Link Building vs. Straight Earning Links Discussion
-
Hello,
I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content.
I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry?
Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach.
But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome.
Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing.
Would love to hear your experiences either way.
Thanks.
-
We highly recommend you earn backlinks; our copywriters spend hundreds of hours writing articles about garden buildings.
We now have our business on page one in Bath, England, because we built quality links, and written white hat blog posts.
-
Hi Bob,
I've gone through the process of building and optimizing quite a few different websites and I've found that the best backlinks come from good content. I've also done paid (supposed to be a no-no) and outreach link building, so I think I've got a good perspective across all the different approaches.
My personal opinion is that at the very launch of a website, beyond just indexing and on-site optimization, it's a 100% must to have the site linked to on a few good directories or other sites that are connected. For every single site I've built, I've seen fantastic results with this initial push. I believe that all SEOs have a little cache of backlinks stashed away and we all use them sparingly whenever we need to give a new site that first push. With this little bit of a push, I usually see my sites begin to rank within 4 to 5 days on less competitive keywords. To be honest, I don't think that this initial paying for backlinks is an ethical issue or one that can be classified as 'black hat SEO'. I've found it practiced at the top level agencies and it's also something that's recommended in Rand Fishkin's book 'Art of SEO'.
After the initial launch, then comes the real work. How do we get quality backlinks consistently?
Reaching out to other webmasters in the same verticals has had some fantastic results for me as well. I typically do an outreach program that is personal and not a template-based spam fest. Oddly enough, I've had these outreach attempts even grow into marketing partnerships, and even business partnerships. I find that if you reach out authentically to other webmasters or business owners, they tend to respond much better.
I've competed in large markets and also small ones, and I've found that it can actually be a problem for smaller market segments or industries, that you run out of other sites to reach out to. In my previous startup, I found that the source of quality backlink partners ran out after 3 or 4 months of research. At that point, I set up google alerts for specific keywords, and stopped my outreach program and decided to focus on content creation instead.
This was where it really began to pay off in buckets.
For that business and as a startup, I was able to create backlinks from not relevant sites, but even government organizations looking to highlight a particular type of business (educational startups in this case). Creating content like infographics and how-to articles was an extremely good investment as well. We publicized what we deemed to be good content out across our social media, and I found that these continued to generate backlinks even years later. The main reason why anyone would want to link to your site, is that you have something interesting or useful for them to share. I even used myself as 'content', giving interviews to online news portals and blogs, always asking if they would kindly do me a favor and link to my site as part of the article. We also got lucky with one of our seasonal articles. This particular article was shared on our social media and a reporter at the local newspaper came across it. That eventually led to an offline article published about the company, and since offline content eventually gets republished on their site, it also led to a backlink from an incredibly reputable source.
I think that the reason why most SEOs tend to focus on paid or outreach programs is simply because of the amount of time it takes. Writing an email takes at most 10 minutes, while research, writing and creating the graphics for a good piece of content (video, written or otherwise), would take days and not have an immediate payoff.
All said and done, I feel that a solid linkbuilding program should be multi-faceted and not be overly dependent on just one aspect. If you depend solely on outreach as your main source of backlinks, then what happens when you no longer have time to write emails? Eventually, you will still need to focus on content creation.
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
-
How to find if a website has paid or spammy back-links? Latest ways to investigate.
Hi all, I would like to investigate about our website back-links if something is wrong. If there are any paid or spammy back-links. How to proceed on this exercise? We have been using ahrefs and seems like it's quite enough. Is there any way we can pull out the fishy back-links? Do we have any helpful data from webmasters about this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Paid Link/Doorway Disavow - disavowing the links between 2 sites in the same company.
Hello, Three of our client's sites are having difficulty because of past doorway/paid link activity, which we're doing the final cleanup on with a disavow. There are links between the sites. Should we disavow all the links between the sites? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Low quality links
Hi I have found a lot of links from a majestic report (not found on moz open site explorer). inwhich I have found lots of links from 2010 and possibly earlier which either I can't get hold of the webmaster. Is a disavow the right way to go if I can't get them removed myself? Also I have noticed that there are a lot of free directories listing new pages from our site and I am concerned Google are going to find these. I surpose there is nothing I can do about this, does anyone have any recommendations.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
11 000 links from 2 blogs + Many bad links = Penguin 2.0\. What is the real cause?
Hello, A website has : 1/ 8000 inbound links from 1 blog and 3000 from another one. They are clean and good blogs, all links are NOT marked as no-follow. 2/ Many bad links from directories that have been unindexed or penalized by Google On the 22nd of May, the website got hurt by Penguin 2.0. The link profile contains many directories and articles. The priority we had so far was unindexing the bad links, however shall we no-follow the blog links as well? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | antoine.brunel0 -
Can image links help improve my backlinking profile?
I recently spent some time looking at the backlink profile of a leading UK food & clothing retailer and noticed that a high number of their backlinks for very competitive search phrase's consisted entirely of image backlinks. 50% of the links contained no alt text and other 50% contained a mix of just the targeted keyword or a phase containig one mention of the targeted keyword. Has anyone had any experiance of this type of marketing producing any positive effect on SEO or search engine rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigJonOne0 -
Redesigning my site, and not sure what is best for seo, subfolders or direct .html links?
,I have 4 examples to choose from, what is best:? http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/games/dublox.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox/index.html http://hoodamath.com/dublox.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | hoodamath0 -
Fix Bad Links in Google
I have a client who had some grey hat SEO done in the past. Some of their back links aren't from the best neighborhoods. Google didn't seem to mind until 9/28, when they literally disappeared for all searches except for their domain name. Google still has their site indexed, but it's just not showing up. There are no messages in Webmaster Tools. I know Bing has the tool where you can disavow bad links and ask them to discount them. Google doesn't have such a tool, but what is the strategy when you don't have control over the link sources, such as in blog comments? Could this update have been a delayed Penguin ranking change from the latest Penguin Update on the 18th? http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomBristol0 -
Would you get link from this blog?
I have an opportunity to place a guest blog on a site. The site has the following metrics: DA/PA: 24/36 Inbound links: 3K+ from 16 root domains Here is what makes me uneasy: The number of links from the same domain, suggesting sitewide or footer links When I look at the backlinks, there are links from sites like http://best-american-law-firms.info/, or http://www.luvbuds.info/. They sare blogroll links that are likely paid for. Would you get a link from this blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0