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

just bought a tier 2 package off the back of reading this thread lol. 400 links at like $35, going at my six best guest posts only like hexforge said

will report back in 8 weeks!! this is a proper test right

It's not a test, it's a purchase with a follow-up post attached. But go on then.

Audit done on the client's 43 tier 1 links. 29 indexed, 9 indexed but last crawled over three months ago, 5 never indexed at all. Two of the five never-indexed are on the same domain, which tells its own story.

So about a third of what he paid for is either doing nothing or doing very little, and he's been paying £180 a month to amplify all forty-three of them indiscriminately.

What I've told him: cancel the blanket package, spend one month's budget pointing something at the fourteen bad ones, and we look again in eight weeks. If nothing moves he's saved himself two grand a year. If they index he's learned something worth knowing.

He asked why the seller hadn't suggested this. Didn't have a kind answer for that.

Because the seller can count.

Worth flagging that this thread is running straight through a core update - the August one has been rolling since the 22nd and it's still not done.

Anybody measuring anything over the next fortnight is measuring the update. Wait for the confirmation that it's finished before you read anything into a rankings graph, and if you're cashflowkid, restart your eight weeks from whenever it lands.

IME people attribute two thirds of update movement to whatever they changed that month. It's the single most common way a tactic acquires a reputation it hasn't earned.

Had almost this exact conversation with myself in 2019 - was paying about $200 a month for tier 2 on a site that made decent money and I couldn't tell you what it did.

What I did in the end was just stop. No audit, no test, I just cancelled it one month when I was cutting costs. Nothing happened. Rankings didn't move, traffic didn't move, and four years later I've never restarted it.

The uncomfortable part is that I also can't prove it was doing nothing - maybe the effect decays over a year and I'd have noticed eventually. But I stopped worrying about it around month three.

What's the actual downside your client is afraid of, other than the sunk cost?

Nobody has raised the obvious one, so I will.

A tier 2 package is a list of every tier 1 link you own, handed to a third party, kept in their system, and often visible in whatever cheap panel they resell through. You have paid someone to compile and store the map of your link profile.

That's fine if your threat model is only Google. It is not fine if it includes a competitor buying the same panel, an ex-employee at the seller, or the seller's database ending up somewhere public, all three of which I have watched happen.

Separate point from whether it works. Worth knowing what you're handing over.

the seller already has your money and your list. this is the deal you made

Re-ran my table eight weeks on, because the under-3-months number bothered me enough to want the follow-up. Same 84 links, nothing bought or pointed at anything in between.

Placement age at first check	n	Indexed then	Indexed now
Under 3 months	19	11	16
3-12 months	34	27	27
Over 12 months	31	26	25

Five of the eight unindexed new ones indexed on their own with no intervention of any kind. The older cohorts didn't move except one that dropped out.

So the natural indexation rate for a fresh bought link over eight weeks, in my sample, is about 60% of whatever was still outstanding. Any tier 2 service pointed at fresh placements is competing with that, and I don't see how you'd tell the difference without a holdback group.

No view on whether it works. Just noting that the baseline is not zero and everyone in this thread including me was talking as though it was.

That's the most useful number posted here and it partly undercuts what I wrote in August.

If 60% of outstanding fresh placements resolve on their own in eight weeks, then targeting tier 2 at the unindexed subset - which is what I recommended - is targeting precisely the group most likely to fix itself. The stale-but-indexed group, which I told people to include, is probably the only one where an intervention could show a clean effect, and I had that backwards.

I'd revise to: point it at links over six months old that are indexed but haven't been crawled recently, and leave anything under three months alone entirely. Still untested. But less wrong than what I said.

I want to plant a flag here because the thread has drifted somewhere I think is a mistake, and it's the same mistake I watched people make in 2015.

What's happened over sixty posts is that a question about whether tier 2 works has quietly become a question about how to make tier 2 work. Those are different, and the second one is much more comfortable to sit with, which is why threads always end up there. Hexforge's revision is careful and honest and it is still a plan for spending money on a tactic that nobody in this thread has shown does anything.

We've just come through August, September and now October, three updates back to back, and one of them was a spam update running alongside the core one. If tiered links had any current effect at all, positive or negative, someone here would have a graph with a step in it. Nobody does. Not one person in this thread has produced a single case where tier 2 moved a ranking, and the best data posted - MetricsOverMagic's - is a baseline that explains away the main thing tier 2 is claimed to do.

What I'd say to byte_broker's client: the £180 has already been an eighteen-month experiment with n=1 and no result. That's not a reason to design a better experiment. It's a reason to spend the money on something that has visible effects.

I'll be told I'm the man shouting that nothing works. I've been right about the last four of these.

Sixty posts and no graph. That part is true and it should bother people more than it does.

ok reporting back like i said, 8 weeks (well 9)

of my six guest posts, four were already indexed before i started so nothing to see there. of the two that weren't, one indexed in week 3 and one still isn't indexed at all.

rankings on the money site are up but the whole site moved in october so i honestly can't say it was this. PipelineRat called that exactly.

so i guess my $35 bought one indexation that probably would have happened anyway? not the result i wanted but i said i'd post it either way

Posting a null result you didn't want is worth more than the $35. Genuinely.

Closing my end of this. Client cancelled the package in September and we pointed one month's worth at the fourteen bad links instead.

Eight weeks later: of the 9 stale-but-indexed, 4 have been recrawled and 5 haven't. Of the 5 never-indexed, 1 indexed. Rankings unchanged, though November has been a mess for everyone so I'm not reading anything into that either.

He's saving £2,160 a year and I can't tell him whether he's lost anything, which is roughly where I came in. What I can tell him is that the thing actually costing him money was five dead links he'd paid four figures for and never checked, and he'd never have found those without this thread.

So: don't buy tier 2, audit your tier 1. That's the version I'll be giving people from now on. Depends what you're running, as ever.