Link building is the most daunting process of any SEO strategy. Link building is not as easy as some SEOs make it sound. Often, the truth is that many SEOs that promise thousands of links in several days get these links by buying them. Buying links will get you a good amount of links way faster than organically building up the number of inbound links to your site, but the truth is that it isn’t a good idea, because Google considers buying links in order to pass/get page rank to be a link scheme. According to Google “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”
Of course Google wouldn’t penalize your site if it does not find out that you have been buying links to get your page rank up. It’s almost inevitable. In every situation that we’ve tested, they seem to know. Eric Enge, who explained why he doesn’t buy links wrote a good entry on how Google can find out that you have been buying/selling links.
For those who do buy/sell links but for only for advertising purposes you shouldn’t really worry since Google considers this as a valid reason. However, you should make sure that the links are properly designated as links for advertising only (no passing of page rank) by…
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag; or
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
If you have been buying links as part of your link building campaign or has been doing so for your clients this is a good time to rethink your strategy.
When building links for your website or any out there – you need to have a plan. Think about it. How long would it take you to build 250 “good” links if you are asking websites one by one? How long does it take you to find 250 websites that are even generally relevant to your website’s theme? After you’ve asked each of those 250 websites to link back to you, how many actually will? There really is a good solution to all of this, but you have to start to think outside of the box.
- Many companies use a “link baiting” technique. They come up with a neat tool or a neat informative article and people just start to notice it and link to it
- Companies will also produce press releases stating something cool and neat for what they do in the market. This always seems to grab some attention.
- Articles written about a similar subject to your website and submitted to news sources are always to great way to capture people’s attention.
- Directories are almost always a sure thing. Most directories are happy to have a link to your website. All directories have the hopes of becoming the next big place for people to go to search online.
- Blogging. What a great way to help keep people up to date with your latest news. If you can write compelling statements that keep people’s attention, you are sure to get a following, and some linking.
Above a just a few of the many examples of ways that you can grab some of those much needed links. My advice is to try out as many things as possible. You never know what you will get. What’s the worst that can happen? They will tell you “No” or you just don’t get the link. Then, it’s back to the drawing board and try-try-again. How creative can you be?
Here is how Netmark Essentials does some of the basic link building for their clients.
