Better to place linked-back article or post article and seek multiple links?
-
Which option is better for SEO purposes:
1. Author article for trade journal in return for link back to my home page.
2. Post article on my site and solicit links from multiple sites.
Assume links all have moderate authority.
-
Thanks, Ed.
I see your point, but I haven't seen a lot of viral activity when I've guest authored on good sites in the past.
So maybe I'll self-publish and try to promote links. If I don't get any links I can always take the article down and submit it.
Any additional thoughts?
-
This has always been a bit of a point of contention for me too. When you pitch an article then you can usually be pretty sure that it's going to attract one link - from the target. You can get in touch with someone and basically make a little agreement that you are going to write for them personally and that the piece is going to be specifically angled and targeted to make their brand or product look good. So the chances of getting it published in this way is high but you usually need a good relationship or at least an existing relationship with the site owner.
Then there's 'link-worthy' content that you put on your site and market it and hope it attracts links. This is much more speculative in my opinion because it might not be good enough to attract links and attracting links will inevitably take time as it rises to a prominent position in the SERP.
However, you forget that using the first way has the added benefit that the person you write for will want to market the content you wrote just for them to their own partners, suppliers customers and friends etc. So they will 'treat it as link-worthy content' and so long as the link is a 'naked link' so https://nakedlink.com then wherever that article gets sent you'll get a backlink from that source also.
Thew first way is the best IMO because you do all the work of writing, are guaranteed at least one good link and are guaranteed one good relationship that can be leveraged in the future. Then the difficult job of publicising the article is effectively outsourced to whomever you wrote it for because it's then in their interests to get it published on other websites to get more backlinks for them and you. Sometimes they will do a poor job but sometimes a flurry of links will come your way as they market the piece to other sites.
This has worked for us to great effect in the past with success stories and case studies and great pieces of content about other brands we like. Almost like ego-bait. I prefer to also build better relationships with the publishers so I can write again for them in the future if the content does well using different topics and attracting links to different pages on my site with anchor text (but don't overdo this, you'll end up with a penalty)
Sure there is a place for creating link-worthy content on your site and certainly if you're a Moz or a big brand this is the best strategy but for a smaller brand I'd advise creating the relationship, writing something with the target in mind that's personalised and makes them look good and something they will then want to 'trade up the chain' to quote Ryan Holiday - the master media manipulator.
So for smaller blogs it's number one and then when you're confident of a stellar article that's going to rank in 1-3 position then you can go for a skyscraper piece or a piece of 'linkworthy content' but it's much MUCH harder for smaller brands to do this and have it work. You may see no results at all.
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
-
Back links from seller review platforms
I did a back link research on one of our competitors and saw a back link from resellerratings.com listed as back link from a high authority website. My question is do any of these review platforms shopper approved, resellerratings, or trust pilot gurantee a do follow back link if i create an account with them? if so, which one?
Link Building | | Swifttechbuy0 -
Back links from press release. How and Who?
Is it thru I can publish article on press release site and get back links? If yes, are those paid? Do you have any one to recommend? Thank you, BigBlaze
Link Building | | BigBlaze2050 -
What is a good ratio of total links to linking root domains?
Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
I am getting links on people's wordpress blogs but are not showing up on the just discovered tool. Is it true that wordpress links are no-follow links that do give off any link-juice?
A blogger told me that "wordpress.com does not allow blogs to show advertisements or use links to sites that sell merchandise of any kind" is this true? Am i wasting my outreach time trying to get links from wordpress operated blogs?
Link Building | | odegi0 -
Link Building - Post Penguin
Hi, We have an eCommerce site that has recently been hit for some unnatural linking, resulting in a warning in our Google Webmaster Tools account. We weren't doing anything particularly underhand (and indeed before Penguin there wasn't a cause for concern) but nevertheless Google has picked up and penalised us. We've instantly removed the worst offending links and requested a resubmission. If this doesn't result in positive action from Google we're planning on employing the services of an Oracle member on SEOmoz who was kind enough to give us some fantastic free advice in order to go through and remove any further links that may be seen as questionable. Moving forward however I'm a little bit overwhelmed as to exactly what we should be doing in order to create a positive, natural link portfolio. I understand the emphasis is on ‘natural’ linking but we’ve been online for 8 years and I think it’s fairly safe to say that the number of links we have now is probably representative of about our ‘lot’ when it comes to 100% natural links. It would be nice to give our portfolio a nice gentle push in the right direction. I’ve checked through SEOmoz and the most up to date link building article they have appears to be http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links - This guide however does seem to suggest some things that are potentially frowned upon now (for example, highly optimised anchor text I understand is now a no-no). Obviously, in days gone by I could look at Open Site Explorer to try to emulate my competitors but, to be honest, most of them have what I would describe as a fairly poor link profile and if I'm going to invest real time in to this I want to make sure I'm heading off in the right direction. Does anybody on here know of a really high quality post penguin link building guide, either on SEOmoz or elsewhere that I can use as some bedtime reading? Our website is eCommerce in nature so an article tailored towards online selling would be ideal. Thanks for reading! Chris
Link Building | | ChrisHolgate0 -
How many nofollow links should we build to have a natural link profile
Hi guys, As with many link builders we have been building lots of dofollow links for our site, so many that mainly our incoming links are dofollow. Some pages have 99.5% dofollow external links which I know is not very natural. In your experience in terms of percentage how much should you have in terms of nofollow external links in your link profile. I noticed SEOMoz has about 12-13% nofollow external links, shall I go with this figure? Thanks guys. David
Link Building | | sssrpm0 -
How might Google differentiate between an artificial link exchange and partners linking to each other?
Hi, All! Artificial link exchanges (contacting a vaguely connected site and requesting to exchange links to increase your PR) is, as far as I know, considered an outdated, not-so-smart technique, as Google might devalue them. Yet, for real business partners to exchange links seems to be an entirely accepted and encouraged technique. While that would be intuitive to a human who's viewing the pages. how might Google detect when two sites that link to each other are linking because they are trusted business associates (valuable) as opposed to when they are doing a link exchange (devalued)? Thanks! Aviva
Link Building | | debi_zyx0 -
Press release site for posting article and get links, what do you think?
If find sites like: http://eon.businesswire.com/portal/site/eon/ and http://www.free-press-release.com/ where you have to pay to post article, they have very good domain autority, what is your advice on those site? eon.businesswire.com/ is asking 225$ for a lifetime registration but they have a DA of 91, is this a good investement for building incoming links and increasing DA? Thank you, Jean
Link Building | | BigBlaze2050