DIY Link Building Basics

[LinkingClever]

Ok, this is a follow up to the DIY SEO basics thread, this one is all about link building.

Whilst doing your link building there are a few points that should be remembered;

• Ensure the bulk of your onsite SEO is correct. I feel that back links are much more important than onsite SEO, but the link building will be much more effective on a properly formatted site, with the correct keyword selection and onsite factors in place.
• Don’t point all the links at your home page. Get them to all the major sections of your sites, as this will help the individual pages rank in the search engines for the keywords on that page. This helps with ‘long tail’ keywords, greater site wide PageRank, and stronger internal linking power.
• Use correct anchor text. This is making the clickable text of the link related to the keywords for that page. Use several variations of your keywords/terms as the anchor text.
• Don’t worry about building links too fast. You won’t be penalized in the search engines unless you are gaining thousands of links in a short space of time for a new site.

OK, on to the actual link building…

First thing to do is check your competition. If you have 10 keywords or terms you are looking to rank for, and are on the second page of Google for all of them, you have a minimum of 100 sites to learn from. Run each site through the Yahoo back link checker, domain-pop and backlinkwatch. See where these sites have got links from, and see if you can add yours there too.

Directories. Directories are a great way to build links, but you need lots of them. There are a couple of types of directories; ones that send traffic, and ones that simply give you a back link. Submit to all of them, even new ones. Here are a couple of links to some directory lists that you can work through. Here, here and here

Blogs. Blogs are another valid link building technique. You can comment on blogs in your market, using some anchor text as your name, and each will be a back link to your site (you can also make these a deep link) Make sure you are not ‘spamming’ the blogs, write a good comment, a couple of sentences’ is great. I use this tool to find blogs that don’t have the ‘no-follow’ attribute, meaning the link will count in Google.

Article submissions. Either write, or get someone to write, a load of articles about your business/product/service, include links back to your site and submit them to article directories. These will be picked up by other websites and in the directories themselves, and each place that publishes your article will (should) give you a back link. Here is a list of article directories

Paid links/reciprocal links. Go for it. The only sites getting penalized for ‘paid links’ are the ones selling, not the buyers. And even then, not many have actually been penalized from what I have seen. Reciprocal links have slightly less weight in the search engines, but are still a valid link building technique, and can often get you a strong link where you wouldn’t otherwise.

The above methods should get you a good number of back links, and allow you to compete with some of those sites above you. If you find you have done all this list and are still not ranking too well, you either have some serious onsite issues, or are in a high competition niche. If this is the case, expand the above tasks to include other similar markets, and be more relaxed about staying ‘relevant’ with the source of your back links.

There are many more methods to build links, and it would be great if some of the other SEO’s contribute! These ones are all pretty simple to implement, although they take a lot of time, are well worth the results.

Hope that helps, feel free to add!
Jay

 

[garyk]

superb stuff Jay! Im just doing this with 2 new domains and this is really helpful.

One thing I found (which is free) is Tattler which is a program rather than a webpage and analyses backlinks and lets you look at the list and navigate to the ones you are interested in. Theres also some useful snippets here http://www.seobook.com/archives/000869.shtml


Gary

 

[LinkingClever]

Nice one Gary, I'll have a look at that! Im going to do another thread like this full of tools, I'll be sure to include that one.
Cheers
Jay

 

[sabian1982]

I've pretty much got to agree with everything you say but not with reciprical linking. There was a time when SEs weren't so clever; people would gang together a say if you add a link to me, i'll add a link to you - hence we'll both be helping each other to get a better ranking. Unfortunately (as with the likes of meta keywords) the SEs have become more intelligent around such things - they can quite easily identify reciprical linkage. This results in either your recip linkage giving you no improvement (hence meaning its a waste of your time) or (if you're unlucky) even the potential for your site to get devalued so as causing you a problem as apposed to an improvement in your serps. Of course there is always an exception to the rule; if you were to generate a circular recip linkage around 4, 5 or 6+ sites this has the potential to provide a positive affect (especially when all sites are relational).

Also paid links - the fact that google only penalises the sellers of links is untrue. If you go into your google account you'll find there is not only an option to report sellers of paid links but also the buyers as well! Hence indicating that google is targeting both the buys and sellers of links. That being said though less weight would be given to a potential buy as it could just be a sneaky technique to devalue a competitor site...

Thats my Friday blah, blah done

 

[LinkingClever]

I do agree that recip links have less weigh in the SEs, Google especially.
But, a link is a link, and I have not seen any evidence of them causing a negative effect on a sites rank, both on my test sites and in the SERPs.

The other fact is that links direct spiders/robots/crawlers to your site, and this still happens wether a link is 1 or 2 way. So the more the better!

Cheers
Jay

 

[LinkingClever]

Paid links - I hadn't seen the report buttons for that, so many thanks! I think it comes down to being aware of the problem, and staying under the radar. As you said, it would be too easy to knock a competitor out of the SERPs for a few $.

Imo, the overall aim is to build up varied and diverse backlinks, if that includes a few paid and a few recips, its not gonna harm you.

Jay

 

[cmcridland]

But, a link is a link, and I have not seen any evidence of them causing a negative effect on a sites rank, both on my test sites and in the SERPs.

The other fact is that links direct spiders/robots/crawlers to your site, and this still happens wether a link is 1 or 2 way. So the more the better!

I'd agree with this although if you have an established site I wouldn't bother about reciprocal linking.

However, for new sites it's still worth doing. The more links pointing to your site the better (as long as they are from relevant sites), and it's often possible to exchange links with PR5 + sites - as a new PR0 site I think this can only be beneficial.

 

[I, Brian]

Reciprocal links - seriously, not recommended. Aside from the investment taken to apply them, the various footprints Google can use to devalue them, it's also worth pointing out that Google has been devaluing link exchange networks. A little network theory can easily highlight these for devaluation. Happened in the US Real Estate industry last year.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-h...-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate

 

[aidan1980]

quality post this Jay, its gave me some good points to look into. Thanks

 

[aidan1980]

can someone explain the difference between a deep link and a normal link aswell please

 

[LinkingClever]

A deep link is a normal link, but is pointed to an in internal page on your site, like http://domain.com/products.php. The benefit of deep links is a stronger spread of PR, greater internal linking power, and better ranking for that page and its keywords. Its a great technique for building up your high rankings for 'long tail' keywords, which in enough volume can generate significant, highly targetted traffic.
Jay

 

[bobgentry]

Is bit possible to detect if you have any inbound links that could be damaging your site as far as Google is concerned.

 

[LinkingClever]

Is bit possible to detect if you have any inbound links that could be damaging your site as far as Google is concerned.

Good question. Unless you have done some things you shouldn't, all the backlinks to your site should be ok in Googles eyes. You will probably have a load of backlinks from MFA (Made For Adsense) sites, which could be considered spam sites. This happens as they copy the search results for the content of the site, and often leave the links in place. There is probably a tool out there for this, although I have not come across one.
Jay

 

[bigears]

Great post!!

Quick question; If you are a uk site, does it matter if links come from usa or australian sites??? would these links have less weighting for uk based sites??

 

[seo_uk]

Paid links/reciprocal links. Go for it. The only sites getting penalized for ‘paid links’ are the ones selling, not the buyers. And even then, not many have actually been penalized from what I have seen. Reciprocal links have slightly less weight in the search engines, but are still a valid link building technique, and can often get you a strong link where you wouldn’t otherwise.

Jay, you are a very active member and have been very generous with your advice up to now, but I have to say this is the worst thing you can tell any novice SEO'er. The only sites getting penilised are the ones selling them!!! Wtf! Seriously, that is a really bad thing to say. Only a few weeks ago Uswitch got knocked out the rankings for buying links and so have gocompare in the past.

Yes, you can buy links, but you have to do it professionally and very carefully. Going to these sites like textlinkads and link directories and buying thousands of links will only give you short term benefit, before you get caught and possibly banned.

Advice to newbies, be careful with buying links - try and approach individual site owners and not link agencies or link directories as you WILL get stung.

 

[seguro-auto]

Great post!!

Quick question; If you are a uk site, does it matter if links come from usa or australian sites??? would these links have less weighting for uk based sites??

If your website is co.uk you will benefit from links from any country but google will see your site as UK and google.co.uk will rank you but google.com.au for instance will not.
I always go for .com or .net or .org.
Also I found that giving out no links at all works very well as the search spiders come to your site and do not go straight back out through a link without reading your site.
Another point about links is some links carry weight like .gov links and others get crawled every few seconds like bbc or aol so posting on these ensures spiders keeping going through your site all the time.
The best way to get links is to google search your own keywords and whatever google throws up on page one look for blogs and stuff to comment on. Google ranks these high so they are doing everything right.
Make sure your links are all in your subject area for clarity and strength to google.
Also make sure the first thing you do is bookmark your homepage on all the bookmark sites but DO NOT put their icons or buttons on your own site as this devalues the link completely today.
Make sure your title and URL are exactly what you expect people to ask for and no more as each new word divides up the relavance.
Always use hyphens between words in links as two words next to each other spell nothing at all.
Do not have any broken links at all as this will destroy your ranking chances.
Register your website for 5 years as google use this info when indexing.
One year sites get sandboxed and do very poorly after an initial short period ranking well.
This is because of the different spiders that come through your site later looking for more info.
I have many sites at number one on Google for all my chosen keywords.

Good luck everyone.

 

[JustOneUK]

Great post!!

Quick question; If you are a uk site, does it matter if links come from usa or australian sites??? would these links have less weighting for uk based sites??

When you say you are a UK site do you mean that your website ends with .co.uk or do you mean that you are hosted on a UK server? (or both?)

James

 

[DavidRoss]

The only sites getting penilised are the ones selling them!!! Wtf! Seriously, that is a really bad thing to say. Only a few weeks ago Uswitch got knocked out the rankings for buying links and so have gocompare in the past.

Uswitch and Gocompare did not get penalised or knocked out of the rankings for buying links.

The links that they bought were devalued (any benefit they received as a result from those links was removed) when the links were were discovered as paid which is why you saw a drop in their site's rankings.

The actual Uswitch and Gocompare sites were not affected at all, the links just ceased to give any benefit so their ranking naturally dropped due to the loss of links.

You never be penalised for getting links to your website.

If this was the case I'd simply go out and buy my competitors some links and then report them to Google...

 

[mke]

can someone explain the difference between a deep link and a normal link aswell please

A deep link is one to a page other than your index page, so it's "deeper" into your site.

Don't point all the links at your home page.

Overall a good article, LinkingClever, but this specific point is misguided. Get your index or other main landing page as highly ranked a possible. You can't do that if you are dissipating your efforts across several targets, especially if your site is not already very well established. The bots will crawl the rest of your pages so concentrating your efforts will not be wasted.

Just one further idea to throw into the pot: Send out press releases to the various online PR agencies. It works. many of them carry tutorials on how to write a press release, so I won't bore you here. I have just written a tutorial on the topic, too, so keep your eye on my signature until next week when I part with the readies to become a paid member. I'll add the link then.

 

[DavidRoss]

Don't point all the links at your home page.

Overall a good article, LinkingClever, but this specific point is misguided. Get your index or other main landing page as highly ranked a possible. You can't do that if you are dissipating your efforts across several targets, especially if your site is not already very well established.

Actually, not pointing all your links at the homepage is an effective strategy to use in getting your site's index / main page ranked as high as possible.

With correct site structure and good internal linking (directing page rank appropriately), building links to all of the internal pages of your site will increase overall site authority and allow page rank to flow through your site, reinforcing the importance of your site's homepage as well as many others.

 

[mke]

Ah. So that's why the press releases are more effective than I'd expected. And there I was, thinking about how to address them to the front page rather than the relevant content inside.

Thanks, David.

 

[DavidRoss]

No problem mke, with press releases it doesn't hurt to add in a homepage link too if you can get away with it

 

[Aaron H]

Sorry, had to stick my nose in on this one. Totally agree with some of whats been said about recip linking, if you're going to do it to game the search engines then personally I wouldn't bother.

On the other hand there are decent recip links out there to be had, I've got a couple for my employers site this year which bring in large amounts of highly targeted visitors and have paid off quite nicely, and where they came in from pretty much acted as endorsements for our products and a valuable branding exercise.

Don't just look at getting links as a rank building exercise.

 

[ScottB]

With correct site structure and good internal linking (directing page rank appropriately), building links to all of the internal pages of your site will increase overall site authority and allow page rank to flow through your site, reinforcing the importance of your site's homepage as well as many others.

It's all the same (if we're just talking about link juice flow throughout the site). The same process is involved - if all links point to homepage then that passes link juice to deep pages. If all links point to deep pages, then they pass back to homepage.

That's the main reason that homepages tend to have more "ranking power" than other pages - more internal links point to them. In fact I've only seen one instance of an internal page that had a higher Toolbar PageRank than it's homepage (and that guy was absolutely whoring himself to get links).

There are other levels to consider though.

Many spam filters and ranking algorithms are based on models of how search engines think sites should work. One model might be rate of link growth over time, another might be ratio of homepage links vs deep links - and these can vary depending on the site type.

The danger here is that a small business site (say, 10 - 100 pages) goes away thinking a deep link campaign is the way forward when it might not be (and in fact could do more harm than good in the long term - as with paid links for example).

IMO there is no substitute for a solid site structure that interlinks pages well - that's your base to start off with. Then all any small site needs is homepage link building campaign. Yes, deep links can help (and may be necessary for more competitive markets), but I've yet to find a small business site that needs deep link building (outside high £££ areas).

The problem is that although deep link building can be useful, it can also essentially mask bad site structure (the deep links compensate for poor internal linking). All it would take is a shift in how search engines value homepage to deep link ratios (for example) and that work could be rendered useless (in the same way paid links could be).

There's always a lot of talk about the benefits of x, y and z SEO technique - but there's very little discussion (or general knowledge IMO) about the potential risks. Risks in SEO aren't limited to "stuff that can get you penalised" - there's loads of stuff that might work now and simply won't work tomorrow. Small businesses in particular really need to be educated on the associated risks with various SEO activities so they can make an informed choice.

My summary:

• Recips - OK on a small scale - won't harm your site if on topic - search engines only really slap sites doing it on a large scale - you can still get some benefit from recips.
• Deep linking campaign - more appropraite for high competition terms or larger sites with distinct sections. Minor risk that search engines will find a way to clamp down on this in the future.
• Small sites - homepage link building + good site architecture is all you'll need 95% of the time and carries no risk.
• Press releases - always good, and a good place for a select few deep links (particularly useful for promoting new content). Don't be tacky and circulate PR everytime someone sneezes though!
• Buying links - I agree with David + SEO_UK here. Buying paid links is no task for newbies. While David is right - it won't harm your site in terms of rankings - you still lose the money you spend and there is an increasingly high risk of this happening (even to pros).

Scott

 

[LinkingClever]

Great input Guys, thanks!

I agree, buying links was maybe not the best thing to delve into on a 'Basics' article, as there are some complicated issues surrounding it, and as this is intended for beginners/DIY SEO's I should have been more specific and included more detail. It was not my intention to encourage buying crappy links in bulk. I will do an advanced link building guide, time allowing, with more info soon

Jay, you are a very active member and have been very generous with your advice up to now, but I have to say this is the worst thing you can tell any novice SEO'er. The only sites getting penilised are the ones selling them!!! Wtf! Seriously, that is a really bad thing to say. Only a few weeks ago Uswitch got knocked out the rankings for buying links and so have gocompare in the past.

Yes, you can buy links, but you have to do it professionally and very carefully. Going to these sites like textlinkads and link directories and buying thousands of links will only give you short term benefit, before you get caught and possibly banned.

Advice to newbies, be careful with buying links - try and approach individual site owners and not link agencies or link directories as you WILL get stung.

Cheers
Jay

 

[freeindex]

Hi All
Anyone got any advice for us at FreeIndex on the reciprical linking question? Obviously we have thousands of reciprical links which of course are not paid for. I don't think they are looked on favourably by google anymore....any thoughts?

Toni

 

[bwb]

You guys might find this useful, nice SEOmoz article on link building and the comments are full of the crazy ideas people came up with, great stuff!

In the comments below, share your top 3 most bizarre, unique, unconventional, or simply unexpected link building tactics. They can be specific, broad, or even a little coy. The rest of us will go through and reward with thumbs up depending on how valuable we consider the techniques to be.​

it won't let me post a url but just go to semoz and then do a search

 

[aidan1980]

i was just wondering for the SEO pro's that when you start to do a link build for a site (any really in general) is there a say 5 or 10 set sites that you use as a base to start from? And do you mind telling me what they are if they exsist

 

[bwb]

i was just wondering for the SEO pro's that when you start to do a link build for a site (any really in general) is there a say 5 or 10 set sites that you use as a base to start from? And do you mind telling me what they are if they exsist

Nah there are not 5 or 10 set sites you start from. You have to keep in mind the niche of the site you are working with and what their long term ranking goals are for. Then you need to find what site's google trusts in that area and similar areas and get them to link to you, it doesn't hurt if you have fantastic content or do something different. Of course it also depends how gray/black/white your methods are.

The key though for white hat and the vast majority of the white hat work I do is that you need to find the site's that google has deemed trustable in your niche and the surrounding niches, and then you need to figure out anyway possible to get them to link to you with anchor text that is focused and helps the search engines know what you are about. After that you have your link goals set out and can work on those while branding and doing some broader marketing at the same time.

 

[aidan1980]

Nah there are not 5 or 10 set sites you start from. You have to keep in mind the niche of the site you are working with and what their long term ranking goals are for. Then you need to find what site's google trusts in that area and similar areas and get them to link to you, it doesn't hurt if you have fantastic content or do something different. Of course it also depends how gray/black/white your methods are.

The key though for white hat and the vast majority of the white hat work I do is that you need to find the site's that google has deemed trustable in your niche and the surrounding niches, and then you need to figure out anyway possible to get them to link to you with anchor text that is focused and helps the search engines know what you are about. After that you have your link goals set out and can work on those while branding and doing some broader marketing at the same time.

cheers mate, with anchor text do you mean what name the link is listed as. For example my site is about free bets from bookies so when i post on blogs i list my name as 'free bets' which then links to my site. i do 'free bets' as this is one of my keywords. is my understanding correct on this

 

[bwb]

cheers mate, with anchor text do you mean what name the link is listed as. For example my site is about free bets from bookies so when i post on blogs i list my name as 'free bets' which then links to my site. i do 'free bets' as this is one of my keywords. is my understanding correct on this

Yep that is correct, of course its good to trust people to use a number of different ones as many times this looks more natural (plus it is natural) and in the long run you might rank for some keywords you didn't know might pay off. Things like "free wagers" "no cost bets", etc, the more long tale, plus in the eyes of a smart search engine like google it knows those words are related and can figure out if you are getting anchor text with all you just arn't gaming the system and actual have content that should rank for many of those keywords.

 

[PrettyPaws]

Article submissions. Either write, or get someone to write, a load of articles about your business/product/service, include links back to your site and submit them to article directories. These will be picked up by other websites and in the directories themselves, and each place that publishes your article will (should) give you a back link. Here is a list of article directories

Great post so thanks for that!

I just wanted to ask about this one. If you send out the same article 10 times isn't Google just going to ignore 9 of them as duplicate? I have started hosting articles on my site to encourage others to link to me but should I submit them aswell? Also am I really going to see much benifit from inbound links from page which are never going to give much link juice ie individual article pages?

 

[LinkingClever]

Great post so thanks for that!

I just wanted to ask about this one. If you send out the same article 10 times isn't Google just going to ignore 9 of them as duplicate? I have started hosting articles on my site to encourage others to link to me but should I submit them aswell? Also am I really going to see much benifit from inbound links from page which are never going to give much link juice ie individual article pages?

Google won't ignore content/links due to it being duplicate, as long as the link is on a page that's indexed in google, it will count a a link.

If you have unique, original articles on your site, I would personally not distribute those to other sites, but write some new ones specifically for submission to other sites.

The benifit of this technique is not the link from the article directory or site where you first put the article, but the potential for it to be picked up and placed on strong, high PR pages many times over, giving you a load of quality backlinks. I have seen a few hundred copies of an article distributed around the net, giving great backlinks, and heard of people writing a cracking article and getting many thousands of links....

Jay

 

[dotwhack]

GaryK - can't find this resource, what's the link? TATTLER

 

[aidan1980]

just another thought that has came into my head. People keep mentioning link juice and relevent links which made me think. even though a page may have no or very little page rank but would be considered relevent is there a for or against getting a link from it in terms of SEO?

 

[bwb]

just another thought that has came into my head. People keep mentioning link juice and relevent links which made me think. even though a page may have no or very little page rank but would be considered relevent is there a for or against getting a link from it in terms of SEO?

Correct, page rank used to be a lot more valuable but I would only use it now as a broad idea of how trusted that site is. If the content is good and the page isn't loaded down with links then it is probably a good place to get a link from, I would just use more common sense and try to treat it from a human perspective. If someone read page A would they want to buy or try or read my service? If so try to get a link on it.

Now if the page is full of crap content, had loads of links, its not going to benefit much.

The above is a pretty long term white hat point of view, probably better to be a little gray in those areas and not only do the above but also build some broad links as well. Google will eventually sort the crap out of the index but it can't help to speed that up and not rely on them completely.

 

[garyk]

GaryK - can't find this resource, what's the link? TATTLER

try this http://www.webguerrilla.com/down-loads/tattler.zip