. You don’t want your personal blog or flagship blog to have 1,000s of spam links coming to it. You might piss someone off and they’ll report you to Google for link spamming.
One possible solution: Link Laundering
What is Link Laundering?
I’m sure you’ve heard of money laundering. It’s basically the idea of cleaning money to make it look like it came from a different source than its original source. Its done basically by spreading out the money through different accounts, business deals, transactions, and investments. Eventually the money is pulled out at the end source and there is a legit source for the money.
Now, lets apply this to links. Spam type links are considered “dirty” / “spam” / “blackhat”. What I’m going to explain is a basic way of cleaning these links and converting them to higher quality back links. Its a method of passing juice through a chain of sites and mixing in more authority to mask the dirty authority. All will eventually generate a high quality 1 way back link that you’re not scared of competition finding.
(I wouldn’t suggest using this on a highly competitive niche. There are a lot of savvy SEOs who might catch on to what you’re doing and lay it out for Google)
Generating Dirty Links
Dirty links are easy to get links that are usually obtained through some form of spam.
Possible Types of Dirty Links
- Forum Links (profiles, sigs, posts)
- Blog Spam (comments)
- Guestbook Spam (lol old school)
- Social Bookmarking Sites
- Low Quality Directories (1000’s of these)
The Link Laundering Process
For this example, you’re going to need a small blog farm of seven sites in addition to your legit site. This is a simple explanation and you can vary the number of sites and the networking, but this should explain the concept.
Set up a couple of accounts at wordpress or blogger to set up a few free blogs, this will be your link farm. Each blog should be about a different topic. In these blogs write naturally and post legit content. Write like a normal blogger by rambling about different topics. You do not want the blogs to look like the same person runs all 7 of them! Stay under the radar. IMPORTANT: DO NOT MONETIZE THESE BLOGS. DO NOT PUT A SINGLE AD ON THEM. These are for links, not money. Do not put adsense or an affiliate on these. Try to post quickly on each one to get them going. Go and get each one indexed by getting some links pointing to them. At this stage you want 100% legit links coming it. You want them to look legit at day 1.
Consider making 1 of the sites closely related to your legit site’s topic. This will be the “yellow” site, which I will explain in a moment. Then later, I will explain why we’re making it related.
Now, let me show you the overall concept of what I’m about to explain. Look at this image, it will explain this concept in general. Then read my explanation below.
Link Laundering Diagram
Phase 1:
After getting them indexed, lets start the building process. Look at the diagram and you’ll see I used 3 different colors for the laundering sites: red, orange, and yellow. I will be using these colors to describe the process for each site in each phase. These phases doesn’t have “time periods” on them like “2 days” or “1 week” because it will vary on the amount of time you invest daily.
Red: Hit the links hard. Start with the least spam and work your way toward the worst. You want to keep it looking legit at first and slowly bring in larger and larger bulks of links. These are your crap sites and you’ll be slamming them with links. Do not link out with these sites yet.
Orange: Build links here slower than with the red sites. Use moderate quality links. These are the higher quality link directories. The better article submissions. Dofollow blogs. Site wide blog roll link exchanges. Three way links. Nothing thats too “shady”, but still pull in those higher quality crappy links. Also try to pull in a couple of legit authority links. You want to keep the profile of these sites fairly clean. Do not link out yet.
Yellow: Build this site 100% clean. Do not give Google a single reason to expect anything. Clean links all the way. Slowly build these links.
Post one or two more posts to each site at varying time intervals. Make them look live and fresh.
Phase 2:
You should have built a fair amount of links for each type of site. The reds should have 1,000’s of low quality links coming in. The oranges will have a 100’s. And the yellow should have less than 100.
Link the red sites to the orange sites. Look at the diagram and point a links from the red sites to the orange sites. The best way to mask these is to leave the links inside the content of a post or drop a comment link (must be dofollow). You can put in a post’s content and make sure the post stays up on the homepage for a while. Then work your internal link authority so you build the authority of the page linking.
Do not link the other sites yet. Your two red sites should now link to your orange sites, that’s it.
The reason we’re taking time with this is to allow each stage to build some trust and link age from their authority links, before they get linked into the red sites community.
Now build links. Build more for each color and remember that each color gets different quality links. Red can get bads. Orange can get mediums. Yellow gets clean links.
Post one or two more posts on each site at varying time intervals, keep them fresh.
Phase 3:
Just like before, we’re going to link up the sites. It is now time to link the ORANGE sites to the YELLOW site. DO NOT LINK THE RED TO THE YELLOW!
Follow the same linking suggestions in phase 2.
At this point the yellow site will have been around for a few weeks, built legit links, gained trust and authority and not shown itself to have any bad associations. It has legit links to help mask any dirty link juice coming in. And the juice coming from the orange sites isn’t 100% dirty because it has a mixture of links and they’re not all spammy.
Again, build links just like in phase 2.
Post one or two more posts on each site, vary the intervals, keep the sites fresh.
Now we’re just going to wait a little while and let these links we’ve built gain a little authority over time and allow Google to find more links.
Phase 4:
Now its time to hook up your sites. This entire process could have taken 1 to 3 months easy to build. During this time you should have also been building your legit site using as many legit means as possible. Your legit site is the green star in the diagram. It should be around for a few months and look clean in Google’s eyes. The yellow site should be fairly clean in Google’s eyes and carry a fair bit of authority due to all the links from 6 sites funneling to it. It should have a fair bit of PR. Lastly, if you remember when I started to explain this, I said to make it related in some way to your main site’s topic.
Now it is time for the “perfect” link. Go to your yellow site and make a post. Follow my guides about links and writing for search engines. Focus the post at your legit site’s keyword. Optimize the post to death. Then in the content drop a keyword anchored back link back to your main site. Don’t update the yellow site quickly for a while and let the link sit on the home page for a while.
And there you have it. You converted 1,000’s of horrible low quality links into 1 high quality, high authority, highly related, keyword anchored back link.
Benefit of Link Laundering
If you don’t see why this is useful. There are lots of places on the net to gain low authority links in bulk, but you do not want to associate those types of link building methods with your site. Link laundering allows you to mask your methods by filtering the authority through multiple layers then condense it down into 1 high quality link.
Again, this topic is taboo to white hats and is not suggested for anything you’re serious about. Unlike some SEO’s, I am not against learning different link methods no matter what shade they are. The more I know, the more effective I am at SEO.
Related Posts:
A Word About Link Farms
Should You Submit Articles?
Infuse Your Back Links With Sweet Sweet Juice
A Lesson in SEO
How to SEO a Wordpress Template
{ 20 comments }
Nice! But where do you get all these links? Sounds like a winner to me!
What ever works! :-)
There are a variety of low quality links you can obtain using software. I try not to push any software here, but there are several types of automated software out there.
I’d check out BloggerUnleashed.com and check out his suggestions for software. If you’re willing to put out the money, you can get software that will automate directory submissions, article submissions, and social bookmarking submissions.
There are also black hat spam tools, but I haven’t used them.
One black hat example: you can use scrapper sites that generate links by trackback spamming other blogs, then get links from that.
If you find a guestbook, you can go to the bottom and you’ll see stuff like “Powered by:“. If you copy the footprint into Google with quotes, then add a keyword, you can find then find pages using that guestbook software for that keyword.
You can find dofollow blog directories on the net and post on dofollow blogs.
You can also join forums related to your topic and drop links in your profile and stuff like these.
I need to do a solid post on building links.
But like I mentioned in the post. Many of these types of links are “spam” and not looked upon highly by white hat ethical SEOs.
There are also black hat spam tools, but I haven’t used them.
One black hat example: you can use scrapper sites that generate links by trackback spamming other blogs, then get links from that.
Thanks Justin! Getting those backlinks is harder than it looks! :-)
Yeah. Tell me about it. The hardest part though is just the time investment. Its SO boring doing submissions and forcing yourself to go out and comment =/
I’m looking forward to the competition over at blogger unleashed. I hope we get to learn some new and interesting techniques.
This is an excellent post, Justin! My frustration comes with relying on others to determine my fate so it’s always good to set up your own network to throw a few links around when you need it. Right now that’s what I’m doing, setting up my own blog network but I never thought about it in terms of hierarchy. I remember reading documentation on a social site submitting software program, that for each niche you want to build, you should have 10 supporting sites but I always wondered how I was going to get authority on all 10 supporting sites with just low quality links. Your image is really eye opening…
=)
Just be really careful since this isn’t white hat. Don’t leave a foot print by putting up ads or interlinking them all with your personal sites. Also vary your themes and content. I’d suggest each blog have a different topic and personality. Being able to pass a visual inspection is important.
Running something like this on a legit site is risky, but if you don’t mind the risk, go ahead =)
Luckily, if you work really focused long tails the competition is so low it doesn’t take much to out rank them.
I wonder how dangerous this really is. I’m seeing too much different opinions. One side sounds too paranoid, another side to careless. Nevertheless, the main idea is that Google has to battle much larger beasts then something small like this.
100 sites networks are just to small for them to notice and to bother them, they are looking for guys with Blogger Generators and creators of thousands of links per day. I’ve been reading these guys blogs, what they do and how they get ranked… Their schemes are light years away from this little network presented here, and even they get by unnoticed.
Heh, like I said, it’s really hard to figure out is one side too paranoid, or is the other one too careless.
I always try to play the game a little bit different than most people suggest, even different than I suggest here on my blog. Once something becomes announced or people talk about it, it’s on its way out the door. I’m seeing an increased number of people focusing on squidoo and hub pages and free micro site farms.
And the result is that people are seeing all these sites being discounted. You’re seeing people’s PR go down. Personally, I did have have a single site go down in PR. I think it comes down to people being lazy and not getting quality links.
If you’re going to do blackhat, than you’re not trying so hard to hide. You know your site will be caught eventually. But I see people using stuff like link laundering and blog farms as their primary link source.
Stuff like link laundering is designed to be PART of the entire link building process. I see people focusing 100% on farms and BMD, and then don’t get why they don’t get solid rankings or PR. Google isn’t stupid and can notice patterns in linkings.
I’ve looked at some people’s sites and 50% of their links come from micro sites, comments, and BMD. it doesn’t seem natural that all these links are getting generated and nobody is making a legit link for your site.
I comes down to diversification imo. Get a few link exchanges. Get a few directories (not too many). Get a few comments. Get a few book marks. Get a few “laundering”/”network” links. Then do an article submission for each post. Then try to get someone to send you some natural links. This type of diversification looks natural and gets your links from several different IP’s, which will help mask your link farm behavior.
I think the one thing people forget the most is that this is black hat. Don’t be surprised by Google being weird, discounting, reducing, or banning your links, PR, or sites. Thats why I don’t suggest doing this unless you understand that. So many people are sloppy and that’s why Google catches on.
I understand what you are saying, completely. But this is what you have to do, if you do not have Gizmodo.com or Epinions.com in your hand. What choice a person has? I had legit sites, with original content and many hours invested in them. I got 0 links to them in 2 years. And I made some good money with Amazon because I had 300 links from directories.
Now the situation is different (although that old site is still on Page1 with 300 old links :) I also believe it is about diversification.
Hehe, this line of yours cracked me up:”Then try to get someone to send you some natural links”. If you try, its not natural anymore, right :)
But with that line you said exactly what I was thinking today, about finding few people to exchange links, just to crash the pattern and mix it all up.
At the end of the day, all these links are made by one person, the difference is that it has to look like that’s not the case.
Do you really write an article submission for each post? Is this pretty much expected for every site?
Getting links is so much harder than I ever anticipated. And what really bothers me is I can’t confirm that my link building is working until maybe months down the line, (since I don’t have my own network to use)
thanks for the post.
But one thing confused me. You wrote: blog commenting is spam.
If I comment on a site that is related to mine, how can it be spam.
If I am making totally inappropriate or won’t read the post and simply say ” great post” it is spam. In that case, the webmaster will delete or won’t pass the google juice ( assuming the site has do follow policy).
am I wrong?
This seems like a lot of effort. This would be better done in cahoots with three or four likeminded and trustworthy conspirators. It would ease the individual workload and potentially increased the gain.
I love terms like link laundering to describe clever practices.
Some people have enough time on their hands to go out and do this, but I don’t. I am still looking for the best way to rank without working so hard. I will keep you posted.
This was very interesting reading. I found this article about two months ago. That was seven sites back. Cool. Brilliant!
I already have some clean blogs with links to money website. I also have wpmu blogs and belong to a wpmu blog club. I guess I just never thought out the process far enough and the linking. The wpmu blog club blogs are really spammy, although each post only links once to money site. The good blogs also link to my money sites. After reading your diagram, I should not link directly to website but to blogs and I need an extra layer of blogs between my really spammy club blogs and good blogs.
Also have a question about doorway pages – I could put out thousands with a service(one for each keyword or misspelling thereof) then link them to the blogs at the lowest level. Supposedly these doorway pages are in sets of four optimized for the major engines. I am a little skeptical. Also they would have to be on a separate hosting service. I only started with this submission service because I am down in Mexico using satellite and it sucks bigtime. I have ad submission software and it works for me, at least the way I use it(won’t work with satellite service).
I don’t think of myself as BH, I work hard and just want to do what works.
So is it doesnt matter at all if the red sites get taken out of google? Would they still retain the linkjuice?
justin this is a kewl idea but seems like a bunch of work to get one single quality link imho. thanks tho very int to know.
Yeah, it can be a lot of work, but its more of a blackhat seo thing and is usually combined with automated spam techniques. It doesn’t take as much time if you’re using automated link networks, spam bots, comment spam, directories, and articles. These are tactics you may not want to appear as obvious to your competition, so you can hide them 1 or 2 layers deep and still gain some benefit from these low level methods.
I don’t recommend blackhat spam techniques, but they can work.
Justin,
Your post was very illuminating, and clears up a lot of vague ideas I had before seeing it. I have one question though – do you have any suggestions on whether we can re-use the red, orange and yellow sites to another legit green site. For example, suppose we do set up a green site about “siamese cat health insurance”, and at the end of the 6 months, we find the ad revenue or affiliate revenue is just terrible even with great serp. What about starting another green site on something different, and link to it from the yellow with a different anchor text. What would be the problems with taking advantage of a pre-existing launder structure and using it to beef up another target site? I
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