Is Link Earning the same as Blogger Outreach?
-
Hello all - is there a difference between link earning (from Rand's WBF post) and blogger outreach?
Little confused
-
Cheers all
-
Would you still recommend traditional link building, or do you think that this is now redundant?
Over the past seven years I have spent a total of about two hours on linkbuilding. I have not hired anyone to do it and my employees have done none.
Instead, that time and that money goes straight into content. That gives me more content to appear in the SERPs.
I do use share, bookmark, email, etc buttons and lots of my visitors use them. My goal is to have good enough content that my visitors do the promotion for me.
I believe that doing some linkbuilding would move my rankings faster.. but I don't like asking people to do things for me.
-
It's all about earning the link these days (PR is an important part of that), and you need a balance of approaches too. What amazes me is how many SEO agencies still offer old-style link building services (I spend half my life clearing up the mess they've left behind them - ugh!).
Also, see this on guest blogging: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/
-
Thanks both, very interesting takes.
Would you still recommend traditional link building, or do you think that this is now redundant?
Cheers!
-
One issue that keeps arising at the mo is the mixing of paid and unpaid content by bloggers. Keep an eye on that. I always ask bloggers whether they take sponsored posts. If they do, I check whether their sponsored posts carry nofollow tags on backlinks, which they should. If sponsored posts carry follow backlinks rather than nofollow backlinks, I go elsewhere.
-
Link earning and blogger outreach are parts of the same process.
Think of "link earning" as building assets for your website that will attract visitors. These assets could be interesting articles, valuable databases, useful tools, active forums, informative news. Keep in mind that articles, databases, tools, forums and news will not be link-earning assets unless they have those adjectives of interesting, valuable, useful, active, informative. Just because you have something on your site does not make it a link earner.
The outreach part is contacting bloggers who will value some of your assets and like them enough to say something about them.
Popular bloggers get contacted a lot. Lots of weasels, idiots and moochers are trying to get them to do something. If you have interesting, valuable, useful, active, informative assets your chances of getting them to help you are small.... but if your assets don't have those adjectives then you are just another weasel, idiot or moocher.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does posting links in comments on Linkedin count as blackhat?
Hello, I noticed a competitor site has started writing a post on linkedin and then adding the link to the article they are referencing in the comments section. I started to dig into this and came up with this useful post https://growthrocks.com/blog/linkedin-abtest-link-in-comment/ to me that all screams black hat, spamming and scamming... What does the Moz Community think? Sincere thanks for feedback and I hope you're safe - wherever you are... Rhiannon
Social Media | | rhiannondavies1 -
How to see who shared my link on twitter
I post many blog posts on twitter, but How to see who shared my link on twitter? What I need to search to find out this?
Social Media | | varunrupal0 -
How to fix external links with missing anchor
Hello, My SEO audit on my site shows we have 858 external links with missing anchor, report shows Target URL and Source URL. How I can fix external links with missing anchor? None of them looks like spam, my target URL is all from our Social Media. Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, Pinterest, Facebook ... Here is the link to the the excel spread shit report and you can see it yourself. https://na53.salesforce.com/sfc/p/60000000IcOQ/a/f2000000UVi7/hBZ6Z1tGEFcJOTvVtfjYtYhi_HTw8fRqe9SMjuWcdOA We use ''Hootsuite'' to shrink the URL and post in to our social media, is that maybe we having this problem now? Thank you,
Social Media | | Kiakh19870 -
ROS Outbound Social Links vs Connect Page with Social Feed?
A client wants to include social media icons in their footer. Instead of linking to facebook, Google+, etc they would like to link to a page with social feeds from their networks. Are there any SEO implications to doing this?
Social Media | | CompucastWeb0 -
Please help me improve this link building strategy
Link building is challenging. Can you guys read my process below and offer improvements: This is for marketing an article that is good for target websites for humanitarian reasons. It helps their readers in a way that they really need it. Not to say that all of these target websites are going to want to reference my article. I'm looking for A. The target website to write, or let us write, a blog post around my article, of course with a link to the article and no other links to my website (unless they want to) or B. For our article to be listed in a resource section when appropriate How I'm doing this now: 1. We're starting with a well written, authoritative article with attractive images, graphs, and even a fancy javascript display area that's useful. The article is 3500 words. There's a big image link at the bottom that goes to the article in PDF version. Due to some hosting problems, the pdf version is disallowed in the robots.txt (it won't help to get links to it) There's 2 versions of the article, the one I'm marketing has all of our ecommerce menu and such removed, so that this version has minimal commercial parts in it. There's also a commercial version, which we are not pushing, and the non-commercial is rel cononicaled pointing over to the commercial. The non-commercial article has only one external backlink so far, and the commercial version has no external backlinks yet. We're just getting started. 2. First I like on facebook and follow on twitter. I spend some time with the target site's facebook page and like several recent posts, sharing one or two things to my own facebook page. I then retweet two good recent tweets put out by the site's general twitter account. BTW, we don't have very many twitter followers yet for our twitter account. 3. Then I read their newest blog post. I read it thoroughly. Sometimes I don't pick the newest if there is another recent one that is more similar in topic to our site. I spend some time putting together a thoughtful and helpful comment for that blog post. I submit the comment. I then go on FB and carefull post how I found the blog post helpful and place a link to their blog post. A lot of these sites, though, aren't accepting blog post comments but I always post on their facebook page. 4. I wait a couple of days in case my activity gets noticed. At that point, I go to linkedin and look for people that work for the site. If I find a content/marketing director, or if it's a small site and I find the owner [still not very good at this part], I search google for their email address and/or twitter account. I'm successful in finding a specific person only about 1/3 of the time. These sites also often have phone numbers. 5. I send out either A. a tweet to a specific person asking if they need help with content, or B. An email to a specific person like: Subject: Do you need help with content that is very useful to [niche audience] [their first name] I hope you are doing well. [add sentence here referencing something I learned about them, I don't know how to do this part well yet] I'm writing you because we have some content that is useful and important to [niche audience]. It's an article about [our article name and link]. We're wondering if you'd consider, since it would be very beneficial to your audience, to write a blog post explaining and citing that article. We think our doing this would add to [niche audience] quality of life. Sincerely, Bob Weikel
Social Media | | BobGW
Co-owner
[website] If I don't find a specific person, I write an email as similar to the above as possible and send it to their general email address or contact form. I send one email, wait 2 or 3 business days, send another email, wait 2 or 3 business days. Then I call. I ask for "Marketing" or whoever is in charge of their blog [I haven't done much of this and am not good at it yet] or if it's a small company I might talk to the owner. Sometimes I only send one email before calling, especially if I think email's a lost cause. I never leave voicemail. I always keep calling over several days until I reach someone. When I call and get someone, I say something like, "Hi, I'm Bob from [website]. I was wondering if you would be interested in some content that would be beneficial to [niche audience]." I know there is a lot of room for improvement. I'm looking for a 10% success rate. Thanks.1 -
What's the value of Twitter and Pinterest links?
Just wondering should part of my regular activities include sharing certain URL's to these social networks? Presumably it requires constantly mentioning random pages as part of an ongoing nature... Any pointers? thanks
Social Media | | bjs20101 -
Need people's opinion on if this is good advice for link building
What google wants is authority, relevancy, quality and engagement. If you have an authority in your niche and place relevant content on your website plus grammar free, unique and a lot of words, and social influence via Twitter, Facebook, Google +... You shouldn't be worried about the speed of building back links. I checked your website and it seems like an authority site. PR5, 18K backlinks plus $38K SE free traffic (according to SEMrush)... You just need a social influence to boost your authority. Create Twitter, Facebook, Google+ accounts for this website and also Facebook and Google+ pages. Then Create 30 web 2.0 accounts and on each one post three articles. Two of them are an account activation (this is what I call it), which can be just grabbed from ezinearticles and spun. Keep the links to the articles at the bottom of the pages. Once your web 2.0 sites are indexed by Google publish 800+ words quality relevant content with two links to your website. One to your root domain and one to the most relevant page your website (I mean relevant to the 800+ words article). Do this on each of those 30 web 2.0 sites. After this blast all of the 800+ articles with all kind of backlinks. Forum profiles, blog comments, article directories... Just use Senuke and other software. And don't forget to create a facebook fan page for each of the web 2.0 sites. In one month, you'll see a heck of a move in rankings. Where does the bookmarking part go? You need to bookmark every single URL you want Google to see. And if you want to outsource it, I highly recommend you to get a full time VA who would do this for you. Hope it helps. And your answer to your question about speed, if your site is older than 3 months don't care about the speed. Care about the quality.
Social Media | | newcitymoving0 -
Vittana Blogger Challenge. Feedback is Appreciated!
Hi all, We're just about to push out a blogger contest. We want to win for the keyword "How to make a difference" Search volume: Exact match: 810 Broad Match: over 300,000 These are our contest guidelines that I plan to share with interested bloggers soon: Subject:
Social Media | | vittana_seo
Follow Up: The Vittana “Make a Difference” Contest. Hi [FIRST NAME], Thanks for expressing interest in the blogging contest that I mentioned a couple weeks back. We’ve finalized the contest rules and we’d love to get you on board. We were impressed by the interest that this contest has generated. Not only do we expect this contest to help over 250 students in developing countries to complete their education, but it should also drive traffic to your site as well! PRIZES $200, $100 and $50 gift certificates for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners. Badges showing the amount of loans driven by your blog post. ??Another idea?? CONTEST RULES: WRITE A SHORT BLOG POST
Write a post on your blog focused on the theme “Making a Difference.” The post length is up to you but probably should be under 500 words. Some possible topics include. These posts do not have to be related to Vittana: How has education made a difference in your life? How have you used your education to make a difference in the world? What are, in your opinion, the best ways to make a difference? What are, in your opinion, the most pressing problems in the world today? What can we do about them. Check out the list of countries on left-hand side of Vittana’s student list. Have you been there? What are major problems facing the country? How might they be solved? Tell us about someone or something that had made an impact in your life. Again, the format can be up to you, but you can check out this document (TO BE CREATED) to help get you started. PASTE THIS TEXT AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR POST
Please put the following text at the beginning of your blog post to mention the contest:
[Paragraphs with varying anchor text pointing to our contest page--we'll vary through mail merge] EMAIL ME THE POST URL AND YOUR TWITTER HANDLE
In order for us to enter the contest, please send me the URL of your published blog post and your twitter handle. If you don’t have a twitter handle, we encourage you to sign up and create one for the purposes of scoring. Important: The scoring of posts is based in part by the number of tweets that your post receives. In order for us to properly calculate your score please ensure that your username and the hashtag #makeadifference is part of the tweet. Something like this: http://i.imgur.com/nlVij.png In order to make this process easier, we will be sending a “tweet this!” link so that when people do share the hashtag and your twitter username is already included. Good luck! And if you have any questions just let me know! Kenji1