Getting links on old blog posts

[elefantes]

There's 100 of blogs with posts that link to my competitors, but don't link to my site.They are mostly lists. Eg: "The best Sites to get blue widgets"

I was thinking about getting in touch with these blogs, and asking them to take a look at my site, to see if perhaps they would add it to the list. In fact, I started doing it and I got some links already.

Now I am starting to worry that Google could consider these links as unnatural, because, you know, the algos are not exactly perfect. Anyway, the links are important for the exposure anyway.

I've two questions:

1. Is there any chance I'll be penalized?

2. May I get a SEO benefit from this links?

[EGOL]

I agree with you, Alan.   That's how most people do it.

I've found through a few small retail sites and a couple of information sites, that publishing useful or interesting content can be enough that other people will share it for you.  There are still niches out there where one or two people, working as a team, can produce, in two or three years, more content and better content than all of the competitors in the niche combined.  Once you have that, then some of the people who find your site and see the depth of content, will share it for you.  And, there are some topics where people will search deeply for the right information.

If you have a hardware store or a toy store or a jewelry store, you don't have to attack the entire industry.  Instead, focus on a very small niche of products that are typically not represented well in local stores, and that do not have an online champion.

The niche must be chosen carefully.

I don't have any interest in social media, or making personal connections, or in soliciting others.    But, I do have an interest in learning the deep technical details of things and enjoy writing about them.  Through that, I provide the community service similar to what you provide.  Then a steady stream of visitor questions coming in and being answered, first by email and then published to the content library that provides a service to a consumer community - these are coming from people who may have first purchased at amazon or or some other vendor who places 100% of their effort in making the sale but places zero effort in helping the customer after the sale.

These people are out searching deeply.  They feel like they have been abandoned. This is today's internet -  Walmart, Amazon, Jet, and others are all focused on the aggressive price competition.  Service after the sale and deep information for the consumer has been abandoned at the very time when you think it should be abundant.  Nobody wants to write it.  How many times have you purchased something and could not understand directions that were written on another continent and then translated into English by someone who knows the language poorly.

That leads to a problem in that you become the default service department for amazon!  They don't do it.  But if you step into that role you quickly obtain a knowledge of what information people need and when you answer an email, you also place another brick in your relevant content library.  So, although I am not making any direct outreach at all to advocate a brand, engaging a community, or soliciting on my own behalf in any way, the questions keep coming in, the content mass continues to grow,  and it attracts more and more traffic year over year.

Most business owners are not going to do this because they don't like to write content and they don't have a situation that allows them to invest a lot of time now and not be paid back until years down the road.  No SEO will do this because the upfront labor is very high and the return isn't fast enough to satisfy a client.  These opportunities are perfect for the person who enjoys working from the cloister. 

[AlanBleiweiss]

EGOL,

As always, you infuse wisdom into this discussion.  I have always been an advocate of "content first, content last".  Yet in 2015, search engines are only one piece of the puzzle, and until and unless other efforts for brand visibility / authority / trust are made, the overwhelming majority of sites on the web will leave way too much money on the table.

I happen to believe links need to be generated through our own efforts yet it's not the "traditional" link building. Instead, it's more about advocacy of brand, community service, and participation in the community in which our prospective/existing clients/customers live.

If we are not active in those ways, we build a house on sand.

Just my take on it.

[EGOL]

just "produce great content" and sit on our asses.

That's what I do.

'Cept, I don't do much ass sittin'.   I am right back onto the next piece of content.

If you don't spend any time link buildin' you can make twice as much content and then even if it attracts half as many natural links you have broken even on the links because you have double the amount of content.

The problem with link buildin' is that you can only put 20 hours per week into it.  With content makin' at the end of the first year I have 100 articles out there pullin' links and at the end of the fifth year I have 500 articles out there pullin' links, but you are still only able to work 20 hours per week.  Rand would say that content makin' is a flywheel activity because it scales while link buildin' isn't.

The biggest risk that you take content makin' is that you are not honest with yourself, or unable to distinguish, "great content" that will become popular from "pedestrian content" that nobody will link to and most people bounce off of.

[AlanBleiweiss]

The reason for the skepticism is the scale of spam out there, and the volume of ways spam efforts attempt to trick search algorithms.  Google, even now, all these years into it, still does a very poor job of trapping some of that noise, and so the index remains polluted.

Of course, just building great content is never enough and won't ever be enough.  So we just need to check the boxes regarding the potential for Google to think "this isn't legitimate".

[elefantes]

They are real, quality, relevant, etc, etc. Is there any good reason for such skepticism? It seems like every link building idea is met with a negative attitude, as if we should just "produce great content" and sit on our asses.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Are they legitimate placement? Meaning - are the posts you seek links from real, quality, and relevant posts, and not on sites that are created for spam purposes?

Are you asking for a link and NOT specific anchor text, and NOT the wording they would use?

If the above scenario is what's happening, it's valid to reach out this way.  As long as you leave it up to them to decide whether to include your content or not, and decide what they write, and what anchor text to use, and there is no reciprocal exchange, and no paid aspect, you "should" be fine.

Of course, it's impossible to know what some poorly trained manual reviewer might think about them, however that's the only scenario where I'd be concerned in this situation.

And if all of the above criteria are met, then those links would be helpful to readers of those sites, and thus have a chance of bringing actual human users to your site. Which makes them valuable for many reasons, one of which is SEO.