All right, here goes another

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Rye Smith: 1. Murky waters here. “It depends” - best for develop a white hate digital PR/citation/link building strategy. 2. Doing it properly, 3/4% response rate from experience. Backlinks at scale is quite the process but worth it.3. Start local, get a conversation going and then sell the vision. Otherwise you’re just coming off spammy.4. Anything worth doing isn’t going to come easy - otherwise everyone would be an SEO whiz.
  
  Avoid PBNs, unless you can diversify DNS/IP location (costly and time consuming) and avoid spammy Indian/Pakistani backlink providers. Might sound good but rarely works out well for you.
  
  If it’s your blog and yours only, give it a shot - because occasionally there’s some gold out there but you would never, ever do this for a paying client.
  
  As with all things SEO, test, measure and learn.
  
  Good luck!
  
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  Tim Capper: Group expertIf you really want main stream publications - you need to produce something that is unique and they want to publish.
  
  Like data that your business has and re hashed into an article that makes a good headline and timely with publication cycles.
  
  Reach out direct
  
  PR companies do this day in day out.
  
  I have had better success with direct product packages to jornos - all wrapped up with press kits.
  
  Another one that worked well and 11yrs on it still generates links - was for a major chocolate brand launch.
  
  We got celeb chefs, did a competition in three stages, each stage had different jornos invited, champagne, goody bags the lot
  
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  Braden Norwood: Tim Capper Awesome - I appreciate the insight!
  
  In my experience so far, organic traffic growth and link acquisition has definitely been a long-game, and that`s only speaking after a year-and-a-half of getting into it. Right now, we seem to have one blog that ranks relatively well in comparison to all of the rest, and regularly gets about 2, 000 visits per month - without much else linking back to it. So, I`m trying to figure out how to leverage the meager success of that article to potentially generate higher quality backlinks.
  
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  Tim Capper: Group expertBraden Norwood Unless you are in a super, super competitive niche - you should not have to worry about link acquisition.
  
  Your content and structure should be able to put you in front and actually even in a super niche.
  
  It sounds like your article do pretty well - so perhaps look to built out the missing content around the current published stuff.
  
  Also re visit your Call to Actions on site.
  
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  Michael Martinez: Group expertAs long as the search engines forbid a practice, it will always be "black hat" (assuming you`re comfortable with that definition).
  
  Yes, many people pay for links these days. And the search engines say they are doing whatever they can to ignore or diminish the value of those links.
  
  But there are still millions of people writing blogs who link out to other sites. You don`t have to pay for those links. You don`t even have to ask for them. The challenge is creating the kind of content they want to link to.
  
  And I`d say that`s probably more challenging now than it was 5, 10, 15+ years ago because the blogosphere has become more specialized (in my opinion). People are less likely to blog about life in general or share their general Web browsing experience and more likely to blog about their special interests.
  
  The more nichey or topic-focused your site is, the less likely it will earn many links simply because fewer sites will share those interests. Isolation is the price of joining exclusive groups.
  
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  Braden Norwood: Michael Martinez That all makes complete sense. I had it in-mind not to pursue links through any sort of paid means, but this being a bit new to me, I wanted to make sure I wasn`t entirely off base.
  
  I appreciate your insight!
  
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  Michael Martinez: Group expertBraden Norwood You know, there is one link buying/building strategy that is search-friendly: you can add "rel=`nofollow`" or "rel=`sponsored`" to the links and place them with guest post-friendly sites.
  
  Why do that?
  
  Well, if they truly are good Websites, they have visitors and can send you traffic.
  
  And if you write really good content, you`ll bring in traffic for them AND give yourself some exposure. You don`t have to play games with the anchor text - you can be as blatant as you wish.
  
  It`s up to the search engines to decide whether to ignore the "nofollow" or "sponsored" attributes (they say they might do that). And it`s up to the Website publishers whether to leave the attributes in place (although I would not expect much from the links if the sites are selling a lot of guest posts).
  
  It`s only "black hat" if it violates search engine guidelines (or the law). But if you`re transparent about what you`re doing, you can evolve these campaigns into full-on marketing strategies.
  
  Companies have become comfortable with the constraints that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and other regulatory agencies have placed on "Influencer Marketing". So why not take advantage of what you can do legally and ethically if you have the budget to spend?
  
  Create brand visibility. Get non-search referral traffic.
  
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