Is Link Building Dead?
-
I know there are various posts about this but none of them are up to date.
I am so reluctant to do any linking now as I was hurt by google algorithms (without even knowing I was doing anything bad back in April 2012).
I am just overwhelmed with all the seo info out there - I have written articles, blog on my site, lots of facebook postings but I don't seem to reach people
I now have someone who wants to help me get a new linking structure to get my ranking back but the whole idea scares me. He basically wants to do the following using social media platforms only to get natural links (is this a very bad idea? ANY comments will be appreciated:
Proposed Plan includes 200-250 Do-Follow Themed Links to your “TARGET SITE”
50 Approved Social Bookmarking Links: - 2 articles are used to build 50 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.
25 Approved Article Submission Links: - 2 articles are used to build 25 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.
20 Approved Press Release Links: -2 articles are used to build 20 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.
50 Approved Web 2.0 Properties: - 2 articles are used to build 50 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.
30 Approved Classified Links: - 2 articles are used to build 30 PR 3-9 do-follow links with guaranteed approvals.
-
You're right to be scared! Earn backlinks via quality content and clever PR instead.
RE: News releases... http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339
-
Llanero,
I was going to write a long list of reasons why you shouldn't do this but there are so many posts out there on the topic, I'm just going to say it's a horrible plan. Rather than looking for someone to build links for you, you're better off looking for someone to help you write content that is going to make a positive difference in your marketing.
-
I agree with Kevin. Those sort of tactics will not work and will ultimately bring your site more pain.
No, link building is not dead, but it has changed.
If your blog posts and articles are good and target information that people are searching for your pages will rank well and people will link to them either through social media or via their own sites.
Consider also backing up what you are doing with content on your site by making sure you include authorship that is connected to a Google+ account. Then use content sharing platforms like Google+ and LinkedIn (possibly specific LinkedIn groups if they exist for your industry) to place snippets of your articles with read more links to your articles and posts.
Peter
-
Run. Google is extremely good at figuring out unnatural link profiles, so please don't do this.
The key is to earn links by having unique, compelling content that people want to link to. Invest time and resources creating content that is useful. This is difficult to do (as you know), so read up on successful campaign and look for firms in your industry that is successful in doing this. Try mixing up your content strategy to see what works (video, images, how-to guides or whatever). Study your analytics and leverage any data source you have to get inspiration. Good luck!
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
-
Too many links pointing to our privacy policy page: Hurting our ranking efforts of main pages?
Hi community, As per the "Links" report from GSC, there are millions of pages pointing to our privacy policy page. We can expect high number of links to this page being ours an open source product. But these links are overtaking the count of links pointing to our homepage which are very artificial from few spammy or low quality sites. "Privacy policy" anchor text is also been the top anchor text. Our homepage ranking dropped and I suspect this is the culprit. Google might be considering this is the important page being linked on top with anchor text. Shall I Disavow these sites and will this makes Google stop counting links, and the anchor text coming from these sites as well? Suggestions please. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Linking Anchor Text is simply "." what is the purpose of this?
I have several backlinks with high spam scores. The anchor text as listed is either just a period, or it says there is no anchor text. These links don't generate traffic and there is no way for me to contact the website owner. Is this a case for the Search Console Disavow Tool?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Harley.Helmer0 -
Rank drop after link reclamation
Link reclamation is good activity interms of technical SEO and UX. But I noticed couple of times rank drop post the link reclamation activity. Why does this happen? What might be the cause? Beside redirecting to the most relevant page in contest to the source page content; anything else we must be looking into?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Canonicalize vs Link Juice
I recently wrote (but have not published) a very comprehensive original article for my new website (which has pretty much no domain authority). I've been talking to the publisher of a very high Domain Authority site and they are interested in publishing it. The article will include 2-3 follow backlinks to my website. My question is should I: Repost the article in my own site and then request a "rel=canonical" from the high authority site Not re-post the article on my own site and just collect the link juice from the high authority site Which would be better for my overall SEO? Assume in case 1) that the high authority site would add a rel=canonical if I asked for it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke20 -
Removing Poison Links w/o Disavow
Okay so I've been working at resolving former black-hat SEO tactics for this domain for many many months. Finally our main keyword is falling down the rankings like crazy no matter how many relevant, quality links I bring to the domain. So I'm ready to take action today. There is one inner-page which is titled exactly as the keyword we are trying to match. Let's call it "inner-page.html" This page has nothing but poison links with exact match anchor phrases pointing at it. The good links I've built are all pointed at the domain itself. So what I want to do is change the url of this page and let all of the current poison links 404. I don't trust the disavow tool and feel like this will be a better option. So I'm going to change the page's url to "inner_page.html" or in otherwords, simply changed to an underscore instead of a hyphen. How effective do you think this will be as far as 404ing the bad links and does anybody out there have experience using this method? And of course, as always, I'll keep you all posted on what happens with this. Should be an interesting experiment at least. One thing I'm worried about is the traffic sources. We seem to have a ton of direct traffic coming to that page. I don't really understand where or why this is taking place... Anybody have any insight into direct traffic sources to inner-pages? There's no reason for current clients to visit and potentials shouldn't be returning so often... I don't know what the deal is there but "direct" is like our number 2 or 3 traffic source. Am I shooting myself in the foot here? Here we go!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry0 -
One of my outbound links website go hit by panda!
Hi mozzers, today I received a message from one of my blogger partners announcing me that he got hit by panda. 2 weeks ago I had him placing 2 anchors one in our main domain and a second one on our subdomain. I know panda focuses essentially on dups and I have paid attention to our webmaster tools to make sure we haven t got any messages Which we re good with. What do you guys suggest, will this affect us at some point or we re good? also in case that we re good will panda affect the blogger's authority therefore ours? if yes I should probably remove them, right? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
How Can I Check Competitors Linking Profile?
If I'm looking for weak points in my competitors linking structure, how can I use Open Site Explorer to do that? In other words, I'm not sure how to use Open Site Explorer? Zane
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Springboks0 -
Single Domain With Different Pages Deep Linking To Different Pages On External Domain
I've been partaking in an extensive trial study and will be releasing the results soon, however I do have quite a strong indication to the answer to this question but would like to see what everyone else thinks first, to see where the common industry mindset is at. Let's say SiteA.com/page1.html is PR5 and links out to SiteB.com/page1.html This of course would count as a valuable backlink. Now, what would happen if SiteA.com/page2.html, which is also PR5, links out to SiteB.com/page2.html ? The link from SiteA is coming from a different page, and is also pointing to a different deeplink on SiteB, however it will contain the same IP address. What would the benefit be for having multiple deeplinks in this way (as outlined above, please read it carefully before responding) as opposed to having just a single deeplink from the domain? If a benefit does exist, then does the benefit start to become trivial? This has nothing to do with sitewide links. Serious answers only please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stevenheron1