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Link Building Without The SEO Risks

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In this article Glen Dimaandal goes deep into one of the biggest subjects in search engine optimization (SEO) – Link building and how to avoid the SEO Risks often associated with it.

We are firm believers in natural linking – in other words, we never ask for links and we regularly place external links on our website that takes our visitors to valuable content related to our subject. (These external links are not requested and we give them freely).

It is not rocket science – but the more valuable and helpful your content is, the more links you will get!

SEO at it’s best is working with the search engines to deliver your content to them in a format that makes their task of indexing your website easier. That said, just about everyone agrees that the more natural links you receive – the better your search engine ranking. So follow Glen’s guide to develop a safe and effective strategy for getting more links.

Building Links That Drive SEO without the Risks – By Glen Dimaandal 

Link building is an integral part of every successful SEO strategy. To modern search engines, backlinks are more than just the conduits that interconnect pages around the web. They’re also viewed as votes of confidence that help search engines decide which sites to trust and prioritize. The more links you have and the higher the quality of the sources, the greater your site’s ranking power becomes.

Of course, talking about the value of links is a lot easier than actually building them. Finding relevant and reputable sites that will make good link sources is one thing – convincing the webmasters that control them to link to your site is quite another.

And while gaining links generally does good things to your site, there’s SEO Risks associated with over-optimization. Google and other search engines have algorithmic and manual measures in place to flag webmasters who try to game their systems. Sites caught amassing unnatural links from low-quality sites can find their search rankings abruptly dropping, leading to sharp declines in organic traffic.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how you can find, qualify and obtain links that help your SEO without creating SEO Risks that result in penalties. We’ll also talk about ways to quantify the impact of your link acquisition so you can justify the time and effort spent in pursuing link acquisition opportunities.

Taking the Risk Out Of SEO – What Factors that Make a Link Good or Bad?

Modern search engines favor sites that have good amounts of natural back links emanating from trustworthy sites. Conversely, they look at sites with suspicion when they detect abnormally high numbers of links pointing to them from shady websites.

Knowing how to tell one from the other can spell the difference between a successful SEO campaign and an outright failure. Here are the things you have to consider when looking at a potential link source for your site:

Editorial links are given and not paid for. They’re usually mentioned within a page’s HTML body and are contextually suggestive of what the reader will find in the pages they point to.  Search engines usually place more weight on these links compared to those that are in the header, sidebar and footer areas which are usually used to display links to advertisers.

PageRank information was once readily available through Google’s own PageRank Checker tool. Several years ago, you could just pop a URL into the tool and it will give you the page’s PageRank rating. A couple of years ago, Google stopped updating results that the tool generated, forcing SEO practitioners to rely more on similar metrics such as Moz’s domain authority and Majestic’s Citation Flow. These KPIs allow link builders to see which sites are likely to pass the most potent kind of link equity.

Aside from raw link-based authority metrics, the type of root domain that a site is built on also matters. Google and other search engines are also biased towards government, educational institution and big brand sites. Anytime you can get editorial links from .gov, .edu and major commercial sites, it’s a great day for your SEO campaign.

Conversely, links that come from low-authority sites will barely matter in your quest to gain better rankings. While it’s normal to have some low-quality sites linking to your site’s pages is normal, having too many of them in your link profile could end up harming your rankings. Make sure that your time, energy and resources are spent on acquiring links from mid to high-authority sites.

When building links, start by looking at sites within your own city, state and country. These links will matter more in helping you rank for search results within the area where your target market lives.

Take advantage of this by pursuing link opportunities from sites with legitimate user bases. This allows you to channel not just ranking power to your site, but to drive valuable referral traffic as well. The higher the linking site’s engagement metrics are and the more the link to your site serves a purpose, the greater its contribution to your SEO campaign.

Conversely, avoid sites that seem to have been built just for farming content and linking to other sites. These sites usually don’t have active readers who’ll click on the links on its pages. They’re pretty easy to spot as you’ll see a low comment, social sharing and Alexa ranking stats from them. Over time, these links are the types whose values would fade and weaken.

When you’re building links, see whether the articles on a potential partner site contain links that are above the fold. Ask the webmaster if it’s okay for you to get a link to your site in these parts of his pages or better yet, read their site guidelines to see if they have existing policies on the matter.

As much as possible, try and get links from sites that allow links without nofollow tags. However, if you don’t mind missing out on link equity and exposure is good enough for you, don’t let this stop you.

However, don’t overdo your optimization of anchor text. Using exact match anchor text is an invitation to Google’s Penguin penalty. You can include keywords in your anchor text as long as you mix it with other words and make sure it’s within the contextual flow of the content’s discussion.

You can check your prospect sites’ IP addresses easily with this tool.

Ethical Link Building Strategies Without The SEO Risks

Link building can be done in a variety of ways. It’s an aspect of SEO where you can get really creative. In theory, the best way to gain links is through the merit of your content. Websites with compelling content attract natural links from relevant sites. This route is by far the safest and most natural way to gain links.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the skills, patience and luck to make it work this way.

In practice, getting links by virtue of a strong content library can be very tough. Unless you have truly unique content assets that are far more compelling than anyone else’s. the chances of standing out are slim to none. In cases like this, you can consider taking a more proactive approach towards link building while still abiding by the search engines’ rules. In this post, we’ll focus on two of the most reliable white hat link building methods: guest posting and resource page link building.

As the name suggests, guest posting involves the contribution of articles or Infographics to blogs that cover topics directly or closely related to your niche. If the webmaster accepts and publishes a writer’s work. The writer is rewarded with a link to his own site along with an author bio that talks about him and his business.

Resource page link building, on the other hand, involves finding webpages that list information resources relevant to their content themes. The link builder then contacts the webmaster and suggests his site for inclusion by pointing to linkworthy content in it.

Both methods are ethical, scalable and highly effective when done right. The first crucial step is finding sites that are both topically relevant and are showing signs that they’ll be willing to link to sites like yours. The next one is convincing them that they should give your link a place within their pages.

We’ll cover both these steps in the succeeding sections but something else to emphasis here is that you are not looking for Unnatural Links. An unnatural link according to Google is “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

We shall assume for the purpose of this article that you only want to attract Natural Links – but for more clarity on unnatural links this article is excellent.

Avoiding SEO Risks In Your Link Prospecting Process

Prospecting is one of the most work-intensive parts of link building. Several years ago, link builders had to manually scour the web for viable link sources. These days, a combination of powerful tools and specialized techniques allows link builders to find, analyze and qualify websites by the bulk. Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

Step 1: Adjust Your Google Search Settings

The first thing you need to do is go to your browser and tweak your Google search settings. Under Google Instant predictions, select the option to never display Google Instant results.

Under results Per Page, move the cursor to the extreme right and set it at 100.

These tweaks allow you to display 100 search results on Google at a time. More on why that’s important later.

Step 2: Run Special Queries Using Search Operators

The next step is to run some searches that will yield just the kind of sites that make good link prospects. To laser-focus our searches, we need to use special commands called search operators. These strings of text limit search results displayed to just the listings that contain words which indicate topical relevance and willingness to link. Below are some popular search operators for finding guest blogging and forum link building targets:

For Finding Guest blog Guest Blogging Opportunities

Let’s see how these queries work. Suppose you’re building links for a site that sells used car parts. You can insert that keyword into any of these queries and get a lot of possible link prospects. In this example, let’s use the search operator “keyword” + “write for us.”

These are just three of the 60+ pages that we saw with this keyword and search operator combination. The query seems to be on point as we inspected the first few ones more closely:

++++++++

For Finding Resource Page Linking Opportunities

Using some of these operators, we found several possible linking opportunities in the resource pages/related links sections of automotive sites:

++++++++++

Step 3: Use SEOQuake to scrape the SERPs.

SEOQuake is a great tool for one very simple reason: it allows you to export the search results to a CSV file that can be opened in Excel. After entering the queries and getting narrowed-down search results, all you need to do is click on the Export as CSV link to the left:

Open the file with Excel and you’ll find the data, albeit unstructured at the moment:

To make the data more presentable, go to the Data ribbon and click Text to Column. In the first step, choose Delimited.

Next, choose Semicolon as the separator.

The data will now be arranged nicely in columns, but you only really need the URLs of the pages, which are in column B.

Step 4: Pre-qualify the URL List

Since we now have a list of URLs that are relevant to the target keyword and are open to linking to sites like yours, it’s time to refine the list further by eliminating sites that don’t have substantial authority metrics.

For the most part, SEOs like to use Moz’s domain authority (DA) metric to gauge the potency of a prospect’s links. For our agency, a DA of at least 25 is acceptable. We discard sites that are lower than that unless they’re very new and are showing good potential with a strong following.

If you have a Moz subscription, you can check site Das one by one either with the Open Site Explorer tool or the Moz toolbar. However, doing that can take a lot of time and work. To save lots of time, sweat and electricity, I recommend using a nice little desktop called Netpeak Checker. Basically, you can grant the tool access to your Moz account and it lets you check DAs by the bulk. Simply copy and paste a bunch of URLs from your spreadsheet and watch the magic happen. It’s also great for bulk-checking other stats such as Majestic’s Trust Flow and Alexa rank.

If you don’t have a Moz subscription, you can still semi-bulk check URL DAs. SEO Review Tools has a browser-based bulk DA checker that can check DAs for you by batches of 10. It’s not much, but it’s free, so you can’t complain about that.

Once you’ve decided on a minimum DA, it’s time to cut away the non-qualified sites from your list.

Step 5: Review the Sites Manually

Just because Google Search says a site is relevant to yours and just because Moz’s DA metric suggests the site has a significant amount of authority doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a great link prospect. The final assessment of a site’s qualification is the eye test. You need to manually review the shortlist of sites you’ve prospected to make sure it’ll help move the needle on your SEO campaign.

Below is a list of questions you need to ask yourself that might disqualify a site from your shortlist:

If the site gets a favorable answer for most or all of the items above, it’s probably worth reaching out to.

To keep things nice and organized, create a tracker in Excel or with Google Sheets. Beside each URL, I suggest you also have columns for the following information:

Keeping a constantly updated database allows you to keep track of which sites granted you links and which ones declined or ignored your outreach attempt. This helps you avoid reaching out to the same sites repeatedly and it helps you establish possible patterns in attempts that succeeded and failed.

Reaching Out to Fellow Webmasters

Having a solid link prospecting process is great, but it means nothing if it isn’t backed up by an effective outreach approach. Outreach is the part where you send a message to a webmaster in hopes of persuading them to give you a linking opportunity. However, it’s never as simple as emailing someone and begging for a favor. You need to craft just the right string of words to make an impression, start a conversation and ultimately make a strong case on why the site’s admin should move a finger to help you out.

If you found a prospect site through the process in the previous section, it’s highly unlikely that you’re the first one to send that site an email with link acquisition as the primary motive. The challenge is to rise above all the noise and make your message stand out. Here are some tips on how you can do that:

There’s really no single best way to do outreach. Testing a few variants of a message to see which one works best is the way to go.

Writing custom outreach messages to each site you approach will work best because it gives the webmaster the feeling that you wrote particularly to him or her. Using templates heavily runs the risk of having a low response rate because generic messages can make webmasters feel they’re being spammed.

If you want a general idea of what a typical outreach message looks like, here’s a sample:

Hi,

I’ve been a reader of <target site’s name> for a while now and it’s my first time to volunteer to contribute. I’m hoping you’d be interested in a post titled <article idea’s title>. I checked your articles and saw that there hasn’t been much written about the subject.

I look forward to hearing from you soon. More power!

Thanks,

<Your name>

If you’re targeting sites for resource page links, a message like this would be fine:

Hi,

I just saw your Related Links page on <keyword/industry> and I thought there were some great listings there. If you don’t mind, I’d like to suggest the inclusion of <your site’s URL>. It’s a site that has excellent insights on <keyword> and I’m sure your users would find it useful.

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Sincerely,

<Your Name>

Again, these templates are just to give you an idea of what an actual message looks like. I highly encourage you to customize these and make it sound like the email was written just for its recipients.

If you get positive responses, thank the webmasters and put together your content asset as best as you could. If the webmaster sets a hard deadline, be sure to be prompt with your submissions. Some sites run very strict editorial calendars and you have to respect that.

If you’ve submitted an article but don’t receive a response, it’s generally a good idea to follow up in a few days to check on the submission’s status. However, avoid sending more than one follow-up message – the last thing you want to make the partner site feel is harassed. Keep in mind that they have all the rights to publish or not publish your work. You’re merely asking for a favor.

Measuring the Impact of Link Building

The analytics behind link building is a very expansive topic that would warrant a separate post. However, it’s important to know what to look at when justifying your campaign. These are the most fundamental indicators that your efforts are paying off:

Remember to set the baselines for these metrics before you start the campaign so you can show your client or boss what kind of progress is being made.

In Closing

Link building is one of the trickiest and most tedious parts of SEO but in most cases, it’s necessary. The good thing is that tools and processes are there to make the work easier and more scalable. The two types we discussed here are just a couple of many different ways to acquire links ethically. I’ll leave it to you to choose and use other methods.

About the Author

Glen Dimaandal is the founder, CEO and sole author of GDI Online Marketing, a Philippine-based SEO company.

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