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What is a Link Pyramid and whether it is penalized by Google ?

The backlink pyramid was one of the first backlinking strategies to be developed ever since Google began placing value on backlinks.

The backlink pyramid is easy to implement, easy to explain and useful in many ways. The strategy allows you to send high-quality backlinks to your money site, strengthens those high-quality links, and improves the index rate of those backlinks. In this article, we will explain what exactly pyramid is and how to create it.

Even when link wheels were popularized by the SEO experts, link Pyramid was better performing, and the experts kept it to themselves. Building a Link Pyramid is not a rocket science, and any sane internet marketer will develop his own version of a link pyramid.

Structure of a Backlink Pyramid


Structure of a Backlink Pyramid


The structure is pretty self-explanatory. It is a tiered structure which looks like a pyramid with the most backlinks in the bottom tier and the least amount of backlinks in the highest tier. Here, you can see a diagram of a backlink pyramid.

Let us understand the logic behind link pyramid and how it came in to existence. You have your main site, let us name it as ‘money site’, so to get better off page SEO for your money site you need to get back links.

Let us assume that you create back links for your website from three different sources. Now you have back links, but your back links don’t have any authority so they will not be indexed soon.

Now to counter that you create back links for your back links and then ping those second level back links and get them to be indexed. Now the back links for your money site will have more authority and your money site will get best SEO value.

Link Pyramid – Link Building Strategy

The professionals will keep telling you that you need technical expertise to build good link wheels and link pyramids; don’t worry that is just a marketing ploy by the SEO experts to sell you their services.

A typical backlink pyramid will have three tiers:


Tier 1
Tier 1 will you be your highest quality links. These links should be manually created Web 2.0’s, high PR blog posts, high PR social bookmarks, etc… These links will be pointing directly tear my site so you want to make sure they are not spammy and have good diversity.


Tier 2
The second-tier of links will be medium quality links. You can use well spun content and auto create links. Article directories, wiki link and various low PR backlinks are good for the second-tier. Your second-tier of links will be pointing towards your first tier of backlinks only. The goal of the second-tier links is to strengthen the quality of your tier 1 points and improve the index rate of them. You will want to send multiple tier 2 links to each tier 1 back link. This means you will be creating 10 to 20 times more tier 2 and then you created in the first year.


Tier 3
This is where we spam the Internet a la 2001. Tier 3 needs low-quality links like auto approved blog comments, Pligg bookmarks and Wiki links. This third tier of backlinks will be pointing directly to your second-tier of backlinks. The goal of tier 3 backlinks is to improve the index rate of your tier 2 backlinks. The majority of your tier 3 backlinks will not be indexed by Google so you should create enough that you will have at least a few backlinks indexed per tier 2 backlinks on average. Send another 10 to 20 times more backlinks pointing to your tier 2 links as you created previously.

There is no doubt that you need good back links to your site. Links can provide traffic that your site needs and also help to improve your SEO score and Google Page Rank. Overall back links will improve the value of your site. However Google and other search Engines looks at the links with the highest authority and will not give much value to weaker links that come from blog comments and forum posts. Now you know what a link pyramid is (the concept of building back links for your back links), the important thing is what elements should be used and in which order.

By arranging the elements of the Link Pyramid in a correct way can provide your site with the mixed bag of links which the search engines love. Link Pyramids can be constructed with any number of levels, however the most effective and optimum is going for a three level Pyramid with Pinging and Indexing of the Level 3 Links. So let us finalize our strategy for Link Pyramids by restricting them to a 3 level Link Pyramid with Pinging and indexing.

Link Pyramid – Elements of Link Pyramid

The important elements of a link pyramid are

1) Web 2.0 Properties
2) Social Networks
3) Social Bookmarks
4) Article Directories
5) Press Releases
6) RSS Submissions
7) Video Submissions
8. Forum Profiles
9) Blog Comments
10) Pinger

Once your third level of links are created, it is now important to energize those links, and we should use a good indexer and pinger to ping and index the third level back links.

Does Google penalize link pyramids?


Unlike the link wheel, backlink pyramids are a more natural occurrence in backlinking profiles. Google cannot actively find an penalize backlink pyramid as well as they can with link wheel other backlinking strategies.

The only real concern should have with link pyramids is with quality. Make sure your tier 1 links are of high quality. Make sure your tier 2 links will be good enough to make googles index.


Creating a backlink pyramid is simple. You can manually create your tier 1 links and buy automate or head over to Fiverr.com and find affordable back links for your second and third tiers.



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