Tweet

Diversify Your Link Building Efforts

Written by: Scott Hendison

Article Overview: Good inbound links for your website can be hard to come by, but if you try enough different strategies, something always sticks.

Diversify Your Link Building Efforts

By regularly submitting to web directories, making sure your blog is pinging news services, submitting your RSS feeds, submitting content to article directories, and even by linking to your own internal pages with good anchor text, you’re going to continue to grow those inbound links.

“Rented” links are another story, and Google’s position is that paid links are definitely bad. They are aggressively fighting to identify and devalue any inbound links that are determined to be paid, and they are penalizing sites that are selling the links.There’s no denying that it still works, because they can’t catch everything, but as time goes on, they’ll catch more and more. For now, there are still too many ways to “fly under the radar” and they can’t possibly catch them all, but if you’ve been buying your links, it’s time to consider a more long term strategy.

What Google can do, and what they ARE doing, is “penalizing” websites that are selling links without the nofollow tag, and they are penalizing them by lowering their green toolbar PageRank.

At this point, Google has not yet lowered these sites rankings, but in my opinion, this was sort of a warning shot across the bow to warn those selling links that they should stop, or that’s next.

I’ve personally paid for links for my own sites before, and some even on a monthly basis, because I believe they have value in the traffic they might bring. It’s a safe bet that if Google “catches” those sites selling links, then any value they have for my ranking will be removed, if it hasn’t been already.

In my opinion, Google can never penalize someone for buying links. Otherwise, an entire cottage industry would pop up buying links for your competition. Instead, what Google does is devalue an inbound link that they determine to be paid and put in place only for ranking purposes.

I believe that the way that they devalue the juice of an inbound link is not by devaluing the link itself, but by devaluing the overall PageRank of the site that is passing along the link to you - i.e. - that makes your link worth a bit less.

The bottom line is that without some sort of link building going on, you’re just not going to be pulling ahead of the competition, and you have to try everything within the Webmaster guidelines.

It’s also extremely important to build links to many different pages on your website, and with many different variations of anchor text too. There’s never a reason to focus all of your link building activity on a single web page, or with identical anchor text. When a site naturally acquires links, they come in all different flavors, to different areas of the site. The key to success is to appear “natural”, so be sure to diversify tour targets and your anchor text accordingly.

Linking to others, commenting (intelligently) on forums and blogs, writing great content of your own, and creating useful tools are only a few ways you can make links happen.

Related Articles
  Link Building It’s tough, but you can do it.
  Link Popularity
  SEO and Link Building
  Do You Know These Link Building Mistakes?
  Why You Shouldn't Keep All Income Eggs in One Basket

Article Tags: anchor text, blog, fly, google, inbound links, news services, pagerank, radar, safe bet, shot across the bow, term strategy, traffic, warning shot, web directories



Related Forum Posts
Type of business with building - If you owned a building and Wal-Mart was opening its doors across the street in a previously unoccupied area (along with 12-14 small shops), what type of business would you start? Here are the considerations: 1. Money is a non-factor 2. Building is fairly large (10,000) square feet 3. Building is on the corner of a busy intersection (about to get much busier)
Re: Using Craigslist SEO to Promote Your Website - [quote:372g7ueu]2) Trent: could you explain more about building solid backlinks? What constitutes as solid? Do you go to relevant articles and try to set up a link to your content that relates to that topic?[/quote:372g7ueu] Article marketing Guest blogging Blog commenting Link exchanges Directories Forums Link wheels Social bookmarking Link bait Quality content Also, you want your links to be keyword anchored if at all possible. Links from sites relevant to yours are better too.
Re: How to do Link Building? - Link Building... Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it's still the trump card for higher rankings. What happens to all those Wavers that think [i:1otfkny0]Getting Links = SEO[/i:1otfkny0] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on "links=seo". When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to. What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn't count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors. toddbeld
Re: Search Engine Optimization - simply trying your hand at doing it yourself :- Directory Submissions - targeted links at high PR directories Blog and Forum Postings - to high PR and frequently crawled sites Social Bookmarking Classified Ads Article Marketing - submit to high PR directories, could also serve as link baits Link Exchange - with relevant sites authority sites Link Baits - for organic linking
Re: Do Women Play the Stock Market? - Hi Aneshia, [quote="AneshiaYS":1lz5khur]I implement a strategy for risk management[/quote:1lz5khur] I'm glad to read this. I think it's the most important part of investing. "Diversify" and have a clear "exit strategy" - ah yes, but "following it" is the hard part and if you have a strategy to induce your clients to follow the strategy, I should think it would be an excellent service.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Selling What Sizzles vs. Delivering Real Value

Work at Home Moms and Their Bad Rap?

Executives and Elevators Perfecting That Pitch

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.