EXPERT CHALLENGE: What link building strategies do YOU think will work after the latest 3/29/2012 Google algorithm change?
-
FOR ALL SEO THOUGHT LEADERS...What link building strategies do YOU think will work after the latest 3/29/2012 Google algorithm change?
NOTE: My hope is that the responses left on this thread will ultimately benefit all members of the community and give recognition to the true thought leaders within the SEO space.
That being said, my challenge is a 2 part question:
-
With the 80/20 rule in mind, and in light of recent algorithm changes, what would YOU focus most of your SEO budget on if you had to choose? Let's assume you're in a competitive market (ie #1-5 on page 1 has competitors with 20,000+ backlinks - all ranging from AC Rank 7 to 1). How would you split your total monthly SEO budget as a general rule? Ex) 60% link building / 10% onsite SEO / 10% Social Media / 20% content creation? I realize there are many "it depends" factors but please humor us anyways.
-
Link building appears to have become harder and harder as google releases more and more algorithm changes. For link building, the only true white hat way of proactively generating links (that I know of) is creating high quality content that adds value to customers (ie infographics, videos, etc.), guest blogging, and Press Releases. The con to these tactics is that you are waiting for others to find and pick up your content which can take a VERY long time, so ROI is difficult to measure and justify to clients or C-level management.
That being said, how are YOU allocating your link building budget? Are all of these proactive link building tactics a waste of time now? I've heard it couldn't hurt to still do some of these, but what are your thoughts and what is / isn't working for you?
Here they are:
A. Using spun articles edited by US based writers for guest blog content
B. 301 Redirects
C. Social bookmarking
D. Signature links from Blog commenting
E. Directory submissions
F. Video Submissions
G. Article Directory submissions
H. Press release directory submissions
I. Forum Profile Submissions
J. Forum signature links
K. RSS Feed submissions
L. Link wheels
M. Building links (using scrapebox, senukex, etc.) to pages linked to your money site
N. Links from privately owned networks (I spoke to an SEO company that claims to have over 4000 unique domains which he uses to boost rankings for his clients)
O. Buying Contextual Text Links
All Expert opinions are welcomed and appreciated
-
-
I have to agree with the other responses: content is the most important thing because everything centers around that. Even with the recent link changes, that hasn’t changed. If anything, those changes plus Panda, Google+, etc. has made content even more important. You have to have good, unique content that makes your website worth linking to and worth sharing. Any business in any industry can come up with unique content that is worth linking to and worth sharing. It takes hard work, but is well worth the effort.
The problem I have with “link building” is that it becomes a separate beast unto itself where the question becomes “How do I get links?” instead of “How do I get people to know/like/trust my business?” In other words, link building is a tactic of the larger marketing strategy. I actually like Google's recent efforts because it brings link building back to what it should be.
That is how I present link building to my clients. The specific tasks within that then become finding websites for companies or organizations that are in related industries or finding blogs/news organizations talking about that industry. Certainly I automate that discovery as much as I can. Once found, the automating stops because at that point it is about making connections with those companies and organizations. As part of that connection, ask for a link. Doing that can get you a link while also helping the business. Which, really, helping the business is kind of the point of our jobs, right?
Does it take time? You bet. It is a pain and trust me I wish there was an easy way. But there is no quick fix and any quick fix tactic is probably spammy and will be shut down eventually by Google and Bing. So, why take that risk with some of those tactics you mentioned? At best, you are looking at a short term gain and a panic attack in the future when Google and Bing make a change. Why do that?
By treating link building as a form of building connections, links I built five years ago are still around today adding value to my client's websites. The best thing is that links built that way—extending a real world connection—will never be penalized by Google because there is nothing spammy about them. Sure it takes time, but I’ll take the long term effects every day of the week.
My distribution of time is dependent on the exact needs of the site obviously. But in general for a site that has been up and running for a year or two my main focus and effort is on content. From there, my time is divided something like this:
50% Content
20% CRO/Usability
15% Link Building
10% Social
5% On-page optimization -
I'm pretty new to the SEO world, but have been in Marketing for an long time. To me CONTENT is king.
60% Content
20% Social Media
15% Link Building
5% On-Site
I think you should have excellent and useful content that provides an awesome user experience on your website. If you do that, the link building and Social Media aspects of your marketing will take a life on of there own. I would spend most of my time creating the best possible product, service and content to provide to the public. The public will be happy to share your pages with everyone without you needing to manipulate the system.
I think Social Media has been and will continue to increase in popularity as "votes" for your pages. Plus, SEO aside... it's one of the best ways to reach new customers. Link building has it's place for sure.. it's huge.. but the engines are on a continual effort to make SEO about real user interactions. The engines want to rank sites that are naturally being shared and "voted" upon by real engaged users. On site SEO? is pretty simple and shouldn't take much time, just making sure your targeting good keywords and having those keywords crawled correctly.
Hope my little bit of knowledge was of some help.
-
Are you talking about the recent crack-down on link networks? I'm a little confuse, because you mention a 3/29 algorithm change and the question went up on 3/28 (at least here in the US).
I'm actually working on a post about (1), because I think it's almost completely unanswerable without specifics. I've seen people obsess over on-page or build links like crazy and let their on-page turn into a mess, and often those people would be well served to completely switch gears. Take a site that's an absolute mess on-page but has a solid link profile, and fixing on-page issues could work magic for them (for example).
Let's say we're talking about a brand new site, though. It still varies with the goals and budget, but I'd probably say:
- 40% Content
- 30% Link-building
- 20% On-page
- 10% Social
Without some base of solid content, you've got nothing to build links to or promote socially. I'm not saying content is magical - you have to pound the pavement and build those links - but you've got to at least have enough of a site that someone would want to link to it. So, in the beginning, content is still the mainstay. On-page has to start pretty strong - do your keyword research and build a decent, SEO-friendly structure, but then it can level off a little.
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
-
Advise / Help on Bad Link Removals
Hey everyone.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheITOteam
Im new to the community and new to backlinks - hence the question to the community today.
I would like help understanding options and work load around back links and removing them.
I have a client with over 8000 back links as a few years ago he paid someone about £10 to boost his rankings by adding thousands of backlinks.
We fear this is having a bad effect on their site and rankings organically as 90% of these back links have a spam score of over 50% and also no follows. My questions to the community (if you could be so kind to share) are:
1. Whats the best way to decide if a Backlink is worth keeping or removing
2. Is there a tool to decide this or assist with this somewhere on the internet? Ive had advise stating if its not hurting the page we should keep it. However, again...
How do I know what damage each Backlink is causing to the domain? I appriciate anyones time to offer some advice to a novice looking to clear these1 -
About link building in 2015?
I don't think we still can use the same link buildings tools of years ago. So, how relevant is this article (from 2009):
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nans
http://moz.com/blog/17-ways-search-engines-judge-the-value-of-a-link Or is there any update? Nancy1 -
Is there a paid link hierarchy?
It seems like the more I learn about my competition's links, the less I understand about the penalties associated with paid links. Martindale-hubbard (in my industry) basically sells links to every lawyer out there, but none of the websites with those links are penalized. I'm sure you all have services like that in your various industries. Granted, Martindale-hubbard is involved in the legal community and it's tied to Lexis Nexis, but any small amount of research would tell you that paid links are a part of their service. Why does this company (and companies that use them) not get penalized? Did the penguin update just go after companies that got links from really seedy, foreign companies with gambling/porn/medication link profiles? I keep reading on this forum and other places that paid links are bad, but it looks to me like there are fundamental differences in the penalties for paid links purchased from one company vs another. Is that the case or am I missing something? Thanks, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
I am experiencing referrer spam from http://r-e-f-e-r-e-r.com/ (don't click) - What should I do?
It amazes me that every day in search marketing is filled with something new that I don't know or never heard of. Most of you are probably familiar with referrer spam, but I hadn't ever heard of it before. I am currently experiencing referral spam on my personal blog. What's the best way to get rid of this pest? Shall I ignore them? Block them in my robots.txt file? Use Google's Disavow? or should I just plain holler "Curse you referral spam people!!!" ? Thanks all!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Setting up a Blog for more inbound links
Site A is my Main Site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CLTMichael
Site B is my Blog. Is using site B to link back to site A a good idea or should site A have it's own blog going after keywords?1 -
How to idesntify "inorganic" links
I am intending to remove spammy link of my website http://cellspyexpert.com/ which has been ranking well but I noticed a sudden drop in its ranking. I took a lot of care while building links, I tried to get links from relevant high authority websites with high page rank. I used profiling and guest blogging method only and never participated in any link scheme but received following message in google webmaster tools " Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.cellspyexpert.com/" I got this message on 19<sup>th</sup> Sep and ranking dropped on 6<sup>th</sup> Oct 1- Is this EMD issue?? I am pretty sure it is not because of EMD (Exact match domain) as I have been using phrase match, brand name+phrase and other anchor texts. I used exact match also but only 2%. 2- If it is bad quality, inorganic link issue?? Then I am intending to remove inorganic links so that I could send reconsideration request but facing problem in detecting inorganic links. Please advise!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
Link package review and recommendations
Hello there, I recently spoke to a contractor that offered me the following package, and i have to ask, in this post-penguin world, does it make sense to pursue this kind of linking? Or will it be considered spam. They said it's a manual submission process and they will 'do their best' to ensure that it's under a related category, but can't promise anything in regards to that. What should i be requesting in this post-penguin world? How do i get quality backlinks that won't harm me given the current environment? Any help is greatly appreciated, here is the package info: 1. 900 links submissions = 450 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links - The links are built by manually publishing 5 Original Articles (500 words each) on 125 different article sites (each published article will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 10 keywords and 10 different URLs of your site to build the links.70% of our Article Sites have PR 2 to 6, all with different C classes IPs. 2. 300 links submissions = 150 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 4 Reviews for your site from 4 different accounts (we can use up to 4 URLs of your site to link back) on 150 Social Bookmarking sites, 90% of the sites have PR 2 to 8, all with different C classes IPs. 3. 480 links submissions = 240 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 3 Original Press Releases on 35 Press Release sites(each published press release will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 6 keywords and 6 different URLs of your site to build the links. All our Press Release Sites have PR 2 to 7 all with different C classes IPs. 4. 220 links submissions = 110 Guaranteed One Way blog links – These links are built by publishing 3 Original Blog Article (300 words each) with 2 back links to your site on 20 different free blog sites. These free blog sites are our sites (new sites with PR 0) which we are promoting to get the highest PR for them and your blog back links too.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
Why is this ranking first in Google Places for this term....?
"Best Bar In Chicago" - http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar+in+chicago They have only 5 Google reviews, and their local directory reviews are suspect. One of them goes to rateclubs.com and it's not even a page for their business, while one of them doesn't have user reviews, it's just an editorial review. The other one at superpages.com doesn't even link back to their site, it links to their restaurants.com profile. What is going on here? I've been trying to figure this out for a while as their first place ranking has been solidified for quite some time now. I can also tell you that a few of the bars listed below them have a MUCH higher profile and are better known. You can see that just by the reviews.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0