Link building techniques : from the most effective to the most risky.
The positioning of a site basically depends on three fundamental aspects:
The contents , which have 40% of the weight on positioning
The SEO technique (or metatags, adequate structure, a fast and user friendly website, etc.), Which has 20% of the weight on the positioning.
The link building (or the strategy to get links to the site), which has 40% of the weight on the positioning.
Lately many have claimed that " content is king ", which is true, but link building is the undisputed queen. SEO cannot be done without neglecting the 40% that is link building, because even today the links that a site receives are a crucial aspect that Google considers in the positioning of the sites.
The links influence the perception that Google has of a website, as it is precisely the links that relate the related sites and topics.
The whole web revolves around links, since it is made up of that spider web made up of sites that are connected to each other by means of all those "threads" called links.
Google's spiders, spiders, explore this spider web endlessly, and the more they manage to move easily between one site and another, the more well-woven the spider web is, the better the general value it will attribute to each site present in the spider web.
The secret lies in not letting the spiders perceive that some threads have been artificially created, that they have been tampered with, so as not to spoil the idea that the spider has of the entire spider web that it is exploring.
So the spider web built around a site must be created in a clever way, intervening appropriately and making sure that it weaves on its own without too many interventions being necessary.
To confirm what has been said, just think of how many energies Google invests in the study of new algorithms aimed at perfecting the judgment towards the links: if everything revolved exclusively around the contents and if the links were not taken into consideration, the web would only be a archive of contents, analyzed by an algorithm expert only to understand the relevance of each page to the search of the user.
Instead, to understand the popularity of a site and therefore its authoritativeness and preparation on a given topic, Google must necessarily refer to the links that site receives, considering both the quality and the quantity. In the ideal world, the more a site receives quality links, the more it means that it offers valuable content.
The problem is that this aspect is often tampered with through artificial links , obtained through the purchase or unnatural exchange of backlinks, through PBN (personal blog network) or any other activity not covered by Google's guidelines.
That's why Google continues to release updates with the aim of making life difficult for those who deceive spiders: below is an infographic with the main techniques used in link building and their percentage of danger (image taken from Dolab's supera danced SEO course School).
Effective link building strategy
To develop an effective link building strategy we should be able to:
- Evaluate a website , trying to understand if in a short time that site will cause damage or further increase its popularity
- identify what could be useful links
- obtain quality links in a more or less natural way
- recognize which links could penalize the positioning of a site
- choose suitable anchor text
understand that if a site that does not deserve links does not have to procure links , and therefore credibility and brand awareness must first be created;
Not all links are good : links from sites that have little to do with the topic we are dealing with, or links from unreliable sites, rather than pushing our site up to search engines lower its ranking.
A winning strategy is that where every onSite, offSite, Social, offLine activity (paper, TV and other channels) is always aimed at creating Brand Awareness, as these activities change the global perception that Google has of our websites and push it to give it Trust, the only winning weapon in SEO that works.
Website metrics and ranking values: which to follow?
To understand what value to attribute to a site and therefore to a backlink, today the web offers us various evaluation tools. Here are the main ones:
Moz : Domain Autority (DA) and Page Autority (PA), where the first parameter indicates which authority has the domain, and the second the authority of the single page.
Moz , SemRush and Search Console , to monitor the number of backlinks but also the sending domains of the links.
Majestic : to find out the Trust Flow (i.e. the credibility of a site), the Citation Flow (i.e. the value of the citations of a site) and the number of backlinks that a site receives.
SeoZoom : to discover the Zoom Autority (ZA) or the ability to generate traffic.
Link building techniques, from the most effective to the most risky
Obviously, there are methods to stimulate the reception of natural backlinks: after all, the goal of a good link building strategy is precisely to generate natural inbound links . Among the most profitable techniques, according to SEO expert Ivano Di Biasi, we have:
Guest post
We can prepare unpublished articles and propose their publication to sites targeted with ours: they get quality content for free, and we get a quality link
Infographics
Creating infographics that are truly valuable also makes them potentially viral. Under each infographic we could insert the html code, including links to our page, and the permission to use them on our sites, obviously linking the source.
The infographics are impactful, rich in information, immediate, and add value to any text on which they are inserted. They are tempting, and certainly those who want to use them will be happy to link the page from which they were taken.
Article Marketing
Similar to the guest post, this kind of content winks at pure copywriting, that is, marketing-oriented copywriting. They are SEO optimized articles that aim to sell a product or service, but in any case they must be content of value for the user who reads and, of course, as for the guest post, we must find sites where to publish them that are relevant to the topic of our site.
Content outreach
Considered by some as an evolution of article marketing, content outreach is much more studied: the insertion of articles is carried out only after an analysis of the positioning of the site, of the SEO reach, of the reach of the social channels. Precisely because it is too studied and therefore unnatural, this technique may prove less effective than the previous ones, but if well planned it could reserve excellent results.
Broken link building
This technique involves intercepting sites that have "broken" links to sites similar to ours and proposing a link to our site.
PBN (personal blog network)
A Personal Blog Network (PBN) is a set of personal blogs over which you have control and management, or which in any case have expressed your intention to publish paid links. This technique is not very welcome to Google, especially if the links are dofollow.
Comment marketing in forums
This technique has been widely abused, but since now almost all the forums and blogs make the links contained in the comments nofollow by default, it proves useless.
Purchase link
The technique is certainly more risky, especially if the purchase of backlinks does not follow a well-studied strategy, since if Google finds out that we have purchased links, it heavily penalizes both the site that sends the link and the one that receives it.
Google Disavow: to "disavow" the penalizing links
Since these changes concerning penalties were introduced in the event that a site
receives poor quality links, a new dangerous phenomenon has also arisen: negative SEO, or a sort of hacker attack that causes the site to be taken Mira receives a significant amount of poor quality links to induce Google to be penalized.
Poor quality links are those from non-target sites and in any case from low trust and citation flow.
But to defend itself from these attacks, Google offers a service for disavowing links: the Google Disawow , through which we can signal to Google that we "refuse" one or more incoming links.
