What is Tiered Link Building in SEO?

[Jake]

That sounds like having a small network of sites in various configurations, sometimes called rings, that feed "link juice" to one main web site, sites on the outer perimeter or tier, may receive more risky blackhat links, but passes on a more sanitary, sager link top the main site, if one of the support sites is deindexed for SEO spam, the main site is only moderately effected and can recover quite quickly from the lost link.

Search engines grow smarter at recognizing such configurations and with the advent of the many free social sites it doesn't pay to maintain all those sites on different IP addresses and complicated domain registrations to conceal the common owner.

This article warns against such incestuous links and other tricks.
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