Link Building vs. Straight Earning Links Discussion
-
Hello,
I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content.
I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry?
Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach.
But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome.
Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing.
Would love to hear your experiences either way.
Thanks.
-
We highly recommend you earn backlinks; our copywriters spend hundreds of hours writing articles about garden buildings.
We now have our business on page one in Bath, England, because we built quality links, and written white hat blog posts.
-
Hi Bob,
I've gone through the process of building and optimizing quite a few different websites and I've found that the best backlinks come from good content. I've also done paid (supposed to be a no-no) and outreach link building, so I think I've got a good perspective across all the different approaches.
My personal opinion is that at the very launch of a website, beyond just indexing and on-site optimization, it's a 100% must to have the site linked to on a few good directories or other sites that are connected. For every single site I've built, I've seen fantastic results with this initial push. I believe that all SEOs have a little cache of backlinks stashed away and we all use them sparingly whenever we need to give a new site that first push. With this little bit of a push, I usually see my sites begin to rank within 4 to 5 days on less competitive keywords. To be honest, I don't think that this initial paying for backlinks is an ethical issue or one that can be classified as 'black hat SEO'. I've found it practiced at the top level agencies and it's also something that's recommended in Rand Fishkin's book 'Art of SEO'.
After the initial launch, then comes the real work. How do we get quality backlinks consistently?
Reaching out to other webmasters in the same verticals has had some fantastic results for me as well. I typically do an outreach program that is personal and not a template-based spam fest. Oddly enough, I've had these outreach attempts even grow into marketing partnerships, and even business partnerships. I find that if you reach out authentically to other webmasters or business owners, they tend to respond much better.
I've competed in large markets and also small ones, and I've found that it can actually be a problem for smaller market segments or industries, that you run out of other sites to reach out to. In my previous startup, I found that the source of quality backlink partners ran out after 3 or 4 months of research. At that point, I set up google alerts for specific keywords, and stopped my outreach program and decided to focus on content creation instead.
This was where it really began to pay off in buckets.
For that business and as a startup, I was able to create backlinks from not relevant sites, but even government organizations looking to highlight a particular type of business (educational startups in this case). Creating content like infographics and how-to articles was an extremely good investment as well. We publicized what we deemed to be good content out across our social media, and I found that these continued to generate backlinks even years later. The main reason why anyone would want to link to your site, is that you have something interesting or useful for them to share. I even used myself as 'content', giving interviews to online news portals and blogs, always asking if they would kindly do me a favor and link to my site as part of the article. We also got lucky with one of our seasonal articles. This particular article was shared on our social media and a reporter at the local newspaper came across it. That eventually led to an offline article published about the company, and since offline content eventually gets republished on their site, it also led to a backlink from an incredibly reputable source.
I think that the reason why most SEOs tend to focus on paid or outreach programs is simply because of the amount of time it takes. Writing an email takes at most 10 minutes, while research, writing and creating the graphics for a good piece of content (video, written or otherwise), would take days and not have an immediate payoff.
All said and done, I feel that a solid linkbuilding program should be multi-faceted and not be overly dependent on just one aspect. If you depend solely on outreach as your main source of backlinks, then what happens when you no longer have time to write emails? Eventually, you will still need to focus on content creation.
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
-
Why There is No link Data Available in my Webmaster Tools even the site has lots of links and webmastert tools account setup properly
i have few account in my webmaster tools that are not showing any link data even the has lots of links. i checked the setup and its everything is good. is some one tell me why there is no data coming through? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners1 -
Reorganizing Links
Hello Guys, Im Reorganizing my link building list in excel. I have tons of good links that I found in the last 3 months. What I want to ask is if there is a way to put those links in my excel list in a automatic way with the folowing fields: Domain Pagerank DA (from moz) Type Submission link Im doint it manual and is driving me crazy 😛 Tks in advance! Regards, MM
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CurriculosOnline0 -
Guest post linking only to good content
Hello, We're thinking of doing guest posting of the following type: 1. The only link is in the body of the guest post pointing to our most valuable article. 2. It is not a guest posting site - we approached them to help with content, they don't advertise guest posting. They sometimes use guest posting if it's good content. 3. It is a clean site - clean design, clean anchor text profile, etc. We have 70 linking root domains. We want to use the above tactics to add 30 more links. Is this going to help us on into the future of Google (We're only interested in long term)? Is 30 too many? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link worth?
These are not my links but does anyone know what the value of one link from something like below is (bio or body) http://designwebkit.com/web-and-trends/how-many-fonts-designer-really-need/ www.thebuildingblox.com/termite-turmoil-how-to-identify-and-remedy-the-problem/ http://creativeoverflow.net/the-10-best-alternatives-to-dropbox/ in comparison with links from below www.01fangchan.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson
www.1.inerdentos.ru
www.1000empregos.com
www.1stdirectory.co.uk
www.2halsi.com
www.3dir.co.uk
www.514friends.com
www.57billion.com We disavowed around a 1000 links of the above quality (crap) and need to rebuild decent quality links and i would just like to know what the guess is on how many links such as below would need to be built to compensate for the loss. http://designwebkit.com/web-and-trends/how-many-fonts-designer-really-need/ vs www.01fangchan.com Would need to replace 1000.0 -
Is it worth getting links from .blogspot.com and .wordpress.com?
Our niche ecommerce site has only one thing going for it: We have numerous opportunities on a weekly basis to get reviews from "mom bloggers". We need links - our domain authority is depressing. My concern is that these "mom bloggers" tend to have blogs that end with .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com. How do I screen for "reviewers" that are worth getting links from and how can I make the most of the community we have available to us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Wilkerson1 -
Spam linking site how to report
I have a spam linking site that is generation thousans of links to my site. Even if i have a good link background, this is the only spammy i have, each week number of links comings from it increases by 500 , i know have 3000 links for that site and 1800 for other sites, but that one keeps growing What should i do, i dont want that link it is imposible to remove as webmaster does not respond
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How to idesntify "inorganic" links
I am intending to remove spammy link of my website http://cellspyexpert.com/ which has been ranking well but I noticed a sudden drop in its ranking. I took a lot of care while building links, I tried to get links from relevant high authority websites with high page rank. I used profiling and guest blogging method only and never participated in any link scheme but received following message in google webmaster tools " Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.cellspyexpert.com/" I got this message on 19<sup>th</sup> Sep and ranking dropped on 6<sup>th</sup> Oct 1- Is this EMD issue?? I am pretty sure it is not because of EMD (Exact match domain) as I have been using phrase match, brand name+phrase and other anchor texts. I used exact match also but only 2%. 2- If it is bad quality, inorganic link issue?? Then I am intending to remove inorganic links so that I could send reconsideration request but facing problem in detecting inorganic links. Please advise!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
40,000 High Value Links - Sold?
I'm a developer spending ever more time on SEO for SMBs. I've never had cause to buy links. Not one bit. I've done ok. Until now that is. Now I am getting my arse kicked into last year. By, I think, a top SEO company. Really, you know these guys and they are whiter than white. But what they have achieved seems an impossibilty to me using white hat techniques. Maybe they are from another planet than me. Or maybe something else is going on. In six months they have built 40,000+ links. These are unbelievably high quality links in their thousands. Really top notch. Keyword rich anchors slap bang in relevant content on great, great sites such as newspapers, univertsities, government, corporate, charity etc. Nothing spammy at all. Amazing. I was skimming but I found nothing to question at all until link 800 which was a cloaked link on a well known review site's product page. But generally the high quality sustained. Gradually, some began to feel somewhat worked into the content, although worked very well. 2000 links in and there are still magazine and review sites, still page authority 40+. There are still local government sites at 10,000 links when the export file ends. I go dizzy at the thought of the remaining 30,000. How far down could this quality have gone? Gulp. I am in awe, intimdated...and a little suspicious. How on earth do you do that with a pure white hat on? Actually, whatever colour your hat - how on earth do you do that? Rand's position is clear. He doesn't do it. Other's are less unambiguous. Comments like "I do it, you do it, we all do it" go unchallenged. Even on a recent link buying question here on SEOMoz most comments say don't do it but one advocates "Paid, targeted, individually prospected links". Am I too suspicious - a fool trying to rationalise my relatively pathetic link building? Honestly, you should just see these links. Of course, maybe some of you have. 🙂 Come on, please don't tell these guys simply worked hard. But maybe that's the harsh truth I cannot face. I have to say I cannot see the site generating an income to pay for the man hours needed for 40,000 high-value, white-hat links but then what do I know. Tell me, what do you think: Is it possible to build 40,000 very high value links in six months using pure white hat techniques - or is there another way? Phil
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Phil_2