Linking Strategies: The Complete Guide. No Links to Poor Richard's Almanac? Major Fail, Mr. Franklin! There are many ways to go about getting links; the different methods vary widely. I recently helped some clients with their linking strategies, and when I did, I researched a wide range of approaches from the perspective of a number of characteristics. This article presents a massive comparison chart that may even make you reconsider certain link building practices you might already be pursuing. Credit for photo of Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence” : Architect of the Capitol ——– Characteristics of Linking Strategies ——– Ethics and Legality The “ethical” part involves two aspects: not making the internet a worse place, and protecting your client (or your company) from problems down the road. Do everyone a favor please – from an ethical standpoint, please don’t spam the world, and make sure you take good care of whoever you’re working for by not doing anything “sketchy”.
White Hat and Black Hat Linking Strategies Link Value. Buying Links is Shallow, Short-Term Thinking. Buying Blogs? Now that's a Strategy. The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far... Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Even if link buying is working in the short-term and webspam's being less aggressive, I still think it's a waste of money for three reasons: Rankings are tactical: Earning your way to the top rankings is awesome, because it brings with it the branding, familiarity, trust, social sharing and dozens of other positive marketing signals that "earned" links carry.
"Blah, blah, blah, I've heard your white hat evangelism before, Rand" Yeah, you have. Here's some rough calculations on link purchasing in a moderately competitive vertical: Now let's try an alternative: Buying a blog. But, let's try another thought experiment. The Ultimate Guide to Link Valuation. How do you know whether or not to pursue a link? Is it the size of the dog in the fight or the size of the fight in the dog? It’s neither – it’s an assortment of varying factors that can help determine whether or not this site, now, can help your website shoot up the search engine rankings. To help you determine whether or not a page is worth its weight in acquisition effort, I’ve developed a flow chart to take you through the process I use to value a link. The earliest parts in the chart are the delimiting factors – those that can instantly make or break a page. As we get further, the lines are more blurry, and many of them simply act as additional buffers or reducers as it comes to how much effort you want to spend getting this link – as often times, if you’ve made it to the bottom of the chart, you should at least make some effort to get a little value passed your way.
Acquisition Difficulty The first thing to assess is the difficulty you’ll have getting a link from the page. Takeaways. A Model For Link Building: Beyond “Great Content” Content isn’t everything. Content isn’t the only thing. Often, it’s not a thing at all. I would say “content is king” is accurate, but only because there are only 44 current monarchs, the system doesn’t work everywhere, and those monarchies only account for a small proportion of the world’s population.
If you’ve read my post on content link efficacy, you know that content as an explanatory model for everything link building is simply ludicrous. Creating the best piece of content, ever, on an insurance website will not produce the same results that the best piece of content – ever – will evoke on I Can Haz Cheeseburger.
Therefore, there is a lot more to the link building thing than just “create great content”, and even “content is king”, in general, gives content a lot more link building credit than it’s due – and otherwise, takes a lot more credit away from us, the creative link builders – the people who can create a mass of links with barely passable content and no money at all. Money. Google Alerts Link Building, A Guide. Google Alerts is an amazing tool for building links, and one I feel that is relatively unharvested in the SEO world.
Yes, there are certain slivers of the tool that most people use, but, used comprehensively, there is massive opportunity to find links – links that are indexed by Google (alerts picked them up!) – and fresh enough that you know the webmaster has recently monitored it, and therefore, more likely to respond – or at very least entertain – whatever link request you might make. I might even go as far as to say that using Google Alerts for a social e-commerce company is basically printing links. Remember, though — before printing those links, think of the environment. Setting up a Google Alert Strategy If you use all of these queries, you will frequently end up getting a lot of mess in your inbox. So, to the queries. Q&A Queries Yahoo! But with Google Alerts, none of these things apply.
Product Giveaway Queries By all means, go alert crazy. Brand Mention Queries Competitor Queries. Creating A Link Building Machine.