Developing a link profile.....

[jackaveli]

So we are a brand new site looking to establish a link profile of earned links vs. manipulative link building practices and have received some conflicting information.

Our goal is to provide users and webmasters of relevant websites with useful content about the areas and topics we cover and let them decide to link to us.  We have been advised by some parties that in order to develop a base set of links we should enter our website into directories.  Now I understand entering it into some of the main directories such as BOTW and Yahoo etc, but please offer your thoughts on smaller less official directories.

Thanks in advance.

Scott

[cwsinc]

Hi all, this might be a stupid question, but what is the "conventional way" of building links?

Thanks

[bradkrussell]

Hi Scott, I agree with Irving. Don't start with those smaller spammy directories. Build up the site and build links in a conventional way. There's still some good directories out there but they're becoming more limited by the day. I'd start with BOTW and a few others that relate to your specific niche from SEOmoz's list of directories (http://www.seomoz.org/directories) You can also get links other ways, I wrote a quick article about gaining high quality links from authoritative domains - http://www.bradkrussell.com.au/followed-links-authoritative-domains. Hope that helps, Brad

[irvingw]

I think it is NOT a good place to start. These directories are dead. Google knows they are spam. If you have a new site and you want to build up some trust in Google, submitting a brand new site to 100 spam directories is a perfect way to show them you have bad intent. You would be better off not link building like that and showing them that you are not trying to game the system. Build up social media presence and link to them from your site, set up a places page and G+ page and link to them , work on your on page optimization. Don't start spamming links and building up an artificial link profile on a brand new site or you'll get most likely get penalized.

[William.Lau]

Less official directories are no longer worth as much anymore. Its because anyone can do it, which just saturates the directory. Its a good place to start, but doesn't mean putting your site on 100 directories will do you any good.