Surviving SEO Agencies #1: Do UGC Backlinks Work ($9k Case Study)?

In this series of articles that I decided to call "Surviving SEO Agencies" I will be discussing some pitfalls that one may encounter while working with SEO agencies, and how you can avoid them. I will be sharing my experiences, so you don't have to make the same mistakes. This is the first article in the series, and today we will be digging into the topic of UGC backlinks.

There are a number of SEO agencies that offer "quality" UGC backlinks as a service. "Quality" in this context means that the backlinks are made to look organic, i.e. they are placed, for example, in a forum post, which actually contributes to the topic of the thread, the post itself is not spammy, it may contain meaningful, unique text, the backlink itself does not look out of place, does not have a rel="nofollow" attribute, etc. This is sometimes also called "crowd backlinks" or "crowd marketing". The websites picked for these backlinks are usually high-DA ones, sometimes really high, like DR 80-90, and some of them may also have a lot of traffic, like 10M+. That's why they claim that these backlinks are powerful enough to help you rank higher in Google.

So $10 for a backlink from a DR 80-90 website, which looks (and, arguably, may actually be considered as) organic, is amazing, right? You can even do it yourself and get it completely for free if you want to, but paying someone to do it for you is obviously more convenient and saves time. Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it? A guest post on a website with such metrics usually is borderline impossible to obtain, but even if somehow there is a way, the price for it will be somewhere around $1,000-2,000, or even higher, so $10 is a steal.

This fact alone should send an alarm bell ringing in a rational person's head. If it's so easy to get a backlink from a high-DA website, why doesn't everyone do it? Why do people still pay for guest posts/niche edits, which are much more expensive?

But when you have no experience in SEO, you think that the reasonable thing to do is to trust the professionals, that's why you hire an SEO agency. And when they start convincing you that UGC backlinks are the way to go, you believe them. After all, they should know what they are doing, that's why you hired them in the first place, right?

My case study

So at the time when I was trying to figure out a backlink strategy for my SaaS, as I've mentioned in the previous post, I had some knowledge about SEO, but when it came to backlinks, I was still basically a newbie. So I hired a reputable SEO agency with a lot of positive reviews, and I fell for the UGC backlinks pitch.

The numbers: for a period of about 9 months they have built a total of 1,483 UGC backlinks for me. A small part of it - 197 backlinks - had a rel="nofollow" attribute (but they were claiming that it's not a big deal, since they may still have some value in Google's eyes, and it's better to have a mix of dofollow and nofollow links), but the rest - 1,286 backlinks - were dofollow ones. The websites (mainly forums) where these backlinks were placed had an average DR of 48, and the average traffic was about 3.7M per month (this is a funny coincidence that one of my competitors who I've mentioned in my competitor analysis post, has built the backlinks with the exact same average DR of 48; we'll get back to it in a minute). The total cost of this service was $9.1k, which is about $6 per backlink (due to the volume, the smaller volumes cost more).

The results? Absolutely none. (It's funny how I use this exact phrase a lot in my case studies, I guess I've made every possible mistake in the book, so you don't have to.) Well, actually there were some movements in the rankings, but they were so insignificant that they could be attributed to the normal fluctuations.

I think it's very fitting here to compare these results to my competitor's backlink strategy and results, which I mentioned earlier (which you may already be familiar with if you've read my post about it).

As I've mentioned in the post with the analysis of their backlink strategy, my competitor's results were amazing, they have absolutely crushed the SERPs, occupating the top spots for the most competitive keywords in the niche and seeing their traffic skyrocket. So the key difference is the backlink type. Using guest posts, i.e. editorially placed backlinks, they have achieved awesome results, while I have achieved nothing with UGC backlinks.

Another hypothesis that I had in the past (before conducting this experiment), as I've also mentioned in the previous post, is that maybe even if UGC links are weaker than guest posts, they still should pass at least some "link juice" and therefore have some value; maybe you can relate to this way of thinking. But the fact that I have built 14 times more backlinks than my competitor, and still have seen absolutely no results, is a clear indication that they are totally worthless.