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The Beginner’s Guide
To Link Building
Author: Paddy Moogan
What You Will Learn
Chapter 1:
What is Link Building &
Why is It Important?
Chapter 2:
Types of Links (Both Good & Bad)
Chapter 3:
How to Start a Link Building Campaign
Chapter 4:
Link Building Tactics
Chapter 5:
Link Building Metrics
Chapter 6:
The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
of Link Building
Chapter 7:
Advanced Link Building
Tips & Tricks
What is Link Building & Why
is It Important?
Whether you’re brand new to link building or have been doing it for a while, we’re
sure you’ll find something useful in this guide. The landscape of SEO and link
building is always changing, and today, the importance of building high-quality
links has never been higher. The need to understand and implement high-quality
campaigns is essential if you’re going to compete and thrive online, and that isn’t
going to change any time soon. This guide is designed to get you going quickly and
in the right direction. There is a lot to take in, but we’ve broken everything up into
easy-to-digest chapters and have included lots of examples along the way. We hope
you enjoy The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building!
Chapter 1
Definition of Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other
websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a
way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search
engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links
between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl
the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for
building links, and while they vary in diculty, SEOs tend to agree
that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many
SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that
reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it
can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.
Why is Link Building
Important for SEO?
The Anatomy of a Hyperlink
In order to understand the importance of link
building, it’s important to first understand the
basics of how a link is created, how the search
engines see links, and what they can interpret
from them.
1. Start of link tag: Called an anchor tag (hence the “a”), this opens the link tag and tells
search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.
2. Link referral location: The “href” stands for “hyperlink referral,” and the text inside
the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn’t
always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download.
Occasionally, you’ll see something other than a URL, beginning with a # sign. These
are local links, which take you to a dierent section of the page you’re already on.
3. Visible/anchor text of link: This is the little bit of text that users see on the page,
and on which they need to click if they want to open the link. The text is usually
formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with
blue color and/or underlining, signaling to users that it is a clickable link.
4. Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link tag to the search engines.
What Links Mean for Search Engines
There are two fundamental ways that the search engines use links:
1) To discover new web pages
2) To help determine how well a page should rank in their results
Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content
of those pages and add it to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they feel a
page is of sucient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords (Google created
a short video to explain that process). When they are deciding this, the search
engines do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of
links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external
websites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the
more likely you are to rank well in search results.
Links as a ranking factor are what allowed Google to start to dominate the search
engine market back in the late 1990s. One of Google’s founders, Larry Page,
invented PageRank, which Google used to measure the quality of a page based in
part on the number of links pointing to it. This metric was then used as part of the
overall ranking algorithm and became a strong signal because it was a very good
way of determining the quality of a page.
It was so eective because it was based upon the idea that a link could be seen as a
vote of confidence about a page, i.e., it wouldn’t get links if it didn’t deserve to. The
theory is that when someone links to another website, they are eectively saying it
is a good resource. Otherwise, they wouldn’t link to it, much in the same way that
you wouldn’t send a friend to a bad restaurant.
However, SEOs soon discovered how to manipulate PageRank and search results for
chosen keywords. Google started actively trying to find ways to discover websites
which were manipulating search results, and began rolling out regular updates
which were specifically aimed at filtering out websites that didn’t deserve to rank.
This has also led to Google starting to discount a number of link building
techniques that were previously deemed fine, for example, submitting your website
to web directories and getting a link in return. This was a technique that Google
actually recommended at one point, but it became abused and overused by SEOs, so
Google stopped passing as much value from that sort of links.
More recently, Google has actively penalized the rankings of websites who
have attempted such overuse of these techniques—often referred to as over-
optimization—in their link building. Google’s regular Penguin updates are one
such example. Knowing which link building techniques to avoid and stay within
Google’s guidelines is an important subject that we’ll discuss later in this guide.
We don’t know the full algorithm that Google uses to determine its search results—
that’s the company’s “secret sauce.” Despite that fact, the general consensus among
the SEO community (according to the 2013 Moz search ranking factors survey) is
that links still play a big role in that algorithm. They represent the largest two slices
of the pie chart below.
Weighting of Thematic Clusters of
Ranking Factors in Google
Domain-Level, Keyword-Agnostic Features
(e.g. domain name length, extension,
domain HTTP response time, etc.)
Page-Level Link Features
(e.g. PageRank, TrustRank, quantity of link
links, anchor text distribution, quality of
links sources, etc.)
Page-Level KW & Content Features
(e.g. TF*IDF, topic-modeling scores on
content, content quantity/relevance, etc.)
Page-Level, Keyword-Agnostic Features
(e.g. Content length, readability,
uniqueness, load speed, etc.)
Domain-Level Brand Features
(e.g. oine usage of brand/domain name,
mentions of brand.domain in news/
media/press, entry association, etc.)
User, Usage, & Trac/ Query Data
(e.g. trac/ usage signals from browsers/
toolbars/clickstrean, quantity/ diversity/
CTR of queries, etc.)
Social Metrics
(e.g. quantity/quality of tweeted links
Facebook shares, Google +1s, etc.)
Domain-Level Keyword Usage
(e.g. exact-match keyword domains,
partial-keyword matches, etc.)
Domain-Level, Keyword-Agnostic Features
(e.g. domain name length, TLD extension,
domain HTTP response time, etc.)
It is generally accepted that if all other factors are equal, the volume and quality of
links pointing to a page will make the dierence between rankings. Having said
that, with recent moves from Google, including the release of Penguin updates and
its push of Google+, there is speculation that the impact of links is being reduced
and replaced with social signals such as tweets or +1s.
For now, though, there is little doubt that if you get high-quality links to your
website, it will help you rank better and get more trac (we’ll talk more about what
makes a “good-quality” link in Chapter 2). We’ve mentioned “high-quality” a few
times, now, and there’s a good reason: The focus on quality is increasing as Google
becomes ever more sophisticated at filtering out low-quality links. This directly
impacts SEOs, as they need to make sure the link building techniques they choose
focus primarily on that quality.
What You Need to Know About Nofollow
Whether you’re brand new to link building or have been doing it for a while, we’re
sure you’ll find something useful in this guide. The landscape of SEO and link
building is always changing, and today, the importance of building high-quality
links has never been higher. The need to understand and implement high-quality
campaigns is essential if you’re going to compete and thrive online, and that isn’t
going to change any time soon. This guide is designed to get you going quickly and
in the right direction. There is a lot to take in, but we’ve broken everything up into
easy-to-digest chapters and have included lots of examples along the way. We hope
you enjoy The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building!
There is an attribute that can sometimes be applied to links called the “nofollow”
attribute. If added, you will not notice any dierence if you’re a user. But, if you look
at the code of the link, it will look slightly dierent:
<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Example</a>
Note the addition of rel=”nofollow”. This tells Google not to pass any PageRank
across this link to the target URL. Eectively, you’re telling Google not to trust this
link and to discount it from consideration. Therefore, it should not help the target
URL to rank any better.
The main reason a site might use nofollow relates to scenarios in which that site
lacks total control over the links that are added to its pages. In other words, they
don’t want to show Google a vote of confidence when they don’t know whether or
not they actually are confident. This is more common than you’d expect; here are a
few examples:
Users can freely add links to each of these places, and because of their size, it isn’t
really practical to moderate every single one of those links. So, in order to deter link
spammers from taking advantage of a site’s PageRank, the site will often choose to
apply the nofollow attribute to all links posted by other users.
Another use for the nofollow attribute is for advertisers to use on links that have
been paid for. So, if you buy an advertising banner on a website which links to you,
Google says that the nofollow attribute should be added so that they know not to
pass any PageRank across that link. The idea here is that you shouldn’t benefit in
the organic results by buying advertisements that include links on other websites.
More recently, Google has expanded this concept to included optimized links in
press releases, article directories, and advertorials. These are all examples where the
use of nofollow is entirely appropriate.
In terms of your work, you should know that links that have the nofollow attribute
applied will probably not help your organic search rankings as directly as followed
links. That isn’t to say they’re not worthwhile. After all, typical users don’t notice
whether a link is nofollowed or not, and may actually click through and visit your
• Blog comments
• Forum posts
• Guest book comments
• Editable Wiki pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Yahoo! Answers
• Guest post signatures
website even if it is. That is, after all, the point of buying advertisements online.
That being said, for the purposes of link building, you want most of your links to be
followed and therefore counted by Google.
How Can Link Building Benefit
My Business?
As we’ve discussed, links are a very important signal that the search engines use to
determine rankings. So, we know that increasing the number of high-quality links
pointing at your website can significantly increase your chances of ranking well.
There are other benefits to link building, though, that may be less immediately
obvious yet still worthy of consideration.
Building Relationships
Link building can often involve outreach to other relevant websites and blogs in
your industry. This outreach frequently relates to the promotion of something that
you’ve just created, such as a piece of content or an infographic. A common goal
of outreach is to get a link, but there is much more to it than just this: Outreach
can help you build long-term relationships with key influencers in your industry,
and these relationships can mean that your business becomes highly regarded
and trusted. This in itself is valuable, even if we forget link building for a moment,
because we are creating genuine evangelists and advocates for our business.
Sending Referral Trac
We’ve talked about the impact of links on your rankings, but what about the impact
of links on referral trac? A good link from a highly-visited website can lead to an
increase in trac, too. If it is a relevant website, chances are that the trac is also
relevant and may lead to an increase in sales, as well. Again, in this situation the
value of a link isn’t just about SEO—it’s about customers. A great example of this in
action was this guest post written by Michael Ellsberg on Tim Ferriss’ blog. He also
wrote a case study on Forbes explaining just how valuable this guest post was to
him. “There’s a big dierence between being exposed to a large audience,” he says,
“and being exposed to a comparatively smaller (but still large) audience which is
ridiculously passionate.” In other words, the avid followers of a single blog were far
more likely to take the advice of the blogger than (for example) viewers were to pay
attention to the anchor on CNN, even if the latter group outnumbered the former.
Brand Building
Good link building can help build your brand and establish you as an authority
in your niche. There are some link building techniques, such as content creation,
which can show people the expertise of your company, and this can go a long way
toward building your brand. For example, if you create a piece of content based
upon industry data and publish it, you have a chance of becoming well known for it
in your industry. When you do outreach and try to get links to the content, you are
showing your expertise and asking other people in your industry to help spread the
word and show others the same.
An Important Note On Link Building Vs. Link “Earning”
Or, the importance of having webpages worth linking to.
Before building links, you need something of value to build links to. Often it’s
the homepage of your website. More often than not, though, you build links to
specialized resources such as a blog post, tool, research study or graphic. Sometimes
these assets exist long before you begin your link building campaign. Other times,
you create these resources specifically with the goal of building links in mind.
This introduces the concepts of link earning and “deserving to rank.” All link building
campaigns must start with something worth linking to. It’s very dicult to build
links to low-value webpages, but when you begin with something truly valuable that
people find useful or share-worthy, link building is a much easier endeavor.
Types of Links
(Both Good and Bad)
As we mentioned in Chapter 1, quality is more important than ever, because Google
has begun penalizing websites that build low-quality or spammy links. In the past,
SEOs have been able to border on the risky side when it came to link building.
Techniques such as article submissions and directory listings were commonly
recommended by SEO companies, because they worked well and posed little risk if
done correctly. However, times have changed with the introduction of the Penguin
updates from Google which aggressively hurt websites that pursue these low-
quality link building techniques. In this chapter, we’ll give you a sense for the types
of links you should and shouldn’t focus on building.
Chapter 2
“Natural” Editorial Links
This type of link is the holy grail for SEOs. Essentially, these are the links that you
didn’t even have to ask for because they are editorially given by other website
owners. This is much more ecient than having to contact someone and ask them
to link to you. However, you need to give someone a good reason to do so, and you
need to find ways of making large numbers of bloggers aware of that reason.
An example of a good reason may be a great piece of content that you’ve created
which you then seeded with a few key influential bloggers, and through that
process more bloggers have naturally become aware of it. This is hard to do and can
take time, which is part of why these types of links are so highly valued. They are
also the types of links that Google often hold up as great examples, indicating that
they will stand the test of time.
Manual “Outreach” Link Building
This is probably one of the most common types of link-building you’ll perform as
an SEO, particularly if you’re just starting out or your business is still quite small
and unknown. It involves manually contacting website owners and bloggers,
asking them to link to you. Again, you need to give them a reason to link to you
and to be successful, you need to be contacting people who are relevant. If you’re
contacting people who have no connection to your industry, then they are likely to
be confused when you ask for a link.
Self-created, Non-editorial Links
This type of link is generally frowned upon these days, as it often falls in line with
black-hat practices that aim to fool the search engines into thinking a piece of
content is relevant and important when it actually isn’t (more on black-hat practices
in Chapter 6). With the introduction of Penguin in 2012 (and the subsequent
updates to it), Google has begun devaluing and even penalizing this type of link.
Due to these links not being editorially given, they inherently carry less weight than
the other types of links. In the past, they have been useful for some SEOs working
on certain websites, but you should use great caution in their implementation now.
A few examples may be:
• Blog comments that are not moderated
• Press releases with optimized anchor text
• Article directories
• Guest post signatures
• Advertorials
• Embeddable widgets
• Infographic embeds
• User profile pages
• Guestbooks
• Forum signatures
• Directories that are not moderated
The types of links you choose to pursue with your strategy should depend on your
existing link profile, but in general, you should avoid links that are not editorially
given. Instead, you should focus on the tactics that will give you editorial links that
add value to your website and business.
How to Start a Link
Building Campaign
A link building campaign is the process of actively trying to increase links to your
website, usually accompanied by some kind of overarching objective. It will use
assets belonging to the website in order to acquire those links, and an asset can be
anything from content and news to products and services.
There are various components of a link building
campaign; some will be crucial to success
and others will be helpful but not necessarily
essential. Much will depend on a combination
of your available assets and resources.
Chapter 3
Structuring a Link
Building Campaign
What is a Link Building Campaign?
Setting Goals
Link building is a form of online marketing, and with any
form of marketing you should start with goals. Knowing the
goals of your campaign right at the start helps to ensure that
you create a strategy that gives you the best possible chance
of success. You also need to ensure that the goals of your
link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals
of your business. For example, “build 10 links” is not a good
goal to hit if building 10 links does not have any impact on
the overall success of the business.
“You also need to
ensure that the
goals of your link
building campaign
tie in closely with
the overall goals of
your business.”
Here, we encounter a slight issue. We learned earlier
that links are a strong part of the search engine ranking
algorithms. So, wouldn’t hitting a goal of more links help
with rankings? Helping with rankings helps drive more
trac and this helps bring more customers, right? All of this
is true, but the problem is that it can sometimes take time
for the links you’ve built to start having an overall positive
eect on rankings. It isn’t as simple as build links one day
and see improvements the next. This is particularly true in
competitive industries.
This poses a problem for SEOs because it can be hard to
show that a link building campaign is successful, even if it
hits certain goals.
For this reason, it is very important to not only set realistic
goals, but to make sure that the goals you set are more
intelligent than “build x links.” The goals need to tie into real
organizational goals and ultimately have a positive impact
on the bottom line of your business. For example, you may
want to increase organic search trac in order to drive
more sales. At the same time, you need to educate those
around you that SEO and link building doesn’t succeed
overnight and that results are not instantaneous. Like any
good marketing, the focus should be on long-term gains,
not overnight quick-wins.
Finding Your Assets
At the heart of any link building campaign is the asset that you’re going to use in order
to attract and earn links. This can also be known as the “hook” that will make people care
about what you have to oer, and will entice them into linking to you. Assets will vary
from business to business and you need to identify which assets your business has that
will be of interest to others and can be used in link building.
One other asset that black-hat SEOs still use is money.
Obviously, all assets will probably require an investment
of some kind, but these SEOs approach link acquisition
as a pure cash transaction. Buying links is strictly
against Google’s guidelines, and if a website is
caught engaging in this practice, it can mean a heavy
penalty and loss of trac. Buying links is risky and
usually the risks will outweigh the potential loss, so we
strongly recommend against it.
Examples of assets may be:
Content
Data
Products
Services
People
You’ll also need to make sure that the assets you create are relevant to the audience you’d
like to attract. Aleyda Solis put together an in-depth walk-through that’s worth a look.
Finding link targets
What Types of Links You Need
When defining the strategy for your link building campaign, you will need to think
about the types of links you need to get. There are various types to consider:
1. Links to your homepage
2. Links to “deep” pages (such as product or category pages)
3. Links containing your brand / company name
4. Links containing the keywords you’re targeting
Additionally, there are combinations of the above, such as a branded link to a deep page.
Identifying what types of links you need will start with a detailed link analysis of your
current website as well as a look at how you rank for certain keywords in comparison
to your competitors. You can use Open Site Explorer to run this kind of analysis and see
what your link profile currently looks like.
The analysis will show you opportunities for improvement. For example, you may see
that you’re not ranking for one of your main keywords. After doing some link analysis,
you find that you have no links pointing to your website that contain this keyword, or,
you find that the most relevant deep page has no links at all pointing at it. If you identify
something like this, you have a tangible problem that you can work to resolve. In this
case, it may mean that your strategy includes trying to build links to the deep page that
currently doesn’t have any links and doesn’t rank for your target keywords.
The first thing you need to think about is what types of people you should contact, as
you want to make sure that you are contacting people who are likely to be interested
in your content. If you contact people randomly, your response rate will be a lot lower,
and you’re likely to give yourself and your website a bad reputation.
Ideally, before you actually start a link building campaign, you should have a rough
idea of who you think will care about what you’re doing. If you create a piece of
content that you want links to, such as an infographic, you should ask yourself right at
the start of the process who will care about it. More importantly, who will care enough
to actually link to it?
This last bit is crucial. While you may find it quite easy to get people look at your
content, it is a whole new level of engagement for them to actually link to it. Linking
to something requires a bit of eort and time, so you need to make someone care
enough for them to not mind doing this. The barrier for getting your content shared on
social networks is much lower. More people have a Twitter or Facebook account than a
website or blog, making it easier for them to share.
So How Do You Make People Care Enough to Link?
You need to find a hook that makes people care. You need to work this hook into your
content right from the start. If you put o creating your hook until the moment you
begin your outreach, you may discover that no one cares about the point of your
content, the result being that you will have devoted a lot of time to crafting content no
one wants to link to.
There are lots of hooks, but the ones above
should at least get you thinking about what
you can oer to people that will make them
link to you.
A simple exercise you can do here is to
go to your Facebook feed and see what
links people are sharing. Note down what
characteristics each link has and try to find
patterns. Chances are that links shared on
Facebook are funny, because many people
use this platform for personal stu and
News
Funny
Controversial
Data Visualization
Competition
Ego-Bait
Long-Form, Detailed Content
Some hooks that you
can think about may be:
may not share more serious stu there, with the exception of big news or controversial
topics. Now go and take a look at your Twitter feed, note down which types of links
are being shared there and ask yourself why. You may find that more long-form,
informative content is shared on Twitter than on Facebook.
Identifying Your Target
Audience for Links
Once you have your idea mapped out, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out who will fall
within your target audience. Generally, you just need to brainstorm subjects related to
your content. Let’s take a look at an example.
Imagine you are putting together a piece of content entitled, The Definitive Guide to
Baking the Perfect Cupcakes. You are producing this content because you own a local
bakery which sells cupcakes as well as lots of other lovely things.
Who would be interested in this guide?
Food bloggers: the obvious choice!
Parent bloggers: they may want to teach their kids how to make cupcakes
and your guide will show them how to do this
Recipe websites: because your guide will contain lots of great recipes for
dierent types of cupcakes
Party websites: no party is complete without a plate of cupcakes
Find Lists of Bloggers
With just a minute or two of thinking, we’ve easily come up with four types of websites
that may be interested in our cupcake guide. Now we can start researching these in
more detail to get a better idea of whether or not we stand a good chance of getting a
link from them.
Techniques For Finding Link Targets
In this section I will outline a few simple techniques that you can use to turn your idea
of “food bloggers” into a full list of websites that you can contact.
This single search gave me lots and lots of great lists to search through. The big
advantage of using this technique is that someone else has already done the hard work
for you by curating the list.
You can then copy the list into Google Docs or your own spreadsheet. From here, you
can copy and paste all the URLs into a tool like URL opener, which will open all the URLs
for you with one click. You can then go through them all, find out if they’re relevant to
your content, and if so, find their contact details.
Once you’ve found a list like this, you can
quickly grab all of the URLs from the page using
a tool like Scraper, which is a Google Chrome
plug-in. You simply right click on one of the
URLs and click on “Scrape similar:”
By far the most simple place to start is a search on Google like this:
Find Bloggers on Twitter
Followerwonk is a fantastic tool that is part of the Moz tools, and if you have a Moz Pro
subscription you can use it for free. It allows you to do all kinds of cool stu with your
Twitter account, but the feature that we’re interested in allows you to search Twitter bios.
We are going to search it for “cupcake blogger” to see if we can find anyone on Twitter
who mentioned “cupcake blogger” in their bio:
You can select more options
such as number of followers and
location, but for now we want to
keep the search quite broad. This
search resulted in 12 people on
Twitter being found:
You can then download these
results into a spreadsheet which
makes them easier to sort through.
It will also tell us if they have a
website or not:
EXCELCSV
Advanced Search Queries
Not a bad result for a few minutes’ work! These are also super-relevant to our content, so
we know that we have a good chance of getting a link or, at the very least, getting some
good feedback from the blogger.
There are a number of ways to search Google that are not immediately obvious to us as
users. We are accustomed to searching for strings of keywords and this is how 99% of
Google users search too. But, there is a set of search tools available to us that can make
our results a lot more focused and specific to what we need.
For link building, this means we can filter out websites that may not be useful for us and
spend our time looking through ones that are. Here are a few examples using dierent
advanced searches:
It turns out that from these 12 results, we find 8 unique websites:
Notice the “inurl:resources” bit? This tells Google to only show results that have the word
“resources” within the URL. Here is an example of one result that Google gives us:
http://cupcake-underground.blogspot.com/p/resources.html
This is a good potential link target, because your definitive guide to cupcakes is a
resource that could be of interest to visitors to a cupcake blog. Therefore, contacting
the owner of this blog and asking them to list your guide as a resource could result in
a link for you.
Let’s take a look at another example:
We have combined two advanced searches here. First, we used the “intitle:resources”
modifier, which tells Google to only show results that have the word “resources” within
the page title. This is useful because sometimes the word may not be used in the URL, so
our previous advanced search (with inurl:) would not find them.
We have also used quotation marks around the word cupcakes. This tells Google to only
return results that mention cupcakes on the page. This is useful in this case because
searching for “food blogger” would probably be a bit too broad and we’d have to dig
through a lot of websites that may not be relevant to the topic of cupcakes.
Now you have three solid methods for finding relevant link targets and, at this point, you
will probably have a nice big list of them in a spreadsheet. But, we need to do a bit more
work before contacting the site owners.
Finding Out More About the Personas We’re Targeting
If you want to have a high response rate with your outreach, you need to spend a bit of
time making sure that the websites you’ve found are as relevant as possible.
food blogger “cupcakes” intitle:resources
You can do this by spending time learning about your target bloggers, Visit their
websites, read through their content, try to get a feel for what they like and what they
don’t like. Take a look through their social networks, such as Twitter, to see what links
they have shared recently.
In particular, pay close attention to whether or not they share other people’s content or
if they only promote their own. Ideally, you want to find some evidence of them sharing
external resources, because that’s what you’ll be asking them to do.
As you go through each website, make some notes about what they’ve shared and what
interests them. This is crucial because you’ll need this information later when you
contact them. Otherwise, you’ll just be sending them a generic, templated email that
won’t be personalized to them at all.
A nice little trick you can use here is to put the blog’s URL into a tool like Tagcrowd
which will analyze the content of the page and show you which words are
mentioned the most.
Finding Contact Details
Once you’ve decided that the blog is within your target audience and seems relevant,
you’ll need to find contact details. This is usually pretty straightforward, but here are a
few tips that may speed things up a little.
Check the Header and Footer First
Most of the time, you will find a link to a contact page in the header or the footer of a
website, so check these areas first. If you can’t see a contact page, try an “about” page
which often list contact details.
Install ToutApp For Google Chrome
ToutApp is a small Google Chrome plug-in that will actively try and find an email
addresses on a page for you. When it has found one, it will be highlighted in your
Chrome toolbar and you can click on it to find the email address.
Prioritizing Link Targets
By this point, you probably have a big list of link targets, and you need to prioritize them
and group them into buckets so that you can customize your message to them with
greatest eciency.
There are a few ways to prioritize link targets for outreach:
Let’s look at these in more detail.
We’ll talk in detail about domain metrics in Chapter 5. For now, all you need to know
is that these metrics can measure the value of link targets just as well as they can
measure the value of individual links.
There are two main domain metrics to use when filtering and sorting your link
targets: PageRank and Domain Authority. You could, of course, gather the domain
metrics for each website one by one, but that would take far more time; there are
tools available that let you gather the data in bulk.
You can get the PageRank for your targets using Excel and the SEO Tools for Excel
plug-in.
You can also get Domain Authority into your Excel spreadsheet by using the Links
API plug-in by SEOgadget.
Once you have these metrics, you can do a simple sort in Excel from highest to
lowest and, if you choose, you can remove link targets that do not have high enough
domain metrics. This particularly helps if you have a very large set of websites and
you don’t feel that you have the time to contact them all. I tend to sort by PageRank
first and get rid of anything that is below a score of 1. If I have a very large set of
results, I may also get rid of anything below a score of 2.
• By domain metrics, i.e., PageRank, Domain Authority
• By blogger influence, i.e., number of Twitter followers
• By the likelihood of linking, i.e., a cupcake blogger vs. a generic food blogger
Domain Metrics
I then sort by Domain Authority and will generally get rid of anything below DA30
or DA35, if I have a very big list. This isn’t an exact science, however, because a new
website that may be very good and relevant may not have accumulated enough
PageRank or Domain Authority yet. However, if you have a large list of potential link
targets, you do want to be quite aggressive in narrowing it down so that you have a
good quality set of remaining websites to work with.
A crucial part of getting as many visitors to your content as possible is getting
influential people to share it. Getting just one influential person to share your content
can lead to a big ripple eect, as lots of their followers will also share it. So, even if
a blogger doesn’t appear to be associated with a particularly strong domain, don’t
discount them before you’ve checked to see how influential they are on social networks.
Again, you can simply go to their social profiles one by one to find out how many
followers they have, etc. Remember that we used Followerwonk to search for
potential people to reach out to? Well, Followerwonk will also give you metrics about
each person, such as how many people follow them and what their influence score is.
If you download a CSV from Followerwonk, you will see a column that includes the
influence score:
Blogger Influence
Simply sort by this column to see which of the people on Twitter are most influential.
These are the people you probably want to target first because they have the ability to
share your content with a large number of engaged followers.
This is where your manual research comes back into play. As you browse the
potential link targets, you should try to assess how likely they are to link to your
content. There isn’t a tool that can do this for you and you will need to come up with
your own way of defining this. One simple way could be to score them on a scale of
1-5, with 1 being not at all likely to link and 5 being very likely to link.
Questions you should ask yourself when giving them a score are:
These questions should give you an indicator of how likely they are to link to you.
Once you’ve gathered all this information, you should sort it all so that you have a list
of bloggers who:
These are the websites that you should
contact first and with messages that are
highly customized and tailored to them.
Take another look at their website and
try to pick up clues that can guide you
in what to include in your email. This
will help your message look genuine
and avoid coming across as just another
outreach email that isn’t personalized.
Likelihood of Linking
• Have they shared external content before?
• Are they super-relevant to my content (i.e. a cupcake blogger should
score higher than a generic food blogger)?
• Is their blog active; i.e. have they blogged within the last month?
1. Are likely to link to you
2. Have high domain metrics
3. Have good social followings
These websites also have the power to “seed” your content. This means that other
websites will also become aware of your content, perhaps even removing the need for
you to make any manual contact with them.
At this point, you should have a nice list of quality websites which are likely to be
interested in the content you’ve created or the campaign you’re running. You have
their contact details and have prioritized which ones are most important. Now it is
time to start contacting them.
Now we need to actually take the plunge and start telling people about our great
content or campaign. You should start with your high-level targets because they
can not only get you good results if they respond well, but you can then use them
as social proof later on when you outreach to smaller websites. If smaller websites
see that an influencer has liked a piece of content and shared it, they are going to be
much more open to you when you contact them.
You’re Contacting a Real Person
There is not some machine behind the website you’re contacting which chooses
whether or not to reply to you. It is a real person who, in reality, probably gets lots of
outreach emails if they have a popular blog. They are a real person and they deserve
to have a bit of your time to make them realise you’re not just another spammer or
automated email program. We’ll talk about a few specific ways you can do this later in
the guide but, for now, remember that you are contacting a real person. Ask yourself
how you would talk to this person if you met them in real life. You’d have a real
conversation with them, not the same conversation you’ve had with other people you
met that day.
Outreach
Also, I don’t think a single blogger wakes up in the morning with the thought, “Hmm,
who should I link to today?” They never planned to link to you; they have other stu
to work on which likely takes priority over what you have to oer them. For this
reason, you should not assume that a blogger owes you anything; it is your job to tell
them why you deserve their time, attention, and help.
If the idea of contacting a real person and telling them about your content makes
you a bit nervous, then do a gut-check and be sure that your content is as shareable
and valuable as you think it is. While overconfidence can be a mistake, you should
feel confident enough in your idea to believe that real people will react well to it. If
you walked up to someone in the street and showed them what you’ve been working
on, would they react well? If not, you probably have more work to do before you
start outreach.
How to Craft Your Message
Remember that the bloggers that you’re contacting are probably very busy people,
even more so if they run popular blogs with big followings. Your message needs to be
detailed enough to explain why they should care, while being short enough for them
to read everything and not get bored or delete the message.
Here are some points to bear in mind for crafting your message:
Lets take a look at these in more detail.
Tell Them Why They Should Care About You
If you’re at this point with your link building campaign, you shouldn’t be stuck
on writing this. If you’ve been working on a piece of content, right at the start of
its creation you should have determined the answer to the question, “Why would
anyone care about this enough to link to it?”
• Tell them why they should care about you
• Tell them what action you’d like them to take
• Show that you’re genuine and not a spammer
Does your content fit into any of these? If not, is there anything else unique about the
content that may make someone care about it?
The blogger you’re contacting is probably active in your industry and will know a
lot about the subject matter of your content, so take a look through their recent blog
posts and, if possible, relate these to the reason you think they should care.
As an example, if you’re contacting a blogger who is a big movie fan, they may have
blogged recently about a film they really like. If your content involves films and
includes the film that they blogged about, mention it! This not only tells them why
they should care about your own content, it also shows that you’ve taken the time to
read their blog, rather than just sending them a templated email.
Tell Them What Action You’d Like Them to Take
Many outreach emails skirt around the subject of what the sender actually wants.
Some may not dare to mention the words “link” or “SEO” in fear of the blogger
flagging the email as spam. However, we do need to actually find a way of getting the
blogger to take the action we’d like. Sometimes, the action may not JUST be about a
simple link. It could be about a number of things, including:
• Sharing your content on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or Google+
• Embedding your content if it is an infographic or widget
• Accepting a guest post from you, relating to your content and linking back to it
• The blogger writing an opinion piece on your content and linking to it
Remember our hooks from earlier:
• News
• Funny
• Controversial
• Data visualization
• Competition
• Ego-bait
• Long-form, detailed content
These are just a few examples, but you can see pretty quickly that there are dierent
levels of actions and the barriers to each one are dierent. For example, the blogger
taking the time to write their own piece of editorial content about the topic and
linking to your content is a big ask. By contrast, simply sharing on their social
networks will probably take a few minutes, maximum.
You should take account of this when crafting your message and be aware that the
more you’re asking of a blogger, the more compelling and interesting your content
must be.
The actions above are not mutually exclusive, either. You may experience great
results if an influential blogger links to you AND shares a link with their social
network. At the same time, you can also use a subtle tactic if you receive a slightly
negative response. For example, if the first action you try to get the blogger to take
is to write an editorial piece on their site and they say no, but they like what you’ve
done, you could follow up and ask for a tweet instead. This is particularly useful if
you’re contacting an influential blogger who many not budge once they’ve said no,
but who likely has a large social following with whom they wouldn’t mind sharing
the content.
Another follow-up to this scenario could be that you oer to write a guest post for
them. This is a good solution if they like the content but do not have enough time
to write about it. Typically, you’ll want to save this kind of follow-up for very strong
websites because it does require extra time and resources from you in order to make
it happen.
Show That You’re Genuine and Not a Spammer
This is all about personalizing your message so that the blogger doesn’t immediately
reach for the spam or delete button. Remember that popular bloggers will receive
many outreach emails, so it is worth taking the time to make yours a little dierent
and customized to them. There are many ways to do this without adding too much
time to your process or compromising on quality. Here are a few of these ways:
Let’s take a look at these in more detail.
Use Their Name
Sounds simple and straightforward enough, but a lot of people do not take the time
to do this despite it usually not taking that long. It can truly make a big dierence and
get you that extra bit of attention you need in order to get your key message across.
• Use their name
• Use a good subject line
• Mention something specific about their work
• Use a proper email signature
• Use a genuine email address
• Use your location (if relevant)
Here are a few tips for finding someone’s name:
If you absolutely can’t find their name, using something like “Hi there” is fine but do
avoid using things like “Hi Webmaster” or “Hi blogger” as these have traditionally been
used by mass email spammers and you want to avoid being associated with that!
Use A Good Subject Line
Before they have even opened your email, the blogger will see the subject line. If
they don’t like what they see here, then chances are that you will be deleted straight
away and they won’t even bother to open the email. This is the worst that can happen
because you don’t even get a chance to speak to them or get feedback at all.
There is something else important to remember here: A bad subject line may also
trigger spam filters and result in your email being flagged as spam. At this point,
you’re relying on the blogger actually checking their spam folder (many won’t) and
seeing your email as genuine. Either way, this isn’t a good place to be.
Here are some tips for writing a good subject line:
• Check the about page
• Check the author name under blog posts
• Click through to their social media accounts to see if their name is listed on there
• Enter their email into a tool such as Rapportive (Gmail) or Xobni (Outlook) which
looks for additional information connected to an email address
• Keep it short and to the point
• Mention the name of the website if you can
• Avoid overuse of capital letters
• Mention something specific about their site (like the name)
• Avoid things like “link exchange” or “link request”
Here are some really good, in-depth articles from Hubspot and Smart Insights on the
subject of good subject lines.
Mention Something Specific About Their Work
This is really important if you want to show that you haven’t sent the same templated
email out to loads of bloggers. Mentioning something specific about the blogger you’re
contacting or their blog can really help show that you’ve taken the time to do your
research before sending the email. This also gives you a great opportunity to introduce
your own content and the concept of why the blogger should care about it.
Let’s look at a few ways you can mention something specific:
All of these can give you valuable information about the blogger which you can then
bring into your email naturally. Here is an example of how this may actually look in
an email:
I noticed your recent blog post about the best movies of 2014 so far. I couldn’t agree more and
would denitely put The Wolf of Wall Street at the top of my list, too. I actually wanted to share
with you something related to this - LINK - it is a visualization of the top-grossing movies of 2014
along with production costs and prots. I thought, given your recent blog post and your interest in
movies, it may be of interest to you.
This didn’t take very long to write and was the result of looking at a handful of recent
blog post titles written by the blogger I’m contacting. It would be pretty dicult
(probably impossible) for a piece of email spam software to spin something this unique
and specific to the blogger, so it is likely to pass the spam test.
Use A Proper Email Signature
This is a small tip and takes no time at all. You should insert a proper email signature on
the bottom of all your outreach emails which includes things such as:
• Look at the topics of their recent blog posts
• Look at their recent tweets / retweets
• Look at the comments they’ve made on blog posts
• Look at their about page for personal interests
• Look at their bio on their Twitter page
• Your full name
• Your job title
• The URL of the website you represent
• Your phone number
• Your social media accounts (if work related)
So, you may end up with something that
looks like this.
This is another signal to the blogger that
you’re a genuine person. They can go and
check out your website, your social activity
or even give you a call. Again, spammers
would not do this.
John Smith
Online Marketing Executive
www.example.com
01234 567 8910
twitter.com/jsmith
Use a Genuine Email Address
There is some debate on this one. Some SEOs strongly believe that you should always
use an email address from the client you’re representing rather than your regular one
for your SEO company. So if I were doing outreach for Zappos, I should use myname@
zappos.com rather than m[email protected].
This argument tends to stem from the fact that SEOs can have a bad reputation, i.e., if
the blogger sees that you’re emailing them from an SEO company email address, it can
instantly turn them o.
However, from my own experience, I’ve never had a problem with using my Distilled
email address for outreach. In fact, it can be a very good way to check that what I’m
doing is good quality. I can ask myself this question:
“Am I ok with outreaching to this blogger about this content, using the Distilled name?”
If the answer is no, then should you really be doing outreach in the first place?
Ultimately, you should test whatever works best for you. If I’m given the choice, I would
probably use a client email address, but if one was not available, I wouldn’t let that stop
me from doing outreach using my regular email address.
One thing for which I would advise caution here is using free email address providers
such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo. Unfortunately, lots of spammers also take advantage
of these free services, making this another signal that you’re not a genuine person.
Use Your Location (If Relevant)
The opportunities to use this tip may be few and far between, but if you have the
opportunity, it can really help you look more genuine and sow the seeds of a good
relationship.
The idea is that if you’re contacting a blogger who happens to reside in the same city as
your client, mention it in your email. This really allows you to work the local angle and
say something along the lines of:
“As we’re also based in Seattle, we wanted to take the opportunity to speak to local
bloggers such as yourself and try to share some of the content we’ve been working on
which may be of interest.”
You can take things a step further and even meet up with local bloggers for lunch or
a coee. There is no better way to show that you’re a real and genuine person than
buying someone a coee (and a cupcake!). If you find that there are quite a few local
bloggers in your area, then organizing a local meet-up could also be a great way of
building genuine relationships and getting them on board with your brand.
I have probably built just as many links as a result of following up with people as I have
with my first email. People are busy; popular bloggers will get lots of emails, and in a
world where we can check email on the move, your email may get buried pretty quickly
and forgotten.
For this reason alone, it is worth making sure that you follow up on all outreach if you
don’t get a reply first time. The added benefit here is that you also reinforce the fact that
you’re a genuine person and not some automated piece of software that is hitting lots
of websites at once.
In order to follow up properly, you need to keep your outreach as organized as possible
and record the replies that you get. The last thing you want is to follow up with
someone who has already linked to you!
There are a few ways to stay organized with your outreach ranging from very simple
Excel spreadsheets to fully integrated customer relationship management (CRM)
systems. Let’s look at some of these options.
An Excel Spreadsheet
When you’re first starting out with link building, a simple spreadsheet will work just
fine. Even at the intermediate level, it can still do the job, but it can become a bit big and
cumbersome if you’re working on multiple campaigns at the same time.
A simple Excel sheet can start o looking like this:
It really can be that simple. You can add extra columns for any specific data or metrics
that you care about, but this will certainly do the job for you.
However, after you’ve been using this for a while, it may become a little dicult to
work with. For example, what happens when you run a second campaign and you want
to connect with your contacts again? It is possible to do with an advanced enough
Excel system, but it can get a little messy.
Following Up
Specialist Tools for Outreach Management
At this point, you may need to invest in a more robust, focused system for managing
your outreach. There are a few options here such as BuzzStream and Raven which are
probably the most popular for this kind of task.
Boomerang
Boomerang is a free plug-in for Gmail with a nice little feature that we can use for
following up with outreach targets. When sending an email, you can tell Boomerang to
send the email back to you if you don’t get a reply within a set period of time. It looks
something like this:
In this case, if the person I’m emailing doesn’t reply within two days, Boomerang will
send the email back to me. At this point I can quickly follow up with them and the
great thing is that I can be sure that I’m not emailing the wrong people who may have
already replied.
Combine this with canned responses (outlined below) and you have a quick and
eective way of following up with all your link targets.
How to Follow Up
In terms of exactly how to follow up with people, my advice is to keep the email short
and to the point. You’ve already emailed them once and outlined all the details they
need, so you don’t need to repeat it all over again. If you reply to the same email you
sent, then most email programs will actually include the original email, anyway, so the
person can scroll down and find it very easily if they want to.
In Terms of What to Say, Something As Simple As This Can Do the Job:
Hey John,
I just wanted to follow up on the email I sent a few days ago (pasted below) regarding
the ultimate guide to backpacking that I’ve put together. It would be great to get your
feedback, if possible, and see if this is something you’d be interested in sharing with
the readers of your blog.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks!
Paddy
(Here you can include the original
email so they can refer to it if they
can’t remember it.)
It’s nice and short, says what you
need it to, and is polite.
I usually tend to follow up with
someone once. If I still do not get
a reply, I’ll probably move on and
not contact them any more for this
particular campaign. If you follow
up any more, you’re running the
risk of annoying them and actually
damaging your chances of building a
relationship with them.
Dealing With Negative Replies
At some point, you’re probably going to get negative replies to your outreach. This
is normal and something that you shouldn’t worry about. In fact, it can be a great
opportunity to engage with a blogger and get further feedback from them. In this
section are a few principles to bear in mind when dealing with negative replies.
Always Reply; Don’t Ignore the Email
It can be tempting to just ignore the email and move on, particularly if you’ve put your
heart and soul into a piece of content that someone just doesn’t like. But, ignoring the
reply means that you’re damaging your chances of ever building a good relationship
with that person. They may not like the current work you’ve done, but what about the
next piece you do? The last thing you want to do is alienate anyone so that they don’t
even bother looking at your future pieces of work.
Get As Much Information and Feedback As Possible
When replying to someone, try to get some feedback on why they’re not interested in
linking to you. If you’re promoting a piece of content, ask them for their opinion on
what would make the content better. Is there a better way of presenting the information?
Are there extra facts or statistics that would have made it more valuable or eective?
Sometimes the problem may not be the content itself. Instead, the blogger just may not
have time to write a blog post and link to you. In that case, you may want to oer the
blogger some help with writing the post so that they don’t need to spend time on it.
At the same time, you could ask the person for their opinion on what content is sorely
needed in their industry. Do they see a demand for something, but do not have the
time to create it themselves? There is great opportunity here if you look for it. For
example, you may be able to come to an agreement in which you partner with the
blogger to create a piece of content. You put the work into the content which they want
to see created, and they use their contacts to help promote it. Together, you’ve created
something valuable for the industry.
Even though you want to take the time to personalize your emails, there are a few good
tools that you can use to speed up your process without compromising on quality.
Boomerang
I mentioned Boomerang earlier, saying how it can be a great tool for making sure you
follow up with people using this nice little feature:
It also has another great feature that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. This
is very handy if you’re doing outreach across dierent time zones. A good example
being if you’re in Seattle and you’re outreaching to UK based bloggers, when you get
into the oce and start emailing at 9am, it is nearly the end of the working day in the
UK. This may not be the ideal time to email someone.
Also, imagine you get a good idea for a piece of content from them. Then you go away
and create it, email them again and show them. They are probably going to be much
more receptive this time around! Even more so if you can somehow give them credit
for the idea, perhaps a small mention or a link on the piece of content which would
acknowledge them again and show them.
Quick Tips For Ecient Outreach
So, Boomerang allows you to schedule when an email is sent. Once you’ve installed the
app, a little button appears in Gmail:
When you compose an email and click on this, you get this dropdown:
From here you can schedule the email and make sure it reaches someone at the
right time.
Canned Responses
Canned responses is a Gmail Labs feature (read how to enable Labs here) and allows
you to quickly insert pre-written templates into an email. This is super-handy for a
number of reasons, one of which being that you don’t need to worry about copying
and pasting into your emails every time. Instead, you can just select the canned
responses option and insert the relevant text:
This is extra-useful if you combine it with Boomerang and use it to follow up with
people. You can create a canned response that follows up with people you’ve already
emailed. Using our example from earlier, it may look something like this:
All of this information can help me to find out a little bit more about him and help to
further personalize my email to him. For example, if he has recently tweeted a news
story that I know about, I can comment on it, too. This shows I’ve taken the time to do
my research on him, rather than just sending a blanket email to lots of people.
There is a bunch of
information including:
Rand’s location
His position at Moz
His Twitter account
His LinkedIn profile
Note that the bits highlighted in yellow are the parts that you
personalize to the person you’re contacting. You still need to
personalize it, otherwise you’re not likely to get a response.
Rapportive
Rapportive is a great plug-in for Gmail and Outlook which
gives you quite a bit of information about the person you’re
emailing. Here is an example of how Rapportive looks when
I try to send an email to Rand:
Outreach Pitfalls to Avoid
There are a few common mistakes that can happen when you’re link building. Mistakes
happen; this is fine as long as you learn from them. Hopefully, this section will help you
learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid some of these pitfalls.
Using Mass Emailing Software
There are many providers of software which allow you to email lots and lots of people
at once. This is a legitimate practice as long as people have opted into hearing from
you and are expecting the email. Lots of companies do this all the time with their
mailing lists. However, when it comes to link building, it is generally a bad idea to use
any kind of software like this.
Here Are a Few Reasons:
• It is much harder to personalize mass emails like this
• If you make a mistake, it isn’t just one recipient that sees it; all of them do
• You can get yourself blacklisted if people start reporting you as spam
• You are possibly breaking the law if you’re mass emailing people who have not opted
into being emailed in this manner
Add to this the fact that you’re jeopardizing not only your own reputation, but that of
the website you’re representing, ruining any chance of the website owner working
with the email recipients in the future.
Not Customising Your Template
Earlier, you saw an email template that I
could use for follow up:
Imagine sending this email to someone
without editing the yellow bits? It is VERY
unlikely to get a positive response! This is
why in this particular example, I’ve chosen
to highlight the sections in yellow so that I’m
less likely to forget about them.
If this does happen, the undo send feature
of Gmail Labs can sometimes rescue the
situation if you’re quick enough.
As mentioned in the previous section on setting goals, it can take time for link building
to have a positive eect on the rankings of your website. The length of time can vary
greatly and depend on a number of factors:
All of these factors can mean that it can take from several days to several months
before an increase in ranking is achieved. This should be factored into your goals and
expectations and all parties should be made aware that instant improvement is unlikely.
A realistic expectation to set is that you will see an increase in trac if you are
constantly working on improving your website, business, and online activity. You
should try to not think of link building as a one-o activity, because you may be
disappointed by the results. Instead, link building should be a constant stream of
activity coupled with other initiatives such as content creation, great customer service
and social media. Combined, all of this activity can lead to an increase in trac and
an increase in revenue for your business. It is the combination and a consistent drive
towards the goal that can make this more likely to happen quickly.
• The competitiveness of your industry as a whole
• How competitive your target keywords are
• The activity of your competitors, i.e., if they are actively building links, too
• The types of links you’re building
• The history and strength of your domain
How Long Will It Take for Link
Building to Improve a Site’s Ranking?
Link Building Tactics
Chapter 4
There are lots and lots of ways to get links. The right tactics for you depend on the
resources you have at your disposal as well as the industry that you’re in. Industries
that are more established and competitive often require you to be quite aggressive with
link building, and you might find earning those links more dicult. Other industries,
often the newer industries that are quickly growing, are full of opportunities to engage
with bloggers and build a community. With that in mind, this section reveals a few link
building tactics that can be applied to most all types of websites.
Content-based link building is becoming ever more popular amongst SEOs for a
number of reasons, even though it can be one of the tougher approaches to carry out
successfully. The basic process looks something like this:
Content-Based Link Building
Some of these you’ve already learned about in the chapter on building a link building
campaign, so we’ll try not to repeat ourselves here. The basic premise is that you create
an asset which you use to try and get links. This takes the form of a piece of content
and can include something like:
You create these assets with a view to earning links to
them from people who find them relevant, interesting,
funny, informative, etc. You then reach out to these
people in an attempt to actually build those links. Over
time, you aim to reach a point at which you don’t need
to ask for each and every link that you receive. Instead,
you should be able to seed the content with a few key
influencers in your community who can help spread
the word on your behalf. This can take a long time to
achieve and requires a lot of investment in exceptional
content, but it is certainly possible.
In this section, we will look at some examples of successful link building campaigns
along with some analysis of what made them successful. One thing to note here is that
the primary goal of the following examples may not have been links, but they were very
successful, nonetheless, so there is something we can learn.
• An infographic
• A data visualization
• A white paper
• A how-to guide
• A video
• An image gallery
Examples of Content-Based Link
Building Campaigns
What made it successful?
• It works very well and is easy to use; you simply choose your country and the
content changes instantly
• The design is very clean which means you understand what it does straight away
• It is relevant to the type of people who would visit a hotel booking website
• The content is genuinely useful to people because not knowing a local culture or
etiquette is a common problem
• The interactivity really adds to the content; it engages the user straight away &
keeps them on the page
• You can interactive with the piece and listen to samples of music
• It applies to a large number of people (rock music fans)
• It is in line with people who would use a hotel booking site focused on
music venues
The Ultimate Guide to Worldwide Etiquette
This is a small interactive piece of content that is not only nicely designed, but
genuinely useful. It helps users understand the dierent expectations in dierent areas
of the world when it comes to culture and etiquette.
http://www.swissotel.com/promo/etiquette-map/
This page currently has 68 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 63.
100 Years of Rock Music Visualized
This is another interactive piece of content which shows the dierent genres of rock
music that have developed in the last 100 years.
http://www.concerthotels.com/100-years-of-rock
The page currently has 198 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 53. Let’s look
at why it attracted links:
You vs. John Paulson
This was a very smart idea by an SEO in the UK. It is an interactive piece of content
that allows you to compare your annual salary with that of John Paulson who is a very
successful forex trader.
https://mahifx.com/john-paulson/
It used to be hosted on the homepage and was used as a link building technique to get
links to the homepage prior to the service being launched. Before it was moved, the
content had over 200 linking domains. What made it successful?
18 Startup Founders Share Their Lowest Points
This is a bit dierent to the previous pieces of content and mainly consists of written,
rather than visual, content. It is a series of stories from startup founders who share
their lowest points before become big successes.
http://www.attendly.com/stories-of-failure-and-redemption-18-startup-founders-
share-their-lowest-moments-before-coming-out-on-top/
This page currently has 21 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 36. Let’s take a
look at what made this happen:
• It’s interactive but very simple to use; it only asks you for one piece of info (your
salary)
• It is very engaging; it keeps you scrolling down the page to find out more
• The sheer scale of how much money John Paulson makes is hard for most of us to
comprehend
• It is very shareable as it is relevant to pretty much anyone, not just forex traders
• It is dierent; interviews are usually about high points and successes but this was
the opposite, so it can provoke people’s attention
• The interviewees and their companies are very well known within their fields, so
they probably have large social followings
• This content can appeal to a wide range of people who are active online, therefore
increasing the chances of getting links and social shares
Guest blogging is the process of approaching other websites to see if they will publish
a piece of content that you write on their blog. While it is often an eective way to earn
links using high quality content, Google has cracked down on marketers who abuse
this tactic with low-quality content and over-optimized anchor text.
As guest blogging became an increasingly common tactic, it became increasingly
automated and the quality of the posts declined considerably. Google noticed. Matt
Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, wrote a post declaring that we could “Stick
a fork in it: Guest blogging is done.” If you can produce high enough quality content,
many reputable sites will still gladly accept guest posts (Moz is one of them). That said,
it shouldn’t be used solely in order to build links, as Google has gotten very, very good
at finding and devaluing links built in this way.
Guest Blogging
Ego bait is a piece of content that plays on the egos of the people who are featured
within that content. The hope is that, by being included, these people feel better about
and are more inclined to share the content with a link. You’ve probably seen examples
of this before. Here are a few:
http://www.thelovelyplants.com/10-gardening-blogs-to-follow/
Lists gardening blogs along with a short description of each one.
http://go.brandshank.com/top-10-electronic-music-blogs-2011/
Lists the top 10 electronic music blogs based on a number of factors including Tweets,
Facebook reach and MozRank.
http://www.webdesigndev.com/roundups/30-most-influential-people-in-web-design
Lists the most influential individuals in web design and includes pictures of them, as
well as their websites and social channels.
All of these will get the attention of the people or websites being featured. While this
can be a good way of getting high-quality links and trac to your website, it is unlikely
to get you huge volumes of links, because the content is usually quite targeted toward a
few high-profile people or websites.
Ego Bait
The process for ego-bait link building looks something like this:
Concept and research targets > Write content > Outreach > Follow up
Step 1: Concept and Research Targets
First, you need to come up with the concept for your content, and it will need to be
somewhat related to the theme of your own website. For example, if you run a website
selling garden sheds, you might choose one of the following ideas:
These are very simple ideas, but the point is to not over-complicate things.
Once you’ve decided on your idea, you need to research whom you will feature in your
content. There are a few things you should bear in mind when trying to find the right
people:
Also—and this should go without saying—if you’re making something like a top-10 list,
make sure that each person or site on that list is actually worthy of being on such a list.
If your only motivation is finding people who might be willing to share, that could be
obvious both to the people you’re attempting to bait and to the readers.
Step 2: Write content
This part is also simple, but you should try to include as much detail as possible about
each person or website you feature. Remember that you’re trying to get the attention of
bloggers, and you want them to share the post and link to it. So, include the following,
if you can:
• Top 10 Gardening Blogs of 2014
• 15 Inspiring Garden Designs
• The Top Gardening Bloggers to Follow on Twitter
• Look for blogs that are active and have posted very recently.
• Look for blogs that have good levels of social followings.
• Make sure you can find contact details of bloggers.
• A picture of the blogger or a screenshot of the website
• A link to their website and Twitter profile
• Why they are included in the list; what makes the blog or person really exceptional
Step 3: Outreach
Once the post is published, your next step is to send an email to the bloggers or
websites that you’ve featured to let them know. Here is an example of an email you
could choose to send:
Remember to keep it simple. You
can always add more detail if you
want, but chances are the people
you’re contacting are busy, so you
want to get your message across
quickly.
Step 4: Follow up
We’ll mention this several times
throughout this guide to highlight
the importance of this step: Make
sure you follow up with the people
you feature in your content. It can
help to use a tool like Boomerang to
remind yourself.
Hi John,
I just wanted to let you know that you’ve been
featured in our list of the top 10 gardening
bloggers of 2014 - LINK TO URL.
You were included because the quality of the
posts you publish, as well as the advice you
give to readers, is amazing, and you deserve
recognition for it.
Feel free to take a look and make sure I’ve got
all of your details correct. I’d really appreciate
any feedback you have, as well. If you would
also like to share it on Twitter or feature it on
your blog somewhere, that would be amazing.
Thanks!
Paddy
1.) Research broken links and find good targets
2.) Content creation
3.) Outreach
The Internet is filled with broken links. Often, these broken links exist on valuable,
high-quality pages. Broken link building is a very popular practice that works on
the premise of helping webmasters fix their broken links by providing a superior
alternative for them to link to.
Although the specifics can vary, the basic process looks like this:
Here’s an example. You run a dairy testing company and want to build links to your
scientific resource pages. A university in your area happens to have an older page
on dairy resources, but many of the links are broken. You kindly reach out to the
webmaster to point out the broken links, and helpfully suggest your newer and up-
to-date resource as an alternative. The university webmaster then links to your dairy
resource page.
Broken Link Building
This process can be repeated over and over again. Sometimes you use your existing
content as a suggestion to replace broken links, other times you create new content
specifically for this purpose.
Here are a few additional resources on how to perform broken link building:
Slightly dierent than broken link building
is the practice of link reclamation, where
you fix or “reclaim” links that once pointed
at your site, or point to your site but fail to
provide any SEO value.
• The Broken Link Building Bible
• Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice
Link Reclamation
There are many dierent types of link reclamation strategies.
404s
These are links that point to pages on your website that no longer exist. Open Site
Explorer is a good tool for finding these. (Preform a “Top Pages” search and sort for
404s). You can either redirect or fix these links on your end, or ask the webmaster to
change the link.
This chapter only describes a few of the hundreds of dierent link building tactics
you can use (or even invent!). The specific tactics you choose will depend on your
resources, creativity, niche, audience, and available time.
For more inspiration, we recommend checking out Jon Cooper’s Link Building Tactics
or the Moz Blog’s Link Building category.
A World of Link Building Tactics
Non-linking Brand Mentions
It’s sometimes common and easy to find others writing about your site without linking
to it. Often a simple email to the author is enough to secure a link. Tools like mention.net,
Google Alerts, and Fresh Web Explorer are great at digging up mentions.
Non-linking Images
It’s common to find websites that have posted your own images without attribution.
Instead of filing a copyright or DMCA takedown notice, this presents a terrific
opportunity to earn a link instead.
Use tools like TinEye and Google’s Image Search to find webmasters who publish your
images, and politely ask for attribution. We’ll cover more of this in Chapter 7.
Link Building Metrics
Chapter 5
There are various metrics associated with links that you should be aware of. These
metrics can help you judge the value of a potential link, helping you assess whether it
is worth pursuing and how much resources you should put into acquiring it. Knowing
these kinds of metrics is also useful when you are doing link profile analysis (a holistic
report of the number and types of links on a website), whether on a competitor’s
website or your own.
Domain strength is the cumulative value of an entire domain. Instead of looking at
the value of individual pages, we look at the domain as a whole to understand how
strong it is.
It is usually displayed as either Domain Authority or as the homepage’s Page Authority.
PageRank is calculated by Google and based on the number and quality of links
pointing to a web page. It runs on a scale from 0-10, with 10 being the highest. We
can use the PageRank of a website’s homepage to get an idea of how strong it is.
Although technically this is only the PageRank of a single page, it is still a good
indicator of the strength of a domain, because the majority of a website’s links will be
to the homepage and PageRank flows from there to internal pages.
It should be noted that there is a dierence between “Toolbar PageRank” and the
actual PageRank used by Google. Toolbar PageRank is visible to you by installing
the Google Toolbar on your browser or by using a browser plug-in/extension that
pulls data from the same source. It is updated every 3-4 months by Google, which is
dierent from the actual PageRank that is more fluid, constantly updated by Google
to be fed into their ranking algorithm.
Domain Strength
For that reason, the PageRank you see in the Google Toolbar could be several months
old. This is why new web pages mainly have a PageRank score of 0: They need to wait
for Google to update the toolbar.
Domain Authority is calculated by Moz and runs on a scale of 0-100, with 100
being the highest. It uses a number of signals taken from the Moz crawler and tries
to predict how well a domain will perform in search results. It is useful alongside
PageRank as another indicator of how strong a domain is.
In terms of link building, site strength is a good metric to use because you want to get
links from websites that are very strong. If the links you get are from strong domains,
they will pass more strength to your own website, which is a clear signal to Google
that you have a good site that deserves to rank well.
For example, CNN has a PageRank of 8 and a Domain Authority of 99. Lots of other
websites link to CNN because it is an authoritative website with high-quality content.
Because of this, CNN is not very likely to link to low-quality websites, so if you get a
link from CNN, it is a signal that you have a good website, too.
Tools to measure domain strength
• PageRank extension for Chrome
• MozBar for measuring Page Authority
• Google Toolbar for PageRank (for Internet Explorer)
There will be occasions when you have the opportunity to get a link from a page
that already exists on a website, as opposed to a new page that is created for a blog
post or news item. An example could be an existing list of some kind to which your
link gets added; perhaps your coee shop is added to a page with a list of the best
espresso in Seattle.
In cases like this, you should assess how strong the page is so that you know how
worthwhile the link is to you before you put too much eort into acquiring it. There
are two main metrics, and they are nearly identical to those for domain strength:
PageRank and Page Authority.
We’ve already talked about PageRank. Page Authority is another Moz metric that is
very similar to Domain Authority, except that it only applies to a single page rather
than an entire domain.
The higher the PageRank / Page Authority of the page you want a link from, the more
likely it is to help you with your SEO eorts.
Page Strength
Anchor Text
We’ve already covered the meaning of anchor text; now lets consider what it means
as a metric for SEOs.
Anchor text can give Google an indication of the subject matter of the page being
linked to. So if I linked to a page using the words “fitness routine,” then it is likely
that the page being linked to contains information about fitness routines. Google
can then use this information as part of its ranking algorithms. In this case, they
may decide that the page being linked to should rank higher for the keyword “fitness
routine” and close variations.
For many years, having a lot of links pointing to your website that contained your
keyword as the anchor text was a very good way of helping you rank well for that
keyword. While this is still the case to some extent, it does appear that the strength of
anchor text as a signal is diminishing slightly. This is most likely because of the over-
optimization of anchor text by SEOs and Google’s readiness to penalize such websites
through the Penguin update.
Rand talked about this in an episode of Whiteboard Friday and gave some indicators
of what Google may use instead.
Number of Links
Due to the changing nature of the perception and use of anchor text, it is probably
best to be cautious when building links. Try not to build too many links that have the
exact same anchor text in them, particularly if the links are not of the highest quality,
such as links that are from low-quality domains, non-editorial sitewide links, or
links that have too much anchor text (for more details on link quality, check out this
post on State of Digital). You should try to make your link profile look as natural as
possible, which often means getting links that use your brand or company name as
the anchor text.
Tools for measuring anchor text
• Open Site Explorer - click on the “anchor text” tab
• Majestic SEO
• AHREFs
When link building, you will obviously want to keep track of how many links you
have built. You will also want to check into how your website compares to your
competitors’ sites to see how far (or how far ahead!) you have gotten.
As we’ve discussed in previous chapters and seen in surveys, the raw number of
links pointing to your website is a strong ranking signal. However, you do need to
remember that the quality is equally, if not more important than the number.
As a metric, number of links can be useful to us in two main ways:
1. Measuring progress / success of a link building campaign
2. For running comparisons between your website and competitors’ sites
Both of these uses still need to factor in quality of links in order to be helpful to us.
When we compare our number of links to a competitor’s number, it can sometimes
show gaps that may explain ranking dierences. If you’re trying to rank for the
keyword “wooden tables” and the websites on the first page of results all have over
1,000 linking domains, that gives you a solid sense for the competitiveness of that
niche and the kind of attention you need to earn in order to rank among those results.
Tools for measuring number of links
• Open Site Explorer
• Majestic SEO
• AHREFs
Not to be confused with the raw number of links, linking root domains is an even
more powerful ranking signal to Google. When we say linking root domains, we mean
the number of distinct domains that link to us, not the raw number of links.
For example, if CNN linked to you from five dierent news stories, that would be
counted as five links, but only one linking root domain, since all five links came from
cnn.com.
If the BBC linked to you from one news story, that would be one link and one linking
root domain.
Linking Root Domains
The number of linking root domains is a stronger signal than the raw number of links
because it is a better indication of the true popularity of a website. If we go back to how
Google think of links as “votes,” then in this sense each website has only one vote to
give you. No matter how many times they link to you, they still only count as one vote,
which prevents the digital equivalent of “stung the ballot box.”
Multiple links from the same domain can be the result of a number of things. Linking
from multiple content pages is one way, but the most common ways are by what we
call sitewide links. A sitewide link is a link that is placed in some kind of templated
element of the website, such as the header, footer, or sidebar. The most common
example is a “blogroll” link, as a blogroll is generally on every page of the website.
In general, these types of links are not as valuable as in-content links from just a few
pages. Sitewide links can sometimes be spammy, paid for, and not editorially given
in the sense that Google would like. In fact, Moz published a case study of a site that
was heavily penalized by Google for incorporating sitewide links on its clients’ pages.
Therefore, you should treat them with caution, only get them from high-quality
websites, and don’t be too aggressive with your anchor text.
Tools for measuring linking root domains
• Open Site Explorer - click on the “linking domains” tab
• Majestic SEO
• AHREFs
There has always been some debate as to whether relevance is a strong signal used
by Google to calculate the value of a link. Logic tells us that it should be, because it
is natural for relevant websites to link to each other. However, what if you get a link
from the homepage of the BBC to your website about coee? You wouldn’t reject it just
because the BBC website isn’t about coee.
If we look beyond link building for a moment though, you still want to bring targeted
trac to your website so that you can try to convert visitors into customers. For
this reason alone, you should be trying to place links on websites where potential
customers may visit. This means that the value of the link goes far beyond SEO and
can become a source of direct income.
As discussed in the anchor text section above, there are some indications that Google
is moving away from anchor text as a strong signal and, instead, could be using
analysis of an entire page to attribute relevance to the link. If this proves to be the case,
then getting links from relevant pages could become a strong ranking signal.
Right now, best practice should be to focus on quality to make sure you’re being passed
link equity and on relevance in the sense that you want to attract the right kind of trac.
Relevance of the Linking Page
Imagine you live in Seattle and you have a blog about coee. You’re going to share
a link with your readers to the website of a local coee shop that serves the most
amazing fresh coee ever. Where would you place this link on the page?
If you really wanted your readers to see it, you’d position it somewhere obvious.
Probably in the main body of the page, probably near the top of the page, and probably
within some content that explains how amazing the coee shop is.
You probably wouldn’t place the link in the footer, right? Many users may not scroll
down the page that far, and even if they do, they wouldn’t expect to find useful links in
that section.
Google is able to work out the position of a link on a page, and from this could choose
to value it dierently. If the link is in the footer of a page, then Google could reduce
the value of that link because they assume it isn’t a great link for users (otherwise, it
wouldn’t be hidden away in the footer).
Google can also use the position of links on a page in aggregate. For example, they
could see if 50% of all the links pointing to your website are in some kind of footer. This
could indicate low-quality link building, and Google may decide to take a closer look.
Position of Links on the Page
Another example could be if Google finds that 50% of the links pointing to your
website are from sidebars. Again, on its own, this may be legitimate, but it could also
be a signal to Google that you’re buying links. Many link brokers will place links in the
sidebar of pages as opposed to within the content.
Because of this ability, you should make sure that you are getting links from websites
which are happy to link from within content wherever possible. There is nothing wrong
with the odd sidebar link, but too many of them does not signal a good link profile.
The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly of Link Building
Chapter 6
You’ll often hear SEOs talking about “white-hat” and “black-hat” (or the questionable
area in between, often dubbed “gray-hat”), particularly when it comes to link building
techniques. This section will outline the dierences and cover some of the pros and
cons of each approach.
White-Hat Strategies
White-hat strategies are those that are very low-risk to carry out and usually fall
well within the webmaster guidelines laid out by Google and Bing. Using white-hat
techniques means that you stand very little chance of running into problems with the
search engines when it comes to losing trac because of a penalty.
White-Hat Strategies vs. Black-Hat
Strategies
A few examples of white-hat tactics are:
• Creating your own unique, insightful, and quality content
• Building a genuine, engaged community which interacts with your website and
each other
• Promoting your website to relevant people in a genuine, personal way by writing
personalized message
Cloaking
• Showing dierent content to the search engines compared to what you
show to users
• Injecting hidden links into a website you do not own by exploiting a security flaw
• Hidden text on a page that is only shown to the search engines, not users,
typically full of keywords you want to rank for
Pros include not having to worry about getting yourself into trouble with automated
or manual spam penalties from the search engines. White-hat strategies usually work
best for real users, too, and can help build long-term assets that are strong and unlikely
to disappear overnight.
Cons include having to focus on the long-term goal rather than short-term gains.
White-hat strategies can sometimes take some time to have a big eect on your trac
and revenue because they are less aggressive.
Black-Hat Strategies
Originally coined as a term to describe computer hackers, black-hat has also been used
to describe techniques that directly violate search engine guidelines. These techniques
seek to exploit loopholes in the search engine algorithms and rank websites higher
than they actually deserve to.
These tactics don’t work in the long-term, because the search engines are always
looking to stop them from happening. This means that trac and rankings can drop
pretty much overnight if you’re caught using these tactics, so we strongly advise
steering clear.
You are building a business online, and chances are that you want to compete online
for many years to come. If you want to do this, then you need to carefully choose the
tactics you’re willing to employ and make an assessment of how risky those tactics are.
As with any business (oine included), there are tactics that carry a certain amount of
risk with them. For example, an oine business may carry out some kind of PR stunt
to try and build awareness of the brand. The inherent risk is that a stunt can misfire,
negatively aecting the brand and deterring potential customers.
As a business, you need to weigh up the risks and benefits of any marketing activity.
This is why white-hat strategies are so important to a website: They pose the least
amount of risk and are very unlikely to lead to you being hit with a penalty from
Google. Also, just as importantly, white-hat strategies focus on adding true value to the
Internet, your industry, and your customers’ experience. If you want to build a loyal
customer base which not only buys from you but happily recommends you to friends,
you need to focus on tactics that give the customer a great user experience. Providing
them with genuine, useful content is one way to do this.
What works today may not work tomorrow, and where might that leave you? Many
black-hats will replace their former ways with other shady techniques, and the cycle
starts again. The problem is that this is not good for most businesses. Most businesses
can’t aord to take risks with their websites, or constantly be looking over their
shoulders, waiting for the day the search engines finally catch up with them.
Why Sustainable, White-hat
Strategies Are So Important
If you contrast this with white-hat techniques, you know that you’re building for the
long term, and while some eorts will yield better results than others, you won’t need
to be looking over your shoulder or worrying every time you hear there has been a
Google update.
You can read an excellent post by Rand on this topic along with lots of examples of
white-hat tactics working very well.
Link building can be quite tough, particularly in the early days when you’re still
trying to build your reputation, find the right people to connect with, and create
great content. It is quite understandable that SEOs look for shortcuts to help make the
process a little bit easier, and one of those shortcuts is often buying links.
Buying Links is Directly Against One of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank: This includes exchanging money for
links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending
someone a ‘free’ product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.”
Google cares so much about this because buying links can change how search results
appear for users. They want companies to perform well in search results because they
deserve to, not because they have deep pockets and can buy links. Also, note that
A Few Words on Buying Links
Google explicitly says “links that pass PageRank.” This is where the dierence between
buying links and buying advertising comes into play.
Buying advertising that links through to your website is fine and can be a great
practice for building awareness of your business. However, Google do say that if
you’re going to do this, then you should make sure that the advertisement doesn’t pass
PageRank to your website. There are a few ways you can do this:
These techniques mean that the advertisements will not aect how much PageRank
your website receives and, therefore, will not aect how you perform in organic
search results.
In general, buying links is a risky business, and for most companies is not worth
the risk. The short-term gains often outweigh the long-term benefits, and if you’re
building a legitimate business that plans on using organic Google results as a means
to get customers, then buying links can put that at risk.
You can read about the Moz stance on paid links here, which goes into a lot of detail
on the reasons behind not recommending it as a practice.
• Adding the nofollow attribute to the link
• Making the link Javascript that Google can not follow
• Going via a redirected page that is blocked in robots.txt
If you’re found to be in violation of webmaster guidelines, it is likely that you’ll be
given a penalty by the search engines. Depending on the seriousness of the violation,
the penalty can last from a few weeks to several months or until the problem is
completely fixed. There have been some very public examples of large companies
being penalized by Google for violating their guidelines.
JC Penney, a very large US retailer was heavily penalized back in February 2011 for
buying large amounts of links targeting a range of specific keywords. It was several
months before they started to see a recovery and they were forced to spend time trying
to take lots of the links down.
Another example closely followed a few weeks later when Overstock were penalized
for the practice of giving Universities discounts on products in exchange for links.
Again, it was several months before they started to see a recovery.
A famous example in the UK was the penalty applied to florist Interflora in February
2013 which was severe but only lasted eleven days. Google didn’t directly comment on
this but it was widely believed to be link related.
Penalties and Black-Hat SEO
All of these examples made headlines because the companies in question were very
large and well-known. In reality, Google hands out penalties for this kind of behavior all
the time, but most cases don’t receive the headlines that our example companies did.
Google hands out several types of penalties which we will briefly discuss here:
Manual Penalties
In this case, a member of the web spam team has manually applied a penalty to your
website after finding something that was in violation of their guidelines. This can be
anything from buying links to sneaky redirects or cloaking. To remove this penalty,
you need to file a reconsideration request with Google that includes several things:
Then Google will manually decide whether or not to lift the penalty. They can
sometimes come back and tell you that you haven’t done enough and you need
to keep working to fix the problem. A common example of this is if you’ve been
penalized for low quality link building and you haven’t removed enough of the low
quality links yet.
In order to see if you’ve been given a manual penalty, you can check the manual
penalties section of Google Webmaster Tools.
Algorithmic Penalties
In this case, Google have automatically found a problem with your website and applied
a penalty because of it. This is usually some kind of on-site problem, such as hidden
text or cloaking, and you need to fix the problem before you will see the penalty lifted.
With this type of penalty, sometimes just fixing the problem can lead to the penalty
being lifted next time that Google crawl and index your pages. Sometimes, though,
you may also need to file a reconsideration request with Google so that they can
manually see if you’ve fixed the problem.
• What you’ve done to fix the problem that you’ve been penalized for
• How you plan to never engage in this kind of practice again
• Clear evidence for both of these
TRADING
POST
Why Simply “Trading Links” Isn’t a
Good Strategy
In years gone by, trading links with other websites was a good way of getting links. It
also became known as “link exchanges” or “reciprocal links” as a tactic. However, like
a lot of link building tactics, it was often abused and pushed to the extreme. Instead of
trading links with other relevant, good quality websites, many SEOs would just trade
links with anyone they could. Therefore, the link was no longer being given because of
the quality of the website, but more because the webmaster would get a link in return.
This led to some websites having pages that were set up specifically for trading links.
These pages would have URLs similar to www.example.com/links.html. Such a page
would consist of a huge list of links to websites that were often unrelated to the
website itself and were not always great quality.
Because of this, Google seek to devalue links that are only given because a link is
being given in return. They can even penalize for excessive link exchanges and have a
section in their webmaster guidelines for it:
Excessive Link Exchanging (“Link to Me and I’ll Link to You”)
When it comes to link building, Google want to see links that you’ve earned. They want
to see links that you deserve because you have something of good quality to oer - not
because you’re happy to take part in link exchanges.
Having said that, Google has no problem at all with websites linking to each other for
legitimate reasons. It is a natural occurrence on the web if a news story on the BBC
cites an article on CNN, then a few weeks later CNN cite a story on the BBC. This is
technically a reciprocal link, but do you think Google penalize for it? No, because there
are genuine reasons for these websites to link to each other and they are doing it in a
natural way that is good for users.
Contrast this with a page that has thousands of links on it, all going to unrelated
websites with no relevance at all and you can see the dierence in what Google does
and doesn’t like.
Advanced Link Building
Tips & Tricks
Chapter 7
This section will give you a few link building tips and tricks that we’ve picked up over
the years. Some have been mentioned briefly elsewhere in this guide, but all are quite
specific and should be quite useful for you, no matter what industry you work in.
Say we worked in the gardening industry and wanted to find garden blogs to do some
outreach. Our first instinct may be to search for “garden blogs” or something similar
to that. This will certainly give you good results, but you’ll need to search through lots
and lots of search results to get a decent amount of blogs.
Speed Up Link Prospecting With Lists
To help speed things up a bit, try searching for “list of garden blogs” instead which will
give you results like this:
As you can see, within the first few results are lots of lists of garden blogs that have
already been curated by other people. This not only helps you find blogs quicker, but
it helps you find better-quality blogs because the list has been curated. I wrote a blog
post on link building using lists on the Moz blog which you should also take a look at.
Find Bloggers Using Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a great little tool that lets you run lots of analysis on Twitter accounts
and it is now part of Moz, so it is free to use if you’re a Pro subscriber.
One of the features of Followerwonk allows you to find influential bloggers very
quickly and easily. It is the Search bios option, and you can search for keywords such
as this:
This will show me people on Twitter who have “fashion blogger” in their bio:
You can then export these results into a CSV which will tell you which of these people
have websites listed next to their bio. If they do, then you can go take a look and see if
they’d be a good person to start engaging with and eventually, promote your content to.
Get More Links From Your
Infographics
Like guest blogging, building links using infographics has become very popular over
recent years. In general, the process for getting links here is the same as the content-
based link building process outlined previously, but there is an extra step here that you
can take which could get you a few more links.
The technique is based on the fact that some people will embed your infographics, but
will not give you a link. This is actually quite common, so there is often opportunity
for you to contact these websites and ask them for the link.
To do this, we need to start by getting a copy of the filename where your infographic
is hosted. Note that we want the actual jpg, png filename rather than the URL itself.
We can get this by going to the infographic, right clicking on it and selecting “Copy
Image URL:”
Then we need to head over to Google Images and look for this symbol:
Click on this and paste in the URL we just copied:
Click search by image and you’ll get results like this:
Now you simply need to go to these URLs and make sure that there is a link pointing
back to your website. If there is not, then you can drop a quick email to the website
owner and ask them to add a link to the original source.
Learning More
This beginner’s guide should give you the fundamentals you need to begin a link
building campaign, but link building is a large and diverse field with many schools of
thought and practice. To further your education and development, we recommend the
following resources:
• Buzzstream Blog
• Growing Popularity and Links
• Ultimate Guide to Link Building by Eric Ward and Garret French
• The Link Building Book by Paddy Moogan
• Link Building by Ontolo
• Link Building Strategies by Jon Cooper
• Link Building on the Moz Blog
To Wrap Up...
THE END
That’s about it for now! We hope that you enjoyed The Beginner’s Guide to Link
Building! As mentioned right at the start of this guide, the landscape is changing
regularly and we’ll do our best to keep this guide up to date. Remember though at one
thing is unlikely to change - the focus on quality should always be front of your mind
if you’re trying to succeed in the long term online. Best of luck!
One more note: We simply can’t thank Paddy Moogan enough for writing this guide.
His expertise and wisdom made the project possible. We’d also like to thank Ashley
Tate for wrangling the early stages of the project, Trevor Klein for taking it to the finish
line, Cyrus Shepard for his expert review and a few key additions, Derric Wise and
David O’Hara for bringing it to life with their art, and Andrew Palmer for seamlessly
translating everything onto the web.