Tier 2 Link Building  – Here’s exactly what you need to know

Tier 2 link building is one of the most commonly debated practices in the SEO. There’s no doubt that building Tiered Links can add value to your website if you do it properly.

For those of you who don’t know, here’s an example of what a Tiered structure of links would look like:

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In 2016 with the launch of Penguin, Google made some drastic changes as to how they calculated their linking algorithm. Instead of links being calculated on a domain level basis, Penguin meant that they would calculate the power of individual pages that were linking to your website.

This sparked up an argument for Tiered Link building as you could essentially have links on lower authority sites and still make them very valuable by building links to the links pointing to your website.

Tiered Link building is something that I have been doing personally for the last few years and it works very well if you understand how to do things properly.

When should you build Tier 2 Links

Generally speaking, Tier 2 links are best built to pages that have lower page authority but a high domain authority. I generally wouldn’t build any Tier 2 links on pages that are lower than an Ahrefs DR of 30+. I’d also be more inclined to build more Tier links to pages that are on websites with higher authority.

The reason why I’d send more Tier 2’s to pages where the DR is higher is because you’ll generally get an exponentially growing return by sending more power to pages with higher authority. For example, if you sent 3 Tier 2 links to a DR 33 site and 3 Tier 2 links to DR 64 site, you’ll get much more value from the page on the DR 64 site than the DR 33 site. Here’s a graph indicating what I mean more clearly:

Essentially, the higher authority your link is, the more value you’ll get out of each Tier 2 link, therefore I’d send more of those than less.

You also want to make sure that the page you are hitting has a low amount of outbound links. The more outbound links you have, the more diminished returns you’ll get for your own target URL. Make sure 100% that you’re not on the same page as one of your competitors!

Does your Tier 2 Anchor Text Matter?

No. Google doesn’t currently track relevance further than what is linking directly to your money site. This is why at Get Me Links, we pick random anchors for you. What you’re looking for with Tier 2 links is a throughput in link power, relevance is something that you should only concern yourself with at a Tier 1 level.

Tier 3 Link Building

One of the most unspoken about strategies is Tier 3 Link Building. Tier 3’s are great for powering up existing Tier 2’s to build more value straight through to your site. Many Tier 2 services on the market just place links on inner pages on PBNs or simple blog websites and this doesn’t actually pass very much “power” through to your site. It’s only good for indexing links and passing a very small amount of Juice.

By sending Tier 3 links, you’re upping the power value from your links and taking them to the next level – this allows you to build much more juice through to your links and get extra value from your links in higher authority niches. Here is an example on a Tier 2 / Tier 3 structure:

How Many Tier 2 Links Should I Build?

As mentioned earlier in this post, you get more out of your Tier 2 / Tier 3 links when you have higher authority links. Here’s a guide from our testing where you could get the best bang for your buck at each of our metric levels:

If you ever need help with strategies regarding Tiered Link Building, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support by emailing support@getmelinks.com.