Into SEO

Is this a good link?

Posted on October 10, 2013 Updated on October 8, 2013

I’ve had several conversations with people from the SEO world lately which left me amazed by how many of them still view link building just as they used to look at it before Penguin and Panda.

If you’re not familiar with the list of criteria which were strictly uphold by building links, here’s a little refreshment with the main ones:

• Relevant content to the content in your site. If the Title tag and Meta description of the page contain relevant KWs, even better.
• Page rank – in home page and inner pages.
• Maximum outgoing links from the site (the exact number was never completely decided on).
• No outgoing links to ‘bad sites’ or what you would call – ‘a bad neighborhood’.
• No ‘nofollow’ in header and of course in the actual <href> tag.
• Link location – could be in content, sidebar or footer. This includes placing the link in existing content.
• Site Directories, Article Directories and Bookmarking sites – the more the better.
• Anchor text – exact, medium or long tail.
• Number of obtained links to your site – the more the better!

Well, all that have changed. I’m not saying it completely disappeared, however you can’t expect to keep things as they are and expect results. In fact, not only you’re not likely to get ranked like this but you’re also very likely to get a penalty by Google.

There have always been guidelines by Google indicating which links they are considering as natural and with good value and which are simply spam. But now these parameters are checked with a magnifying glass by both automatic bots and human checkers. It’s not by chance that the number of site owners receiving warnings through their GWT account and getting penalties, has increased significantly in the past 7 months. You don’t need to check statistics to know this, you simply look on the number of forum threads, blog posts and posted articles revolving around this topic to understand that it has become a real issue for many mainstream sites. I myself, have experienced such a penalty and am still trying to recover from it.

So what changed?

• First of all, Page rank is no longer a relevant factor. You can read all about it in my previous post about PR. You should now mainly rely on the metrics by MajesticSEO – Trust and Citation Flow.

• Second, you don’t need a really big amount of links in order to get ranked. What you need is what I call – the right mixture for you. It’s no longer a game of numbers but a game of strategic thinking while putting the user’s behavior in and toward your site, in the center of it all. We’ll talk more about this in my next article – Custom made link profiles.

• Third, with none-content links, the link location has to be either in a well established site directory, on in a real resources page which a site owner is placing in his site to really help his users. Of course, you still need content links, however it has to be relevant Fresh content.
  This means you cannot simply add your link to an existing article that was published a month ago or more. You must make sure it will be placed in a new article with the link being highly relevant to the content of that article. For instance – you can’t write an article about video games and place in that article a link to your home page with the anchor ‘video games‘.
  It will make much more sense to link to an inner page in your site which is dealing with a specific piece of information given in that article, which people are likely to click on in order to get more relevant information. Something like – ‘the latest technology used in video games‘.
• Sidebar and footer links are fine, as long as they are kept to a minimum by the linking site and they are all highly relevant for its users. In order to understand if it’s relevant or not, picture yourself as a user of that site and try to imagine if you would click on most of the links which are located in its footer or sidebar.
• Directories, web or articles, and bookmarking sites are not the best approach. Especially the low quality ones. You can still use them, but keep the number of such links to minimum and stay within the boundaries of your site’s category and niche.
  Instead of bookmarking sites, try to get yourself into feed readers tools. The way to do that is by creating good content and making sure you have a functional RSS feed. Of course there are ways to promote that feed of yours, but we won’t get into that right now.
• Social media – social networks should be your main target when doing SEO, and I’m not talking about those old-school methods of spamming groups and walls with a link to your site. You have to use viral marketing methods and create a real buzz.
  If you’ve looked in Google Analytics in the past few months you’ve seen that they are now providing you with an option the track social conversations about you. This should serve as a perfect indication for you as to how much Google value social networks right now.
• Traffic through the link – the most valuable link is one that is actually getting clicked on by users which stay in your site, browse in it and use your services. “Well of course“, you say, “conversion is very important“. I say it’s not only for conversion that this is important but also for SEO.
  As far as Google are concerned, if a user used a link and liked the page he reached, that means that link is natural and relevant and therefore a valuable link for your site.
• Anchor text distribution has also become a big factor in this game of link building. It’s not  enough anymore to use multiple short, medium and long terms, you have to expand your use of linking text to general phrases like: ‘this site’, ‘for more information about this’, ‘a really good source I found‘, I think you’re getting the hang of it already.
  You should also use your domain as an anchor, including a regular, none hyper link format. It’s not complicated if you think about it. Simply imaging how your site would be linked to if people really naturally linked to it.
  If you’re still not sure, use link-analyzing tools to research a high quality site which is likely to have a real natural link profile and find out which anchors it is using.

From all this it’s plain to see that link building nowadays means you also need to have a good understanding in SMO, viral marketing, content marketing, BI and Public relations. It’s a mixture which guaranties you’ll not only get a stable natural link profile, but you’ll also get real users which are more likely to convert. I’ll get more into the right mixture you should have in a link profile and how to get it, in my next post.