A BASE Manifesto

TL;DR: Don’t be embarrassed by your links. Demand better. Location, content, and traffic actually matter. We care, and we think you should care, too.

Better and different

Bad SEO providers are a blight on the marketing world. We’re sick of it. That’s why BASE was created; to provide SEO services that don’t compromise our or your integrity. We’re committed to doing things better — and differently.


We’re committed to doing things better — and differently.

We think you’re smart enough to recognize why our way is better for you, better for your customers, and better for the internet.

 

SEO’s dark side

Building links is the soul of the internet, and the heart of SEO. It’s what makes the world wide web a web.

We LOVE links.

Google loves ‘em, too. Its algorithm is largely based on how many sites link to a piece of content. Therefore, agencies and SEOs build links. Heck, we’ve been at it for over 10 years.

There are good ways and bad ways, and right now the bad ways are winning.

How to tell the difference? If you look at our competitors, it appears that links are a commodity item. The only differentiator is DA — the universal currency among link builders.

 

What is DA?

The industry standard metric is Domain Authority (DA). It’s a system built by Moz to help illustrate that sites are probably valued by Google. But by their own admission, DA isn’t really a great metric for a lot of things:

Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs.

So when some agencies build links that have a certain DA, what are you getting, exactly? Just a number. We think that we — and you — deserve better than rely on a metric that wasn’t even made for that purpose. We’re not rejecting DA, but it shouldn’t be your only metric for links. Would you pick a car only based on the number of cupholders? We still use DA to evaluate sites — but only in conjunction with other, better metrics, like how much monthly traffic the site receives.


We think that we — and you — deserve better.

But what if you want to build your own links? How hard can it be? Well, building dumb links is actually pretty simple. It gets harder when you have standards.

 

How to build dumb links yourself

Building dumb links is easy! We’ll explain exactly how to do it.

1. Start a blog on a free site like wordpress.com.
2. Write “articles” using an AI text generator like DeepAI’s GPT-2 generator
3. Embed links to your site in those articles.
4. Links!

But of course you need links from more than one domain, so you repeat this process over and over until…

You’ve created a PBN, a Private Blog Network. Congratulations, you’re making the internet a terrible place!

 

Pay someone to build dumb links for you

You can hire someone from Fiverr or Upwork, or another agency and they’ll build you links. Some of them, we are confident, are good people doing good work. Hard to tell which ones though. But most are slinging rubbish for pennies.

Yep, we’re talking about PBNs. As a company of lifetime SEOs, we’ve bought links from many outlets, including our competitors. We’ve seen it all. It’s pretty gross actually.


It’s pretty gross actually.

But this other agency says they do “genuine outreach,” surely that’s fine?

Doing outreach means that they’ll produce a piece of content—with links to the target site—and reach out to independent sites and ask if they’ll host that content. It’s a laborious process, as you might imagine. But overseas and robot writers, make for a clean bottom line (theirs, not yours). With a moderately legible article in hand, the link builder reaches out, the site agrees, and soon: you’ve got a new link!

Remember this is your brand name. You deserve to be comfortable with where it is being displayed. You deserve to be comfortable with what text surrounds it and where it appears.

 

An analogy

You want to advertise your business the old fashioned way: you want a billboard. Crazy! We know, bear with us. One company promises to sell you a billboard in downtown New York City. For only $100! What a bargain! You can’t believe your luck.

Hold up, because the $100 option is in an alley behind a dumpster. Exactly four people every day will pass by that billboard, and they’re all just tossing a bag of garbage into the dumpster. And it’s printed backwards. The billboard exists, true. You can brag to your friends that you’re advertising in a major market! But it’s not doing you any good.

Or, you can pay more money and your billboard will actually be in a useful location. People—real people—who might buy your products, will walk by and see it. Even if it isn’t in Times Square, a street with steady traffic is better than a dumpster. That’s what we think, at least.

Location, traffic, and content matter.

 

Why we’re different and better

When we build a link, we only use sites that have a minimum monthly traffic of 500. Most are much higher than that, but that’s our minimum. It’s deeply troubling to us that most of our competitors don’t mention traffic to link sites.

When we build a link, we make sure that the linking site actually ranks for legit keywords. We want only real, reputable sites. We think this is important.

When we build a link, the article we send over is relevant to the link. We won’t embed a link for, say, selling shoes in an article about lawn fertilizer on a site about traveling to Fiji.

That example sounds far fetched you say? You don’t get that kind of detail unless you’ve seen it, because that’s exactly what our competitors do. You’ll get a link, but Google can see right through it. This link won’t move the needle for you, the agency will encourage you to buy more, and you’ll be the chump that pulls out your wallet and buys more links.

At BASE there are no chumps. We prioritize real links with real traffic to real sites in real content.

You won’t ever, ever feel embarrassed by the links you get from BASE.

 

Why you should care

We thought about quantifying our link criteria and publishing a “BASE score,” but decided there’s enough BS in the world without another proprietary metric out there.

If you’re going to pay money, you shouldn’t be embarrassed by what you’re buying.


If you’re going to pay money, you shouldn’t be embarrassed by what you’re buying.

SEO needn’t be a dirty word. The attention we give to our links is the same TLC we give to our managed SEO and content options.

And maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re willing to accept making the web just a little bit worse. Maybe you’re comfortable with spam. Maybe you aren’t a good fit for BASE.

But if you want to participate in a better, different way, then we should talk. If you want to make the internet a better place, give us a holler. If you want to be able to hold your head up and be proud of where your name is sprinkled around online, we’d love to help.

For those of you who are ready for excellent, mature SEO and link building, welcome. We look forward to hearing from you.