Getting Started with Link-Building (Advice, Please)
-
Hi forum, my company has done almost ZERO link building, and most of the traffic we receive to our site is for our branded search terms (people searching for our company name). Our content and on-page SEO is pretty solid, but how would you suggest getting started in link building? We've dabbled in comment marketing, but almost all of these were unfollowed links. We already do PR and submit it to prweb.com. We have submitted to quite a few online directories and are currently working our way through relevant directories provided by SEOMoz. We do not want to pay for links, and we want to do all of this in house. We are committed to putting the time in to get high quality links by hand. Does anyone have any advice? A "Beginner's Guide to Link-Building" would be excellent. The specific site we are working on is http://www.consumerbase.com/index.html if that is of any use. Thanks!
-
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide-updated-for-post-penguin
After you read that info on the beginners guide I would read through this post by scott mclay as he talks about setting up campaigns.
-
there is an easy way to find sites that have dofollow comment sections but I will not list it here since this is something you definitely want to stay away from.
The problem with comment linking is that if it's a dofollow it is anly a matter of time before all the spammers start posting on it and what USED to be a decent link is now a like with a hundred spammy med, adult and casino links on it. These sites quickly become toxic and pose a risk to your site.
-
It's debatable on whether Google takes no-followed links into consideration. I've heard arguments on both sides but where they are most beneficial is creating discussion on a forum or comment board to boost your brands image.
I know comment linking is easy, but do not get caught up in it. In my early days I had the "lazy seo" mentality (as much as I want to deny it), and one of my personal sites got dinged hard. I actually blogged about it when I used to work at SEO.com here: http://www.seo.com/blog/staying-off-googles-naughty-list/
Here is an article about how JC Penney got slammed for buying links: http://www.seo.com/blog/seo-jcpenney-disaster/
There are ways of link building that aren't spammy, but like I mentioned, any legitimate link building tactic can BECOME spammy if you are lazy.
I forgot to mention, but infographics are a great way to build links as well, but don't have the "if I build it, they will come" mentality. You need to promote it and share it for it to grow
I hope this is helping Zora!
Kevin Phelps
-
Perfect, thanks Darin. I will give that a read today.
-
This is definitely useful, thank you Kevin.
Can you go into more detail about the benefits of comment linking? Almost all of the sites I found made their comment links no-follow. Even when I used a "do-follow directory," to find blogs - most, if not all, were no-follow.
Is a no-follow link still useful when working to boost DA?
(Just to be clear, when you say comment linking, you mean attaching a website URL to your 'comment-author-name's' anchor text when posting a comment on a blog, right?)
-
Hey Zora,
The thing to note about link building is that you need to do it with your brand in mind, not for the purpose of manipulating the search engines. Excellent link building methods include:
- Guest blogging
- Submitting to truly relevant directories
- Local directories (even if you're not a locally-focused company it's still acceptable)
- Press Releases (although Google doesn't count those links anymore)
- Comment linking (when you are actually adding a helpful response)
Do not get mixed up in this garbage:
- Link trading
- Mass article submissions
- Content spinning
- General article directories
- Link purchasing
- Privately owned blog networks
Make sure you understand what Google means by "paid" links. This doesn't mean hiring an agency to help you is a "paid" link since you're paying them. A "paid" link is a purchase where you are dealing directly with the site owner that is irrelevant and holds no value whatsoever. The recommended link building methods above have other purposes besides just the link.
You should check out our infographic we made to help people with guest blogging. I think you'd like it: http://www.guestblogposter.com/beginners-guide-guest-blogging-infographic/
Just remember, any of these link building methods can become spammy. It's how you treat them that makes them effective. Do not over due it either. Make sure you are varying your anchor text and don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't do all guest posting or all directories. Mix it up and be legitimate!
Does that help?
Kevin Phelps
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwphelps -
Not sure if you saw this but we have "A Beginners Guide" here on seomoz.org
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
Read this first and let us know if you have any questions about it.
Darin.
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
-
Benefit of getting more then one link from a site?
Hi Guys, Is there any benefit (purely for SEO - link building) to getting more than one link from a domain if you already have 1? From my understanding, even if you had 100 links from a domain, that really counts as 1 for link authority. So from this, i don't see much point in getting more then 1 link. Is this a right assumption? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
I would like to get rid of 300,000+ links, please
A couple of months ago, I noticed that in Webmaster Tools my site had acquired 300,000+ links from a single site, updown.com. It seems to be a reputable site, and also in the correct industry, so I wrote to them and said that we love links, but that was probably a few too many and they all go to our privacy policy page. I suggested that they had some type of error that they might want to fix. After a month with no response, I wrote again, and still no response. This is now a month after that.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Linda-Vassily
The strange thing is that I don't see the links when I visit their pages, even in the source (Google provides a list of sample linking pages). I also don't see those links in Open Site Explorer, Majestic, AHREFs, nor Screaming Frog. If I were seeing this anywhere else, I'd just ignore it as some type of glitch. But this is information from Google. I have not received any warnings nor manual actions and I am disinclined to open a disavow can of worms, since the site is doing well and I'd rather not stir things up if I don't have to. Any thoughts about what I should (or shouldn't) do? Is this a problem, or should I assume Google knows it is a glitch and will ignore it? It has been in my Webmaster Tools for about three months. Thanks for reading!0 -
Dummy links in posts
Hi, Dummy links in posts. We use 100's of sample/example lnks as below http://<domain name></domain name> http://localhost http://192.168.1.1 http:/some site name as example which is not available/sample.html many more is there any tag we can use to show its a sample and not a link and while we scan pages to find broken links they are skipped and not reported as 404 etc? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Not sure if I should disavow these links or not
I am on the marketing team for CandyGalaxy.com we are an online candy store that specializes in bulk candy for events. Were just about a year and a half old and i'm running into some SEO strategy road blocks lately. When we started the company we used an oversee's seo company. For the first few months results were great then things took a massive dive as google began rolling out updates early and mid last year. After that point we started taking things in house and have been trying to create content and begin content marketing. We launched a blog @ blog.candygalaxy.com and also launched and educational resource at candybuffet101.com - However the question i'm up against now is what to do with those bad old links? Are they actually hurting us? Or just neutral? I'm also trying to decided what to do about the links in my footer? We put those there because those are truly our most popular products and we wanted customers to have easy access, but are those links potentially harmful? I'm questioning these issues because I feel like there is something holding back some of my pages from ranking. For example "blue candy" is a very popular section of our website. We have worked on a lot of content for the blog related to blue candy, made videos, photo shoots ect. We have customer reviews on page and unique category content. According to open site explorer our DA and PA are around the range of most of the sites in the 8-12 serp position. But we have more social activity then all but the top 2-3 spots. However the page almost impossible to find via search. Its not in the first 300 results and surely the page is more relevant then an entry about quilts.. Similar situations like this have led me to think that maybe there is a technical underlying issues that I have not addressed. ? The content is definitely there because if i type in a line from the content directly to google it is the first result. So the site seems indexed properly.. Would love to hear any feedback from similar experiences or ideas. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan_Murrell0 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Directories - Bad or Good for Link Building (Discussion on Penguin)
Hello, I would like to hear everybodies opinion on directories for link building now that penguin is out. Here's a good background post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger Do you think their out? How do you still use them? Which ones do you stick to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Linking to Authorities
Hello, I know that if its good for the user, its not a bad move. But for this question I am specifically asking for how it affects my ranking. Does it help my ranking to link to appropriate authority sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser
Have you done any tests to see if linking out to authoritative sites like .gov info pages, industry leaders, etc. help with a sites ranking. I am thinking about taking of all of these outgoing links and just link to my important pages. Thank you, Tyler0