Is anyone still paying for tier 2, or has everybody quietly stopped and not said

A client asked me last week whether he should keep paying for tier 2 and I gave him an answer I'm not confident in, which I don't like doing.

The setup is the usual one. Money site, forty-odd tier 1 links bought over eighteen months - guest posts and a few homepage placements, all on sites with real traffic. Then a monthly package pointing a few hundred cheap links at those tier 1 pages. Web 2.0s, profile links, a wiki-ish thing, some social bookmarks. £180 a month, been running about a year.

His question was simple: what does the £180 buy. And the honest answer is that I don't know, because nothing about his rankings has changed in either direction since it started and I can't separate it from everything else he's doing.

Depends what you're running, obviously. But I'd like to know whether people here are still buying tier 2 in 2023 with an actual reason, or whether it's one of those line items that survives because cancelling it feels like a risk.

It's a line item that survives because cancelling it feels like a risk. Cancel it.

I'll date this properly because people always want the year. Tiered link building worked, genuinely and measurably, from about 2011 to 2014. You'd fire a few thousand junk links at a tier 1 page and the tier 1 page would gain authority and pass more through. That was real and I made a lot of money on it.

Penguin 2012 took the edge off. Penguin 4.0 in 2016 is where it actually stopped, because that's when the whole thing went real-time and started devaluing rather than penalising. The moment the response to a bad link is 'this link now counts for nothing' instead of 'this site is now in trouble', tiering stops being leverage and starts being noise. You cannot amplify zero.

And then the link spam update last December put SpamBrain on it explicitly. They said out loud that they neutralise the links rather than act on the site. That is the exact death certificate for tier 2 and everyone read it as good news because it meant no penalty.

What you're buying for £180 is the feeling of having done something.

180 a month for a year is 2160. that would have bought two more tier 1 links

IME everyone in this argument is answering a different question to the one the money is actually buying.

Nobody sane buys tier 2 for link equity in 2023. What people buy it for, whether they say so or not, is indexation. A guest post on a site that gets crawled twice a month can sit unindexed for eight weeks, and an unindexed link does nothing at all. Firing some junk at it gets a crawler down that path sooner.

Whether that's worth £180 depends entirely on whether his tier 1 links are actually getting indexed. Has anyone checked? That's a two-hour job and it settles the question for this specific client rather than in general.

PipelineRat has put his finger on the thing and I want to expand it, because the indexation framing changes what you should measure and almost nobody measures it.

What tier 2 is actually doing, mechanically

There are three separate effects people bundle together under 'tier 2' and they have completely different evidence behind them.

1. Equity amplification. The 2012 model. Junk links raise the tier 1 page's authority, the tier 1 page passes more to you. I think this is dead and I have not seen it work in a controlled test since 2017. I have not tested it at scale since 2019, so treat that as an opinion with an expiry date on it.
2. Crawl induction. A link from anywhere gives the crawler a path to the tier 1 page. This is not controversial and it is not really an SEO tactic, it is how crawling works.
3. Indexation of the tier 1 page. This is the one that matters commercially, and it is downstream of 2 but not the same thing. Being crawled is necessary and not sufficient.

The measurement most people skip

Before deciding whether tier 2 is worth anything, take your tier 1 link list and check three things for each target page:

• Is the page indexed at all
• If it is, when was it last crawled
• Does your link survive on the live page, and does it survive in the cached copy

I ran this for a client in June across 61 bought links placed over two years. 38 indexed, 14 indexed but not crawled in over four months, 6 never indexed, 3 where the link had been quietly removed after payment. So a shade under two thirds were doing anything at all, and the client had been paying for tier 2 against the whole list without distinguishing.

What I would actually do with the £180

Split it. Spend the first month's budget on the audit above - it is one afternoon with a scraper if you have one, or about that in a spreadsheet if you don't. Then point whatever tier 2 you keep buying only at the tier 1 pages that came back unindexed or stale. Not at all forty. That turns a blanket monthly spend into a targeted one and it makes the effect measurable, because you have a control group sitting right there in your own list.

If after eight weeks the stale ones haven't moved, you have your answer for this client and you cancel with a reason instead of a feeling.

The part I am not sure about

I do not know whether the crawl induction effect persists or whether it is a one-off. My instinct is that a burst of junk links gets you one crawl and then the page reverts to whatever its natural crawl budget was, which would mean tier 2 as a monthly recurring spend is wrong even if tier 2 as a one-off intervention is right. I have never designed a test that separates those cleanly and I would be interested if anyone has.

Summary: stop buying tier 2 for authority, consider buying it for indexation, and only after you have measured which of your tier 1 links are actually indexed.

Nine hundred words to say check your links. Bookmarked anyway.

That audit is the answer to the question I should have asked. Running it this week.

You've given a date for when it stopped working. What was the test?

Fair question and the honest answer is that it wasn't a test, it was a business.

I ran tiered campaigns as a service from 2012 to 2016. In 2013 I could show a client a rankings graph and point at the week the tier 2 fired. By late 2015 I was cherry-picking which clients I showed graphs to. By mid 2016 I stopped selling it, not because I ran a controlled experiment but because I couldn't find a case that looked like the 2013 ones any more and I don't like selling things I can't demonstrate.

So: no control group, no isolation, sixty-odd campaigns and a strong pattern. Take it for exactly what that's worth. I'd say it's worth more than the case studies the people selling it publish, which is a low bar.

FWIW the one-off versus recurring question is testable from the logs if you own the tier 1 page, which for a PBN you do.

awk '$1 ~ /^66\.249\./ {print substr($4,2,11)}' access.log \
  | sort | uniq -c

Run that before and after you point anything at it. If crawl frequency steps up and then decays back to baseline over three or four weeks, hexforge's instinct is right and monthly is the wrong billing model.

Obviously useless for a guest post on someone else's site, which is most of the cases in this thread. But if you've got a network you can answer it for yourself in a month rather than arguing about it for a year.

This is correct approach. Anyway is only useful if you keep raw logs, most cheap hosting rotate after seven days and then you have nothing.

most people in this thread don't know where their logs are

Did hexforge's audit on my own list because I had it sitting in a sheet already. 84 bought links, placed between January 2021 and June 2023, three different sellers.

Placement age	n	Target indexed	Link still present
Under 3 months	19	11	19
3-12 months	34	27	32
Over 12 months	31	26	24

Two things I didn't expect. First, the newest cohort is the worst indexed - 11 of 19 - which suggests a lot of what people think is a dead link is just a page that hasn't been picked up yet. Second, seven links have vanished from pages I paid for, and six of those seven are in the over-12-months bucket. Nobody told me.

I have never bought tier 2 and I have no opinion on whether it works. What I'd say is that if a third of your tier 1 is unindexed and a fifth of the old stuff has been quietly removed, arguing about tier 2 is arguing about the second-biggest problem.

Seven removed after payment. Name the sellers or that number helps nobody.

The under-3-months figure matches what I saw and I should have flagged it in my post rather than burying it in the totals.

If 11 of 19 recent placements are indexed, then a good part of what a tier 2 service appears to fix is something that was going to resolve on its own within a couple of months. That's the confound nobody selling this controls for, and it is not a small one - it means a service can show you before-and-after indexation data that is entirely honest and entirely meaningless.

The test that would separate them is holding back half of a fresh batch and pointing tier 2 at the other half. I've never had a client willing to pay for the half that gets nothing.