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CONTENTS
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................................7
Why this book exists ........................................................................................................................................8
The current state of link building .................................................................................................................8
Who this book is for .........................................................................................................................................9
How to use this book .....................................................................................................................................10
The basics of link building .................................................................................................................11
What do we mean by link building? ...........................................................................................................12
Why are links so important to SEO? ..........................................................................................................12
The history of link building ..............................................................................................................15
SEOs and links: a match made in heaven? Or hell? ...............................................................................16
Historical Google Updates related to links .............................................................................................18
What you need to know about Google PageRank .......................................................................22
What is PageRank? ..........................................................................................................................................23
How does PageRank affect the work of SEOs? ......................................................................................24
How much should I care about PageRank? ..............................................................................................25
PageRank sculpting .........................................................................................................................................25
Some background - Bringing order to the web: PageRank ..................................................................26
The role of anchor text ..................................................................................................................................27
The anatomy of a link – what makes a good (and bad) link ......................................................29
Links that are trusted .....................................................................................................................................30
Links that are diverse ......................................................................................................................................33
Links that are relevant ....................................................................................................................................33
Elements of a page that may affect the quality of a link ....................................................................33
Elements of a link that affect its quality .................................................................................................39
Planning and executing a link building campaign ........................................................................47
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The sales process: selling a link building campaign ..............................................................................49
Kicking things off: questions to ask yourself or your client ................................................................51
Clarify the business goals and how link building will help reach these ..........................................53
Identify your assets, resources and USPs that help with link building ...........................................54
Run analysis on your existing link profile and competitors ...............................................................58
How to analyse a link profile ......................................................................................................................58
The key link metrics to focus on .................................................................................................................61
What a good link profile should look like ...............................................................................................92
Identify the techniques you plan to use ..................................................................................................94
Prioritise your techniques based on time and resources ....................................................................94
Plan your activity over the next few months ........................................................................................96
Prepare or create your link building asset ...............................................................................................97
Find link targets and prioritise ..................................................................................................................102
Conduct outreach ..........................................................................................................................................119
Following up ....................................................................................................................................................129
Reporting on link building campaign and learn how to improve ...................................................132
Scaling link building ........................................................................................................................140
Scaling link building post-Penguin ............................................................................................................141
What we can scale .........................................................................................................................................141
Link based penalties ........................................................................................................................144
How to detect and try to lift a link penalty in 9 steps ......................................................................146
Building a link building team .........................................................................................................166
Do you even need a link building team? ................................................................................................167
Hiring link builders ........................................................................................................................................169
Keeping the team motivated .....................................................................................................................172
Outsourcing your link building ......................................................................................................175
For in-house SEOs – choosing an agency ...............................................................................................176
Outsourcing to oDesk ...................................................................................................................................178
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Making link building happen – effecting change .......................................................................186
Getting close to clients ................................................................................................................................187
Social signals and their affect on link building ..........................................................................190
Social signals as a ranking factor ...............................................................................................................191
Social signals and link building ..................................................................................................................192
The Concept of AuthorRank ...........................................................................................................193
How AuthorRank and link building fit together ..................................................................................195
How to benefit from AuthorRank ............................................................................................................196
Link building techniques .................................................................................................................198
Article submissions ......................................................................................................................................200
Being interviewed .........................................................................................................................................201
Blog commenting ..........................................................................................................................................202
Book bait .........................................................................................................................................................203
Broken link building .....................................................................................................................................204
Building a tool / app ...................................................................................................................................206
Buying links .....................................................................................................................................................207
Buying established blogs / websites ......................................................................................................208
Directory submissions .................................................................................................................................209
Embeddable photos ......................................................................................................................................210
Getting links that your competitors have .............................................................................................210
Getting links from customers .....................................................................................................................212
Getting links from your copied images ...................................................................................................212
Giving discounts / free products away ..................................................................................................213
Guest blogging ................................................................................................................................................215
Infographics .....................................................................................................................................................216
Industry roundups .........................................................................................................................................218
Interactive infographics ..............................................................................................................................219
Link bait ...........................................................................................................................................................220
Link exchanges / reciprocal links ..............................................................................................................221
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Link reclamation ............................................................................................................................................222
Live blogging an event .................................................................................................................................223
Monitor for brand mentions without a link ..........................................................................................224
Monitor for social shares of your content ............................................................................................225
Pay a leading industry blogger to write for you ..................................................................................226
Press releases .................................................................................................................................................226
Profile pages for people .............................................................................................................................228
Reviving old, successful content ..............................................................................................................229
Running a competition ................................................................................................................................230
Run a conference / meet up ......................................................................................................................231
Translating content into other languages ..............................................................................................232
Wordpress Plugin development ................................................................................................................232
Wordpress Theme development ..............................................................................................................233
Writing testimonials .....................................................................................................................................234
Quick fire link building tips ...........................................................................................................236
Find competitors guest blog posts quickly ...........................................................................................237
Start your prospecting at page 10 of Google ........................................................................................237
Take bloggers to an event ...........................................................................................................................237
Monitor Twitter for PR and Journalist requests ..................................................................................238
Link building tools ...........................................................................................................................239
Link analysis ....................................................................................................................................................240
Outreach .........................................................................................................................................................244
Competitor analysis .....................................................................................................................................248
Browser add-ons ...........................................................................................................................................249
Finding link opportunities ...........................................................................................................................251
Link building case studies from my own experience ................................................................259
Case study 1 - Ego bait for links in the garden sector .......................................................................260
Case study 2 – photos to get links in a very technical, B2B industry ............................................261
Case study 3 – sports related interactive infographic .......................................................................263
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Case study 4 – building links to a microsite .........................................................................................264
Case study 5 – guest blogging in the design industry ........................................................................265
Other public link building case studies ..................................................................................................266
Amazing, curated link building resources ...................................................................................267
Blogs to follow for link building tips ...........................................................................................269
People to follow on Twitter for link building ............................................................................271
Google Webmaster Tools Videos on link building .....................................................................273
SEO conferences that include link building sessions ................................................................275
SearchLove ......................................................................................................................................................276
LinkLove ...........................................................................................................................................................276
MozCon ............................................................................................................................................................276
SMX ...................................................................................................................................................................277
SES ......................................................................................................................................................................277
Think Visibility ................................................................................................................................................277
SAScon ..............................................................................................................................................................278
PubCon .............................................................................................................................................................278
Affiliates4U .....................................................................................................................................................278
A-Z Glossary of link building related terms ...............................................................................279
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................284
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................286
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INTRODUCTION
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Why this book exists
I’ve read countless blog posts, guides and conference presentations about link building,
some good, some bad, and some amazing. I’ve learned a lot over the years and often get
asked to recommend resources to new SEOs who want to learn about link building. There is no
shortage of information but there can be some conflicting advice out there. I also found
myself linking to five or six different websites and resources just to get people started.
This book exists to be the one single resource that all SEOs
will need to learn about link building.
The current state of link building
At the time of writing, I’ll have been working professionally in the SEO industry for over five
years. I was working part-time doing SEO for my own projects for about three years before
that which means I’ve been in this industry for nearly a decade now. In all that time, many
things have changed in the world of SEO and online marketing. Trends have come and gone,
Google has tweaked and overhauled its algorithm, and SEO companies have, on the whole,
adapted well to these changes. But one thing has not really changed – the need for good
quality links to your website in order to rank well for competitive keywords in the major
search engines.
Even now, with the introduction of social sharing as a ranking factor, good quality links still
prevail in the long term and, in my opinion, will remain to be for a very long time. Having said
that, it would be silly to discount how link building (and SEO in general) is constantly changing
so I will be covering these changes and what you do about this later in this book.
We’ve also seen big changes in the last 12 months with the way Google has prepared to handle
low quality link building techniques. Techniques that involve any kind of automation or scale
have been hit pretty hard and, while they may still play a part in some cases, they are much
more risky than they used to be. In years gone by, SEOs knew full well that links from places
like web directories and article syndicators were not what Google had in mind when it said get
editorial links. But these types of links worked very well and, at worst, it would be very unlikely
that these links would actually hurt you. So it was pretty risk-free and pretty easy for SEOs to
get these types of links.
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Times have changed, and these types of links aren’t as effective as they used to be, thanks to
the Penguin update. Not only are large-scale link building techniques less likely to work for
most websites, they can actively hurt them.
There is little doubt that Google is now happy to devalue any kind of link building that it deems
to fall outside of “editorially given”. More recent talk has even included Google taking action
against links given as a result of embedding infographics. Even guest blogging has come under
scrutiny recently as this is a very popular tactic among SEOs.
So what are we left with?
Actually, there are still lots of opportunities for link building if you’re willing to work hard and
be a little bit creative with the assets you have. There are a number of techniques outlined in
this book that are still useful and fall well within Google guidelines.
But let me say this, SEO is starting to evolve and good SEO is looking more like generic
marketing. Good marketing doesn’t happen if you’re lazy. Hard links don’t happen if you’re
lazy, either. I feel that the Penguin update of 2012 was necessary in order for our industry to
start growing up and be taken seriously. We are marketers and can add value to a business, it
is time we were recognized for this and not remembered for using shady tactics.
More than ever, the approach needs to be focused on building links that will stand the test of
time. These links should also help in terms of bringing relevant traffic to a website, in such a
way that the value goes far beyond being “just a link” and adds value to a business, too.
I’ve written this book to try and teach you how to do this, but at the same time not discount
some of the older tactics that can still work well if done correctly.
Who this book is for
I’ve written this book to be useful to anyone who wants to know more about getting high
quality links to their website. I’m also going to talk quite generically at times, which is
deliberate and involves not only getting links, but also building a website or an asset that
deserves to get links. This covers people who work for agencies (like me), people who work inhouse,
or those of you who run your own websites and want to be hands on.
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I’ve also tried to cover different levels of experience and skill so that no matter how long
you’ve been doing SEO, I’m sure you’ll find this book useful. There is a combination of theory,
reference material, and actionable processes which you can use right away.
How to use this book
I spent quite a long time imagining what I’d want from a link building book. With the vast
amount of information available online, how can a book be made different and more useful?
My answer to this is to try and provide you with a book that is an educational resource, backed
up by facts, which contains real-life examples and techniques that you can use right away and,
above all, to inspire you to actually go and do this stuff. I’ve tried to be as specific as I can
when it comes to link building techniques so that you can go away and use them right away. I
like to give clear, actionable advice, but I’m also including a lot of background information in
this book because I want you to have the “why”, as well as the “how”.
I make no apologies for parts of this guide being basic. I strongly believe that many SEOs skip
the basics and don’t know enough about the “why”. I’ve actually sat and listened to SEOs who
have said they need to get links, but have no idea why or what type they need. My hope is that
this book gives you the basic background knowledge, the examples and techniques to carry
out successful link building campaigns for your clients or your own website.
Simplicity is key when it comes to link building
I’ve made the mistake of over-thinking it, of looking for that magical silver bullet that will take
away all the time, hassle, stress, and hard work of building links. The fact is (most SEOs won’t
tell you this) that link building is only as complicated as you want to make it. Sure, some of the
techniques out there, and some of those in this book, could be classified as advanced. But in
reality, all you need to build links is a form of communication like email or phone and the
focus to get what you need.
You also need some patience, determination, and hustle in order to build good links. It really
isn’t that hard to learn, but it is hard to do. Not because it is technically complicated, more
because it doesn’t happen overnight and it can often be unpredictable. It isn’t as black and
white as learning to code or learning to speak a new language, for example.
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THE BASICS OF LINK
BUILDING
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What do we mean by link building?
Link building is the process of acquiring links to a particular web page from another
(external) web page through some kind of intentional activity. Wow that’s a mouthful and I'm
still not quite happy with it! The best links are usually the ones you don't have to ask for, which
negates the intentional bit. But most of the time, SEOs will acquire links through some kind of
planned activity, particularly in the early days of a website when it is still establishing its
reputation and getting traction. Over time though, you want your link building efforts to
become easier because of the relationships you’ve built and the good reputation you have. I’m
often asked about scaling link building. The best way to scale link building is to build a website
and company that deserves links. This helps build links that you didn’t ask for – which can
scale.
If you’ve ever read Good to Great by Jim Collins (if you haven’t go buy a copy), you’ll be familiar
with the principle of the flywheel when growing a business. The basic principle says that
growing a business is like pushing a big, heavy, metal flywheel that at first, is very hard and
very slow. It takes a long time to do one rotation but the harder you push, the easier is
becomes. Eventually you get to a point where you don’t need to push as hard anymore, the
flywheel takes over and uses it’s own momentum to keep going. All of a sudden, customers are
coming to you. They’re telling their friends how good your service is and they come to you too.
This is how a business thrives.
The same principle applies to link building. It is tough at first, I’m not going to sugar coat that.
But if you focus on the right tactics, alongside building a website into something that deserves
links, it will become easier the harder you push and the longer you stick with it. Up to the
point where you don’t need to ask for links, this is the link builders dream and only a few
websites can classify themselves in this bucket. However it is possible and I want to give you
the processes and inspire you to think about link building in this light.
Why are links so important to SEO?
There are roughly 200 factors that make up the Google ranking algorithm. Each of these has
loads of variations, which means there are thousands of things that could go into any one
keyword ranking. Yet links are usually the difference between ranking well and not ranking on
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the first page. Even fantastic websites with great content will struggle to rank well if no one
links to it.
Why?
Shouldn’t Google be able to figure out how amazing a piece of content is and not need to rely
on links to show this content to their users? Ideally yes, they should. But the definition of
amazing content is very subjective, human readers will disagree about content, so how can
Google (which, remember, is basically a computer program) work it out? Google likes to find
solutions by using data and scale, it lets data decide and then scale them.
In the case of deciding which pages deserve to rank best, Google uses data from the websites
it crawls, namely the links between pages that could also be described as which person links to
another person. So Google looks at the web and sees who recommends content, who shares
it, who likes it, and who endorses it. This naturally makes the truly amazing content on the
web bubble up to the top of search results.
Think of it like this: Each time someone links to you, they are recommending you. They
probably wouldn't link to you unless your website was good. Relate this to the offline world;
the more recommendations someone has, the more likely they are to be sought after for their
services. If you are looking for a good plumber and a friend recommends someone who did a
good job for them, you’ll probably trust that recommendation and use that plumber.
Bringing it back online, the search engines want their users to find the best results; the best
results are the ones that usually come recommended. Links are one of the ways that the
search engines can work out how good a website is. If a website has never been
recommended by anyone, then, chances are, it isn't great quality. There is a slight disconnect
here though which is where our job as link builders and marketers come into play. A brand
new website could be awesome, but, because no one knows about it yet, no one has linked to
it. Therefore you need to spend some time doing marketing to make people aware of it.
The fact is that, technically, all websites could be the same in terms of content and the way
they are built. It is the links that these websites get which ultimately make the difference; this
is why link building is so important. It can make the difference when all other factors are equal
and, from the experience of many, many SEOs, it is widely accepted that links are a large part
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of the search ranking algorithm. Year after year, links are seen as the most important factor of
the Google Algorithm in the SEO ranking factors survey:
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THE HISTORY OF LINK
BUILDING
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SEOs and links: a match made in heaven? Or hell?
As we will discuss shortly, it was the invention of PageRank and the vastly improved results
that helped Google push ahead of their competitors very quickly. Usage of Google outside of
Stanford University soon increased and, after a short period of time, Google was a living,
breathing commercial entity. Google was attracting lots of users, keeping them happy, and, as
a result, businesses (and their SEOs) started paying more attention.
Remember that some SEOs had been around before Google came along, when Yahoo and
AltaVista were leading the way. Links, of course, existed before Google, as did anchor text and
it was certainly something that SEOs were aware of. One of the earliest mentions of anchor
text I could find reference to was in 1998!
However, Google was gaining momentum very fast and SEOs turned their attention to figuring
out exactly how Google worked and what made it tick. The sheer power of links and anchor
text in Google search results became apparent, showing their reliance on these signals as
ranking factor.
This, combined with the first real tangible measure of a link – PageRank – was the first step
towards the link building market that we see today. In fact, PageRank most likely gave birth to
the link buying and selling market, since a value could be put on the different types of links
that were available.
Over the years, many link building techniques have been “in fashion” but, in reality, it is only
very recently in 2012 that we’ve seen some techniques seriously come under fire from Google.
A lot of the large-scale link building techniques such as article syndication, directory
submissions, and blog comments were used for a reason – they worked. Not only did they
work, but also they were very scalable and they made link building into much more of a
commodity, which suited most SEO agencies. Even some of the very best SEO agencies who
prefer to stay on the white hat side of the line used these techniques because they worked
and posed little risk. It was possible to get yourself penalized for sure, but smart use of these
tactics, particularly on large, established websites worked very, very well.
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It was super easy to offer packages such as “500 directory submissions” or “1000 article
submissions” because, at worst, they may not have worked the first time, but the agency
would keep doing them until they did work. The reality was that unless your website was
brand new and had NO other links at all, you were unlikely to get into trouble with Google.
Even these new sites escaped problems sometimes if they were able to get just a handful of
actual, good quality links to go alongside all the large-scale stuff.
Why did Google allow this to happen?
This is a question that pretty much every SEO has asked at some point. We all knew that these
links were not the ones that Google wanted to reward, I’d go as far as saying these types of
links were polluting the Internet rather than making it a better place.
The thing is that Google always had a few principles they adhered to:
★ They preferred scalable, algorithmic methods of dealing with web spam and tactics that
broke their webmaster guidelines
★ They tended to err on the side of caution when making updates. They’d rather not push
an update through if they felt that innocent websites may get penalized by accident
It was because of these things that (I believe) Google stood by for so long and allowed these
techniques to work. I think Google struggled with solutions that would fit with its principles.
Not to mention that the web spam team is not really that big and never has been. They had a
lot of other things to focus their time on, which, arguably, posed more problems for users
such as filtering adult results, protecting users from hacked sites, etc.
However in early 2011, we saw Google become a lot more aggressive and it changed the game.
February 2011 saw the release of the Panda update in the U.S., it was released globally two
months later. Now while these updates weren’t specifically targeted at link building
techniques, they did signal a change in the way Google was willing to deal with spam. Lots of
websites got caught in the crossfire from Google and were given the option of telling Google if
they felt they’d been hit unfairly.
Amit Singhal of Google also stated that they’d make no manual exceptions to Panda but
instead, would incorporate feedback into their algorithms:
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“While we aren’t making any manual exceptions, we will
consider this feedback as we continue to refine our algorithms.”
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithmgoes.html
Just over a year later, we saw the release of the Penguin update that went a step further and
sought to actively penalize websites for “over-optimization”. We will discuss Penguin in far
more detail below, but, again, it showed that Google were prepared to be much more
aggressive than they had been in years gone by.
Today, and many updates later, we’re at a point where most SEOs are steering well clear of
large-scale, low-quality link building techniques. I’m not of the opinion that these techniques
are 100% useless now, but their use is certainly something I wouldn’t recommend for most
SEOs.
Historical Google Updates related to links
Google pushes out in excess of 500 updates a year and do not publicly announce every single
one. However, once in a while, they will push out a bigger than usual update that affects a lot
of search results. Often, these are named after the Google engineer who worked on that
update. This section will give you an outline of all known Google updates that specifically
affected the way they use links. For a full list of all updates, I’d recommend this list , which is
maintained by SEOmoz.
Penguin 3 – 5th October 2012
The third iteration of Penguin was a lot smaller than many expected after a previous warning
from Matt Cutts that the next release would be a big one. It actually affected around 0.3% of
English language queries to a noticeable degree. Compare this to 3.1% from the first Penguin
update, and you can see that the impact was a lot lower.
Penguin 2 – 25th May 2012
The second iteration of Penguin was very small, affecting less than 0.1% of English language
search queries to a noticeable degree. Despite lots of speculation from lots of SEOs about an
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update before this, Matt Cutts explicitly said that this was the first actual update since the
initial push of Penguin.
Penguin 1 – 24th April 2012
The now infamous Penguin update was specifically targeted at fighting web spam. A couple of
months prior to this, Matt Cutts did warn of an upcoming “over-optimization” penalty. He did
later confirm that Penguin was the update he was referring to, but clarified that the update
wasn’t so much targeting over-optimization as it was targeting web spam. The distinction was
made because Google still wanted to encourage good-quality SEO.
Like Panda, Google seemed open to the idea that some sites may be hit by accident. Although
they were quick to say that the number of false positives should be quite small because the
websites affected had a high probability of using web spam techniques. Despite this, Google
released a public form that webmasters could use to tell Google if they felt they’d been
affected when they shouldn’t have been. At the time of writing, this form is still live at this URL.
Here is a screenshot just in case it is taken down at some point:
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While Google didn’t confirm the exact types of techniques that Penguin targeted, it was widely
observed that websites with low quality or unnatural link profiles were being affected. It was
also around this time that Google started sending out unnatural link warnings to webmasters
so the two were felt to be connected.
Google did, however, outline a few techniques in the blog post that announced the update. It
included things such as keyword stuffing and unusual linking patterns. Google has actually
been trying to combat these techniques for many years, but Penguin appears to be much
more aggressive and sought to actively penalize websites heavily for web spam tactics.
Whereas previously, Google may have just quietly stopped the web spam links from passing
any PageRank.
This changed the game for SEOs because the tactics of the past were now looking a lot more
risky than they used to be. As previously mentioned, SEOs knew that these techniques were
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not great quality but they worked and posed little risk, even if they didn’t work. Now they were
facing the real possibility that the wrong link building tactics could actively hurt a website.
Search quality update 3rd April 2012
This was a rather subtle update because it was bundled in with 50 other changes that Google
made around the same time. We don’t know the exact date that the update actually started
affecting results, but the announcement was made on 3rd April 2012.
These are the sections that we care about:
“Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This
month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible
text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that
other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning
off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.”
“Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved
systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how
relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.”
Source: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/search-quality-highlights-50-changes.html
This doesn’t give us much information to go on, and there wasn’t much talk from SEOs at the
time but clearly Google changed the way they handle anchor text.
Jagger – 18th October 2005
Jagger appeared to be more of a rolling update rather than a single swoop in one day. Various
forum threads and blog posts of the time pointed toward a series of updates that aimed to
focus more on quality and trust when it came to links. Reciprocal link exchanges with low
quality, unrelated websites were also targeted, which hurt a number of websites , because this
was a very popular practice of the time. There was also talk about the age of a website coming
into play, which confused things even more and made it more complicated to diagnose exactly
what happened.
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WHAT YOU NEED TO
KNOW ABOUT
GOOGLE PAGERANK
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If you have been reading SEO blogs for any length of time, you have probably read about
PageRank at some point. While I personally feel there is often too much focus on PageRank,
particularly when link building, there are some core concepts you should be aware of. At the
very least you should understand how PageRank works and what it means for your own SEO
work.
What is PageRank?
Contrary to popular belief, the name actually comes from the inventor - Larry Page (cofounder
of Google with Sergey Brin) - not the "rank of a page". If you fancy some in-depth
reading, go and take a look at the original PageRank paper that Larry Page wrote while still at
University in 1999.
Here is an abstract from Wikipedia:
“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page
and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a
numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of
documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of
"measuring" its relative importance within the set.”
PageRank is measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest. It is a reflection of the
number and quality of the links pointing at a particular web page. In general, the more links
and the higher the quality of those links, the higher the PageRank will be.
You can get a rough idea of a page’s PageRank by looking at various browser plugins such as
PageRank for Chrome and SearchStatus for Firefox. These tools will give you a score of 0 – 10
in the form of a round number. This type of PageRank was commonly known as Toolbar
PageRank after Google launched the Google Toolbar in 2000, which contained a PageRank
score feature. This is because it isn't the actual live PageRank that Google uses in their ranking
algorithms.
The real PageRank is fluid and constantly changes, whereas Toolbar PageRank is updated
every few months. Real PageRank is also not measured in nicely rounded of numbers and in
fact is a very long decimal, which allows for calculations and comparisons across the billions of
pages that Google crawl.
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For this reason, you can't use PageRank as a reliable metric for your SEO campaign. However,
it can sometimes be used as an indicator of authority, as well as a good way of filtering and
sorting loads of pages in one go.
How does PageRank affect the work of SEOs?
Despite Toolbar PageRank not being totally accurate and often being out of date, it can have
some uses. The key thing to remember is that it shouldn't be used as a definite, accurate
measure. One thing we do know about PageRank is that Google uses it for deciding how
deeply to crawl a domain. Here is a graph from Matt Cutts, which illustrates this nicely:
This is helpful for SEOs to know because it means you should be checking the PageRank
distribution around your website and making sure that your important pages have PageRank
and are being crawled and cached regularly. Really, you should be looking for places where
the PageRank isn't as high as it should be or, worse, has no PageRank at all. This can help you
spot areas of your website where link flow may not be as good as you'd like. You can combine
this with server log file analysis to see which pages on your website are not being crawled
much, which could be causing you problems.
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PageRank can also be useful for link prospecting and filtering out targets. While I wouldn't use
it as a definite measure, i.e. only getting links above a PR4, I would use it to filter large sets of
link targets into a more manageable set and filter out very low PageRank scores.
You can also use PageRank as a rough indicator of the quality of incoming links to your site.
We know it isn't totally accurate, but, again, you can use it as an indicator of the PageRank
distribution of incoming links. Richard Baxter touched on this type of analysis in this post over
on SEOgadget. Analysis like this can be very useful when it comes to finding low quality links to
your website and if necessary, identifying ones that you may wish to remove.
How much should I care about PageRank?
I tend to think of PageRank as something that I should keep an eye on and use as an
additional metric, but it isn’t the only metric to care about. It is useful, and, when combined
with other metrics and used in aggregate, it can help you do some good link analysis. But I
certainly wouldn't obsess over it.
There are uses of PageRank that we will touch upon later such as link profile analysis and
diagnosing link-based penalties.
PageRank sculpting
The theory behind PageRank sculpting is that you can use various methods to control the flow
of PageRank between pages on your website. Therefore, you can flow PageRank to pages,
such as your category and product pages, that you want to rank well in search results. In
theory, you could also preserve the PageRank of a certain page by restricting the flow of
PageRank from that page, too. However, Google came out and said that it actually prevented
this method of PageRank sculpting from working, which drove hot debates among respected
SEOs, who had been preaching this method for quite some time.
My own opinion on this is that you should care about your pages getting enough PageRank to
rank well in search results; but rather than worrying about keeping PageRank on certain pages
by not linking out, you should focus on enabling the flow of PageRank to key pages. This
manifests itself by having good site structure, both for users and search engines, and having
key pages as close to the homepage of your website as possible. But PageRank alone shouldn’t
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be a reason for this; after all, you want real users to find your key pages, so you should make
sure they can find them easily!
Some background - Bringing order to the web: PageRank
People often wonder what it was that made Google so successful and what has led it to
dominate search in recent years. There are many factors that have led to Google’s success as a
company and the crazy profits they generate, but in terms of pure search, links played a
pivotal role in making their results better than anyone else.
Many search engines at the time were fully aware of how links may help give a better, more
relevant set of search results. But it was Larry Page of Google who made the breakthrough
that would eventually lead to search results that were far more relevant and useful to users
than had ever been seen before.
Links between web pages reminded Page of citations on University papers. Scientists who
published papers would papers they had referred to or used in their research. These citations
gave credit to the right people and meant that some scientists (and their work) became well
known and influential. Page said:
“It turns out, people who win the Nobel Prize have citations from
10,000 different papers. A large number of citations in scientific
literature, he said, means your work was important, because
other people thought it was worth mentioning.”
Source: The Google Story by David Vise
Page felt the same principle could be applied to the web to find the best and most influential
content. He then realised that some links would matter more than others, they were not all
equal. To measure how much a particular link mattered, you could look at the number of
other links pointing at the page it was on.
“The Google search engine has two important features that help it
produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link
structure of the Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web
page. This ranking is called PageRank and is described in detail in
[Page 98]. Second, Google utilizes link to improve search results.”
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Source: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Earlier in this book, we talked about how it was quite hard to determine the quality of a piece
of content because it is a very subjective decision. PageRank aims to overcome this by looking
at the pages on the web and orders them by the count and quality of links pointing at them.
“These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page's
"PageRank", an objective measure of its citation importance
that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of
importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an
excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches.”
Source: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Essentially, PageRank utilizes the democratic nature of the web, and uses the opinions of
webmasters to determine the relative importance of a given page. The beauty of this system is
that it scales amazingly well and allows for pages (and content) to be objectively compared
and ranked with a high level of confidence.
Page also talked of “random surfing”. Whereby a user could randomly surf through the web,
only clicking on links as they went. The sites where the user landed most of the time were the
ones that were most important.
This was the breakthrough that allowed Google to push ahead and give their users more
useful search results. This breakthrough was based on links, pure and simple. While other
search engines were relying on keyword relevance to a page to rank search results and
generally not going a great job, Google was taking all of these existing factors and baking in
their PageRank algorithm to deliver a highly relevant set of search results.
However, it wasn’t just PageRank alone that helped Google deliver more relevant search
results; Google used anchor text to help them determine the context of the page that was
being linked to.
The role of anchor text
PageRank allowed Google to determine the quality of links using a consistent metric. However,
Google wanted more signals to help give users the best search results and realized it could
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extract a signal of relevance from the links it was already recording. Anchor text as a ranking
signal was born.
Page and Brin realized that the keywords used within the anchor text of a link could be used to
determine relevance of the page being linked to. They explained this in the following way:
“The text of links is treated in a special way in our search
engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the
page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the
page the link points to.”
Source: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
As an example, if Google found that a particular page had links pointing to it with the anchor
text “wooden toys”, it may be more likely to show that page to users who searched for
“wooden toys”.
However, it soon became apparent that anchor text was being used as a very strong signal to
Google, and SEOs of the time capitalized on this by building lots of links using the keyword
they wanted to rank for as the exact anchor text. At the time, because Google was relatively
new and there weren’t that many other signals, this was usually enough to get a number 1
position in Google.
Even up to today, anchor text is still a very strong signal although 2012 has seen the Penguin
update which sought to penalize for over-optimization of various signals. One of the signals
believed to be affected was anchor text, and many SEOs reporting seeing penalties on
websites that had a high percentage of commercial anchor text in their link profile.
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THE ANATOMY OF A
LINK – WHAT MAKES A
GOOD (AND BAD) LINK
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Not all links are created equal. One part of the Google algorithm is the number of links
pointing at your website, but it would be foolish to make this a raw number and not take into
account the quality of those links. Otherwise, it would just be a free for all, and everyone
would be trying to get as many links as they can with no regard for the quality of those links
Back in the early days of search engine optimisation, it pretty much was a free for all because
the search engines were not as good at determining the quality of a link. Even the introduction
of PageRank, combined with anchor text as a signal, didn’t deter link spammers. As search
engines have become more advanced, they have been able to expand the link-related signals
they can use beyond raw numbers. They can look at a number of factors which can all
combine and give them an indicator of quality; more to the point, they can tell whether the
link is likely to be a genuine, editorially given link, or a spammy link.
These factors are outlined in more detail below. There is something important to remember
here, though; it isn't really the link itself you care about (to a certain degree). It is the page and
the domain you are getting the link from which we care about right now. Once we know what
these factors are, it helps set the scene for the types of links you should (and shouldn’t) be
getting for your own website.
Before diving into the finer details of links and linking pages, I wanted to take a much broader
look at what makes a good link. To me, there are three broad elements of a link:
★ Trust
★ Diversity
★ Relevance
If you can get a link that ticks off all three of these, you’re into a winner! However, the reality is
that this is quite hard to do consistently. But you should always have it in the back of your
mind.
Links that are trusted
In an ideal world, all links that you get would be from trusted websites. By trust, we often
mean what Google thinks of a website; some will also refer to this as authority. As we’ve
discussed, Google came up with PageRank as a way to objectively measure the trust of every
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single page they find on the web. Generally, the more PageRank a page has, the more trusted
it is by Google, the more likely it is to rank and the more likely it is to help you rank better if it
links to you.
However there is another concept here that you need to be aware of – TrustRank.
TrustRank differs from PageRank in that it is designed to be harder to game if you’re a
spammer. Taken from the TrustRank paper, written in 2004:
Let us discuss the difference between PageRank and TrustRank
first. Remember, the PageRank algorithm does not incorporate
any knowledge about the quality of a site, nor does it explicitly
penalize badness. In fact, we will see that it is not very
uncommon that some site created by a skilled spammer receives
high PageRank score. In contrast, our TrustRank is meant to
differentiate good and bad sites: we expect that spam sites were
not assigned high TrustRank scores.
Source: http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF
If you click through to this PDF to read the full paper on TrustRank, you’ll notice that it is a
joint effort between Stanford and Yahoo. There was some confusion as to who came up with
the original idea for TrustRank because of this. Also, a patent granted to Google in 2009
referring to “Trust Rank” describes a very different process to the one in the original paper
from 2004.
For now, we’re going to briefly discuss the idea of TrustRank from 2004 and how it may be
used by the search engines to calculate trust.
Let’s start with this simple diagram:
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Starting from the left hand side, if you imagine that you had a list of websites that you trust
100%, it may include sites like the BBC, CNN, NY Times, etc. In this “seed list” you have no
spam whatsoever because these are super high quality websites with high level of editorial
control. As we move one step to the right, we first have a list of websites that are one link away
from the trusted seed set. The amount of spam increases ever so slightly but not a lot. Hat tip
to Rand for the original visualization of this.
Now go to the far right of the diagram, and we can see that, even if a list of websites is just
three links away from the trusted seed set, websites in that list are more likely to be spam, as
many as 14% of them, in fact.
Therefore, the search engines could define their own trusted seed set of websites and use this
as a starting point for crawling the web. As they crawl through these websites and follow the
external links, they can see how far away any given website is from the trusted seed set. The
implication being that the further away from there a website is the higher likelihood it has to
be spam. While this isn’t an exact science, when you think of the billions of pages online which
need to be measured for trust, this is a highly scalable way of doing it, and the tests from the
original paper showed that it worked well too.
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Links that are diverse
There are two types of diversity that I want to cover here:
★ Diversity of linking domains
★ Diversity of link type
Both of these are important if we want to build good links and have a strong, robust link
profile.
Diversity of linking domains simply means getting links from lots of different domains – not
the same ones over and over again. I discuss this in much more detail below.
Diversity of link type means getting links from different types of domains. If all of your links
are from web directories, that isn’t very diverse. If all of your links come from press release
syndicators, that isn’t very diverse. I’m sure you see what I mean. A natural link profile will
contain links from many different types of websites.
Links that are relevant
The word relevant here is not referring to the page that the link is on; it is referring to the link
itself. As we discussed earlier, anchor text allowed Google to discover the topic of a page
without even having to crawl it, and it became a strong signal to them.
Therefore we need to acquire links to our website that are relevant to us – we can do this by
trying to make the anchor text contain a keyword that we are targeting and is relevant to us.
However, caution is needed here in light of Google updates in 2012, namely Penguin, which we
will talk about in more detail later.
Despite this, every website that wants to rank well for their target keywords, especially in
competitive industries, will need relevant links to do that. It is all about balance and not over
doing it and making it too obvious what you’re doing.
Elements of a page that may affect the quality of a link
As we have talked about in previous chapters, Google does not simply look at the raw number
of links pointing at your website. They look at many other factors to try and assess the quality
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of a link and how much value it should pass to the target page. In this chapter, we will take a
detailed look into what these factors could be and what this means to your work as a link
builder.
Some of these factors are mentioned in a patent filed by Google in 2004 and granted in 2010,
which became known as the “reasonable surfer” model. It basically outlines how various
elements of a link, as well as the page containing the link, may affect how Google treats a link.
Below we’ll take a look at these and explore how they may affect your work and what you need
to remember about each of them.
Number of other outgoing links on a page
If the link pointing to your website is among hundreds or thousands of other outgoing links on
a single page, then chances are that it isn't as valuable. If you think about it from a user’s point
of view, they probably are not going to find a page with hundreds of links particularly useful.
There are, of course, exceptions, but, on the whole, these types of pages do not provide a
good user experience. There is also the probability that these types of pages are only created
for links and do not have much "real" content on them, which is also a signal of a page which
isn't a good user experience.
Also, going back to our knowledge of how PageRank works, the higher the number of outgoing
links on a page there are, the less value each of those links is worth. This isn’t a hard and fast
rule, though, and has been the topic of hot debate in the SEO industry for many years,
particularly in relation to a process called PageRank sculpting which we will explore later.
How this affects your work as an SEO
When seeking to get links from existing pages on a website, as opposed to new pages, take a
look at the number of other outgoing links on a page using a tool such as Search Status. If the
number looks very high, then you may want to consider whether the link is worth going for
and spending time acquiring. Obviously you should take account of other factors too, such as
whether the domain is a particularly strong one to get a link from, even if it is among
hundreds of other links.
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You may also want to consider whether there is a genuine reason for a high number of other
links on the page. If there is a genuine reason, then the link may still be worth going for. One
thing you should definitely look out for is a lot of links to other websites which are not related
to the topic of your page. In particular, look for links which look like they go to gambling,
poker, pills, and health websites. If you see these, then you may be looking at a link exchange
page where the Webmaster has only put those links in place because he got one back from the
site being linked to. These are the type of reciprocal links that Google does not like to see and
will probably reduce the value of.
The page having a penalty or filter applied
This is a bit of a controversial one. Traditionally, the official line from Google has always been
that links from bad pages can't hurt you. There have been a few comments from Google
employees to the contrary, but, on the whole, their stance has always been the same. That was
until very recently, when they actually reworded some of their Google Webmaster Guidelines
to imply that bad links could actually hurt you. My own personal experience (and that of many
SEOs) is that links from bad pages or penalized pages can hurt you.
I can see why Google, up until recently, held this public stance. They do not want to encourage
people to deliberately point bad links at their competitors in an effort to hurt their rankings.
The fact is that this is a practice which does happen a lot more than people think. Therefore, I
feel it is one that every SEO should be aware of and know how to deal with. We will get into a
lot more detail on identifying and removing link-based penalties later, but for now we will stick
within the context of this chapter.
How this affects your work as an SEO
You need to be able to identify links from pages which may be low quality in the eyes of
Google. You also need to be able to spot low quality pages when identifying possible link
targets. We will explore a method for identifying large numbers of low quality links in a link
profile later.
The quality of other websites being linked to from that page
There is the concept of being within a "bad neighbourhood" when it comes to your link profile.
This stems from the idea that if you are seen to be clustered and associated with a load of
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other low quality websites, your website could be hurt and the authority lowered. One way to
get into a bad neighbourhood is to get links from the same places as low quality, spammy
websites. So if your website is linked to from the same page as 25 other websites, most of
which are low quality, it isn't a good signal to send to Google.
This ties in with your analysis of the number of outgoing links on a page which we discussed
earlier. Quite often, you will find that pages with very high numbers of outgoing links will have
lower editorial standards. This naturally means that they are more likely to be linking to lower
quality websites.
You definitely want to avoid lots of instances of your website getting links from the same
pages as low quality websites. This helps Google see that you are a genuine website that
doesn’t partake in any low quality link building. If you find one or two instances of getting
these types of links, then you probably will not have any issues. But if you find that you are
getting many of your links from low quality pages and bad neighbourhoods, then you will want
to take a closer look and see if these links are hurting you.
How this affects your work as an SEO
It can be hard to go and investigate the quality of every website being linked to from the page
you are considering as a link target. You could do some scraping and assess the quality of
outgoing links using some metrics, but doing this on scale can be quite intensive and take a lot
of time. What I’d advise doing is trying to develop your gut feeling and instincts for link
building. Many experienced link builders will be able to look at a page and know right away if
the outgoing links are to low quality websites. This gut feeling only comes with time and
practice.
Personally, if I look at a page of links and it looks like a link exchange page that doesn’t appeal
to me as a user, it probably isn’t a high quality page. I’d also look for lots of exact match
keyword links to other websites which is a tell-tale sign of low editorial standards.
Number of incoming links to the page
If the page you are getting a link from has lots of other links pointing at it, then that gives the
page a level of authority that is then passed onto your website. Chances are that, if the page is
a genuinely good resource, then it will accrue links over time which will give it a level of link
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equity that many spammy pages will never get. Therefore, a link from a page with lots of link
equity is going to be far more valuable to you.
At the same time, if this page is a genuinely good resource, the editorial standards will be a lot
higher, and you’ll have a tougher time getting your link placed. This is actually a good thing;
the harder a link is to get, the higher the value that link usually is.
How this affects your work as an SEO
When you are looking at a page as a possible link target, take a quick look at a few metrics to
get a feel for how strong that page is and how many links it has. By far, the quickest way to do
this is to have a few extensions or plugins added to your browser that can instantly give you
some info. For example if you have the SEOmoz Toolbar installed, you can get a quick measure
of the Page Authority and the number of links SEOmoz has discovered pointing to that page.
If you also have a plugin installed that shows you Google PageRank, this can also give you a
quick indicator of the level of authority this page has. You can try PageRank for Chrome or
Searchstatus for Firefox.
Number of incoming links to the domain
Similar to the above factor, but looking at the number of links pointing to the domain as a
whole instead. The more links a domain has, the more likely it is to be a high quality website.
Age of the domain
I'm not sure, personally, if age of a domain is strictly a factor, but with age comes authority if
the website is a high quality one. Also, if you get a link from a brand new domain, naturally
that domain is not going to be that strong because it has not had time to get many links. The
reality is that you can’t affect the age of a domain, so you shouldn’t really worry about it too
much. The only way you could possibly use it is as a way to filter a huge set of possible link
targets. For example, you could filter link targets to only show you ones which are more than
two years old which may give you a slightly higher quality set of results.
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How this affects your work as an SEO
As mentioned, you can’t really affect this factor so it is generally something you shouldn’t
worry too much about. You can use it as a way to filter large sets of link targets, but there are
many other better metrics to use rather than domain age.
Link from within a PDF
Within a PDF file, you can link out to external websites, much in the same way you can on a
normal webpage. If this PDF is accessible on the web, the search engines are capable of
crawling it and finding the links.
How this affects your work as an SEO
In most cases, your day-to-day work will probably not be affected that much given that many
link building techniques involve standard links on webpages. But if you work in an industry
where PDFs are regularly created and distributed in some form i.e. whitepapers, you should
take the time to make sure you include links and that they are pointing to the right pages.
In this case, you can also take advantage of various websites that offer submission of PDFs /
whitepapers to get more links. This can work well because some of these sites may not usually
link to you from a standard webpage.
The page being crawlable by the search engines
This is a big one, if the search engines never find the page where your link is placed, it will
never count. This is usually not a problem, but it is something you should be aware of. The
main way a page can be blocked is by using a robots.txt file, so you should get into the habit of
checking that pages are crawlable by the search engines. You can use this simple JavaScript
bookmarklet to test if a page is blocked in robots.txt.
There are other ways that a page may be blocked from search engines and therefore they may
not discover your links. For example, if a page has elements such as JavaScript, Flash or AJAX, it
is possible that search engines may not be able to crawl those elements. If your link is inside
one of these elements, it may never be discovered and counted.
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In general, the search engines are getting much better at discovering links and content within
these elements, however it is best to try and avoid placing your links there is it can be avoided.
To check whether or not a page is cached by Google, you can simply type “cache:” before the
URL and put it into the Google Chrome toolbar. If the page is cached, you will see a copy of it.
If it isn’t cached, you will see something like this:
Elements of a link that affect its quality
Above, we have looked at the elements of a page that can affect the quality of a link. We must
also consider what elements of a link, itself, the search engines can use to assess its quality
and relevance. They can then decide how much link equity to pass across that link.
As mentioned above, many of these elements are part of the “reasonable surfer” model and
may include things such as:
★ The position of the link on the page i.e. in the body, footer, sidebar etc
★ Font size / colour of the link
★ If the link is within a list, and the position within that list
★ If the link is text or an image, if it is an image, how big that image is
★ Number of words used as the anchor tex
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There are more, and we’ll look at a few in more details below. Here is the basic anatomy of a
link:
URL
The most important part of a link is the URL that is contained within it. If the URL is one that
points to your website, then you’ve built a link. At first glance, you may not realize that the URL
can affect the quality and trust that Google put into that link, but in fact it can have quite a big
effect.
For example if the link is pointing to a URL that is one of the following:
★ Goes through lots of redirects
★ Is blocked by a robots.txt file
★ Is a spammy page i.e. keyword stuffed, sells links, machine generated
★ Contains viruses or malware
★ Contains characters that Google can’t / won’t crawl
★ Contains extra tracking parameters at the end of the URL
All of these things can alter the way that Google handles that link. It could choose not to follow
the link or it could follow the link, but choose not to pass any PageRank across it. In extreme
cases, such as linking to spammy pages or malware, Google may even choose to penalize the
page containing the link to protect their users. Google does not want its users to visit pages
that link to spam and malware, so it may decide to take those pages out of its index or make
them very hard to find.
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How this affects your work as an SEO
In general, you probably don’t need to worry too much on a daily basis about this stuff, but it
is certainly something you need to be aware of. For example, if you’re linking out to other
websites from your own, you really need to make sure that the page you’re linking to is good
quality. This is common sense, really, but SEOs tend to take it a lot more seriously when they
realize that they could receive a penalty if they don’t pay attention!
In terms of getting links, there are a few things you can do to make your links as clean as
possible:
★ Avoid getting links to pages that redirect to others – certainly avoid linking to a page that
has a 302 redirect because Google does not tend to pass PageRank across these
★ Avoid linking to pages that have tracking parameters on the end because sometimes
Google will index two copies of the same page and the link equity will be split. If you
absolutely can’t avoid doing this, then you can use a rel=canonical tag to tell Google
which URL is the canonical so that they pass the link equity across to that version
Position of the link of a page
As a user, you are probably more likely to click on links in the middle of the page that in the
footer. Google understands this and in 2004 it filed a patent which was covered very well by
Bill Slawski. The patent outlined a model which became known as the “reasonable surfer”
model which we briefly mentioned earlier and it included the following:
“Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention
may provide a reasonable surfer model that indicates that when a
surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow
some of the links with higher probability than others.
This reasonable surfer model reflects the fact that not all of the links
associated with a document are equally likely to be followed.
Examples of unlikely followed links may include “Terms of Service”
links, banner advertisements, and links unrelated to the document.”
Source: http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer-how-the-value-of-alink-may-differ-based-upon-link-and-document-features-and-user-data/
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The following diagram, courtesy of SEOmoz, helps explain this a bit more:
With crawling technology improving, the search engines are able to find the position of a link
on a page as a user would see it and, therefore, treat it appropriately.
If you’re a blogger and you want to share a really good resource with your users, you are
unlikely to put the link in the footer, where very few readers will actually read. Instead, you’re
likely to place it front and centre of your blog so that as many people see it and click on as
possible. Now compare this to a link in your footer to your earnings disclosure page. It seems
a little unfair to pass the same amount of link equity to both pages, right? You’d want to pass
more to the genuinely good resource rather than a standard page that users don’t worry about
too much.
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Anchor text
For SEOs, this is probably second in importance to the URL, particularly as Google put so much
weight on it as a ranking signal, even today where, arguably, it isn’t as strong a signal as it used
to be.
Historically, SEOs have worked very hard to make anchor text of incoming links the same as
the keywords which they want to rank for. So if you wanted to rank for “car insurance” you’d
try to get a link that has “car insurance” as the anchor text.
However since the rollout of Penguin into search results, SEOs have started to be a lot more
cautious with their approach to anchor text. Many SEOs reported that a high proportion of
unnatural anchor text in a link profile led to a penalty from Google after Penguin was
launched.
The truth is that an average blogger, Webmaster, or Internet user will NOT link to you using
your exact keywords. It is even more unlikely that lots of them will! Google seems to be finally
picking up on this and hitting websites that have over-done their anchor text targeting.
Ultimately, you want the anchor text in your link profile to be a varied mix of words. Some of it
keyword focused, some of it focused on the brand, and some of it not focused on anything at
all. This helps reduce the chance of you being put on Google’s radar for having unnatural links.
Nofollow vs. Followed
We discuss the nofollow attribute in the context of link profile analysis a little later, but for
now we’ll discuss some of the basics that you need to know.
The nofollow attribute was adopted in 2005 by Yahoo, Google and MSN (now Bing) and was
intended to tell the search engines when a Webmaster didn’t trust the website they were
linking to. It was also intended to be a way of declaring paid links such as advertising.
In terms of the quality of a link, if it has the nofollow attribute applied, it shouldn’t pass any
PageRank. This effectively means that nofollow links are not counted by Google and shouldn’t
make any difference when it comes to organic search results.
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Therefore, when building links, you should always try to get links that are followed, which
means they should help you with ranking better. Having said that, having a few nofollow links
in your profile is natural, and you should also think of the other benefit of a link - traffic. If a
link is nofollow, but you get lots of targeted traffic through it, then it is worth building.
Link title
If you’re not very familiar with it, take a look at this page for some examples and explanations.
The intention here is to help provide more context about the link, particularly for accessibility,
as it provides people with more information if they need it. If you hover over a link without
clicking it, most modern browsers should display the link title, much in the same way they’d
show the ALT text of an image. Note that it is not meant to be a duplication of anchor text; it is
an aid to help describe the link.
In terms of SEO, the link title doesn’t appear to carry much weight at all when it comes to
ranking. In fact, Google appeared to confirm that they do not use it at PubCon in 2005
according to this forum thread. Obviously this was a few years ago now but my recent testing
seems to confirm this as well.
Text link vs. Image link
This section so far has been discussing text based links, by that we mean a link that has anchor
text containing standard letters / numbers etc. It is also possible to get links directly from
images, the HTML for this look slightly different:
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Notice the addition of the
![]()
Example
The rel=”nofollow” is the important bit here and makes the link different to standard links.
The main reason for a website to use the nofollow tag is to tell the search engines when they
can’t trust the website being linked to. This may sound a bit strange at first, but there are
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many instances where users can link to their own websites without the website owner
endorsing the link. A few examples of this would be:
★ Blog comments
★ Forum posts
★ Guestbook entries
These places have traditionally been targets for SEOs to get easy links from, but the addition of
the nofollow attribute to these kinds of links can help discourage them because no link equity
will pass anyway.
Google also advises that any links that are paid for, should be marked with the nofollow tag.
This means that no PageRank will be passed across and therefore, paid links will not affect
rankings. This also applies to advertising banners. In reality, SEOs who buy links will actually
make sure that the links do pass link equity because they wouldn’t buy them otherwise.
Here is how you can find nofollow links:
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Majestic SEO:
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Open Site Explorer:
This data isn’t massively actionable and very rarely will you be able to change a nofollowed link
into a followed link. If you are running this analysis on your own site, you should certainly
make sure that you’re generating plenty of links that are followed because these are the ones
that will matter.
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You should also be aware of this when you’re building links. You should check that a website
actually follows external links. You can do this very easily using a number of browser add-ons,
0ne being the SEOmoz toolbar which will highlight nofollow links in red:
These are blog comment links on the Distilled blog and, as you can see, they are highlighted in
red which means they have the nofollow tag applied to them.
There is one other thing to remember here, the nofollow tag can be applied at the page level
as well as the individual link level. In fact, originally the nofollow tag was only able to be
applied at the page level as a meta tag which looked something like this:
This tag would be included in the section of the page and meant that every link on the
page would be nofollow.
What a good link profile should look like
There isn’t a perfect answer to this, but it is something that I get asked about quite a lot, so I
wanted to address it. I’ve highlighted a number of things above that would make me a bit
suspicious when looking at a link profile, but, to summarise and say what a good profile would
look like to me, I’d say:
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★ Most of the most popular anchor text is branded, not commercial keywords
★ Links containing natural text such as “this website”
★ Lots of linking root domains, not just raw links
★ Links to deep pages, not just the home page
★ Diversity in types of links i.e. some links from guest blogs, some from industry
associations, some from newspapers, and some from customer reviews. Not all from
one source such as guest blogging
★ Some nofollow links and a few links from domains with low quality metrics
★ Links from images
★ Links that go via redirects
To summarise, remember what we looked at early on in this book when discussing the broad
elements of good links:
★ Trust
★ Relevance
★ Diversity
If your link profile has a nice balance of all three, you are probably doing well and do not need
to worry.
Ultimately, ask yourself this question – if Matt Cutts took a look at this link profile, would he
get suspicious and take a closer look? If the answer is yes, then you may want to work on
cleaning up some of the bad links and building some better ones!
At the end of this link analysis, you should:
★ Know any potential problems with your own link profile i.e. you need to get more
branded anchor text or links to deep pages
★ Know which techniques you want to replicate from your competitors for quick wins
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Identify the techniques you plan to use
Now that you’ve spent some time checking out the competitive landscape, as well as your own
link profile, you need to start figuring out which techniques you can use that will help you
achieve your goals.
There are a few things you need to keep in mind when choosing your techniques. By this point
of the process, these should not all be new to you:
★ The goals of the business
★ The assets and resources you have available to you i.e. design
★ The types of links you need based on your own link profile
★ The types of links you need in order to compete based on the link profile of your
competitors
★ The amount of time you have
The contents of this book include a very big list of link building techniques along with the
process for each one. I’d encourage you to read that section very carefully and pick out
techniques that you feel you can do, and would help you achieve your goals.
At this point, just go through the link building techniques and pull out the ones that you think
are applicable to you and are achievable. So you end up with a nice big list of techniques to
filter down and prioritise.
Prioritise your techniques based on time and resources
By this point, you should have a big list of link building techniques that you feel you can use.
However, it probably isn’t practical or sensible to try and implement them all at once. So you
need to spend some time prioritizing so that you give yourself adequate time to focus on each
technique and stand a good chance of making it successful.
But how do you prioritize lots of ideas that could work?
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Put simply, I try and pick the easiest ones! If you have experience with a particular technique
already, or a particular technique is easier because of certain resources you have access to i.e.
a designer or developer, then I’d tend to go with those.
Remember the list we used when choosing our techniques:
★ The goals of the business
★ The assets and resources you have available to you i.e. design
★ The types of links you need based on your own link profile
★ The types of links you need in order to compete based on the link profile of your
competitors
★ The amount of time you have
You can use the exact same points to narrow down and prioritize your list. As you do this, bear
this in mind:
Link building isn’t always about reinventing the wheel; it is about prioritizing and doing
Unfortunately, I speak to too many SEOs who over-think link building. I admit I’ve been guilty
of this myself and still find myself doing it sometimes. But the truth is that my most successful
link building campaigns have been simple.
Ask yourself these questions when choosing the techniques:
★ Am I capable of implementing this on my own?
★ Will I need extra help to implement this? i.e. designers, writers or developers
★ Will this technique deliver links that help me hit business goals?
★ Can I implement this technique in the time that I have?
★ Will the client be happy with me using this technique?
★ Do I feel confident about this technique?
These questions should help you filter out techniques that you can’t use and will help you end
up with a list of techniques that are prioritised.
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Plan your activity over the next few months
Now that you have prioritized your link building techniques, you need to plan the time to
actually implement them. This is particularly relevant for those of you who operate in an
agency where your time may be split among a number of different campaigns, so planning is
very important.
From another point of view, it is important because you need to set the right expectations with
your client or boss about how long it may be before they can see some results. If you’ve sold a
contract where the client is only paying you for a day of time a month, you may struggle to put
together a big piece of interactive link bait without going over budget.
I can’t explain the importance of having a plan. It not only helps you, but clients love to see
plans. It helps make them feel reassured that you know what you’re doing, even if the plan
changes.
When it comes to planning, I try and keep it as simple as possible. A simple Excel spreadsheet
that looks like this can do the job:
Simple can work fine. You can break each of these down into more concrete steps and actions,
but, broadly, this can work fine and make sure you stay on track.
If you want to get a bit more advanced, I have found that Trello is a great little tool for
managing projects. It is great because you can share it among team members and even share
it directly with the client, who can see progress at a glance.
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Prepare or create your link building asset
Now we need to create our link building asset. I like to think of building an asset because this
helps to make sure it is something truly valuable to the business, and it may even be useful to
other departments. For example, you may work on a great piece of content that visualizes
some industry data. This could be used by the PR team, who can take this to high-level
journalists to use in their stories. Whereas, if you say that your content is “just for link
building”, then you’re not getting as much value out of it as you could.
Content as a link building asset
This section is very biased towards using content as a link building asset; this is deliberate, as
I’ve seen first-hand that it is a lot easier to build links when you have something of value to
offer someone.
Great content makes outreach a lot easier
Having said that, I will touch on a few other ideas later in this section as well as touching upon
some specific content ideas and processes.
Think about your outreach - now
Thinking about outreach early in the content creation process helps ensure that you’re
building something that people will care about.
Answer the following questions in relation to the content you’re creating:
★ Who gives a shit about my content?
★ Why do they give a shit about my content?
★ Do they have the ability to link?
If you struggle to answer these questions confidently, you may struggle with your outreach. If
you can answer them positively, then you not only have a better chance of success, but you’ve
already done most of the work you need to do when crafting your outreach message – more
on this later.
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Let’s look at these in more detail.
Who gives a shit about my content?
To enforce the point on this one a little bit more, I’m going to expand upon it slightly:
Who gives a shit about my content? (Outside of my team)
Sometimes when you’re working on an idea, you are convinced that it is an awesome idea.
Your team probably agrees with you, after all, you’ve probably pitched the idea to them in a
very convincing way and they like you, so why wouldn’t they like your idea?
The problem is that we can become blinded by our own opinions. We get too close; we don’t
take a step back and look at the bigger picture, which is a whole lot bigger than you and your
team. Think about it, too, when crafting a piece of link bait; is it you and your team who are
the target audience for links?
I highly doubt it.
The target audience for linking to your content may not care less about what you have created;
they’ve seen it all before and it doesn’t excite them. This usually comes as a surprise because
you felt that your idea was amazing, but did you actually ask anyone else outside of your
team? Did you get an opinion from someone in your target audience? If the answer is no, then
you only have yourself to blame.
You not only need a very good understanding of your target audience, you also need to be
prepared to fail fast. Failing fast lets you sanity check an idea before you go to the trouble of
creating the whole thing, if at this early point of the process you find that no one gives a shit
about the content then you haven’t actually lost that much. In fact, you’ve gained valuable
insight into what doesn’t work and, if you’re smart, will have gotten feedback on why it doesn’t
work. This information is invaluable and can be fed back into the next piece of content.
When creating a piece of content, you always need to be thinking – who cares? Who gives a
shit? Yes, it is a tough question and not one that people like asking themselves, particularly if
they’ve become personally attached to an idea, but it can help weed out the bad ideas and
leave you with ones that stand a good chance of doing well.
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Here is a tip, when you think you have an idea for a piece of content and you think it has a
good chance of getting links, do the following:
★ Set a timer for ten minutes, go to Google, and find ten people who a) will care about
your content and b) have the ability to link to it
If you can’t find ten people after ten minutes, it may not be such a great idea as a link building
piece. It could be great as a normal piece of content, but, if you can’t quickly find people who
not only care but also have the ability to link, you’re going to find outreach very hard.
Why do they give a shit about your content?
It isn’t enough to simply find people who may care; you need to figure out why they care. This
is a secondary check against yourself, to make sure that you genuinely do have a good idea.
Answering this, at this stage, also helps form an important part of your outreach message,
which we’ll come onto shortly.
Again, you ideally need to answer this question very early in the content creation process
because it can drive how the content is shaped and it can really help make it a success.
Ultimately, the reason that someone cares about your content lies in how it provokes an
emotional response. It needs to have some kind of hook that makes it stand out and makes it
matter. If it doesn’t matter to someone, why would they bother taking the time to read it, let
alone link to it? It could matter to them because of a number of reasons:
★ Informative
★ Funny
★ Controversial
★ Interesting
★ Thought provoking
★ Meaningful
★ Visualizes something complicated
★ Beautiful
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If your content ticks one or more of these areas, it has more of a chance of making someone
care about it. But it isn’t enough to simply say “this content in interesting” or “this content is
funny”. Why is content interesting? What makes it interesting to your target audience?
Remember that you don’t want to end up being the only one that thinks a piece of content is
interesting.
When you are thinking about an idea and asking your team for feedback, try to take your own
emotion out of the equation by not saying things like: “I like it” or “I don’t like it”. Instead, try to
begin your feedback by using one of the following:
“It works because…”
“It doesn’t work because…”
This is something I picked up from a book called Creative Mischief by Dave Trott who uses the
same process for helping decide how good advertisements are.
Instead of the usual, “I like it, it’s cool,” feedback that you may get, you’ll get something like, “It
works because it does a great job of visualizing the history of modern cinema. I can easily see
which films have grossed the most and which ones were rated highest.”
Even if the person doesn’t like it, you’ll get feedback on why and you can choose to either
improve those elements or you can decide to move onto another idea.
Here is the fun part of all of this too: You are putting together your outreach message (which
we’ll talk about more shortly) piece by piece. Let’s look at the previous bit of feedback again:
“It works because it does a great job of visualizing the history of modern cinema. I can easily
see which films have grossed the most and which ones were rated highest.”
Let’s imagine we are contacting a movie blogger and telling him about some content we’ve just
created, we can change this feedback to say the following:
“This piece of content works because it does a great job of visualizing the history of modern
cinema, and you can easily see which films have grossed the most and which ones were rated
highest.”
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Just a very slight tweak to the feedback has given you a hook to use when emailing a blogger.
You’re not only testing your idea to see if it can work, you’re taking the information and using
it to help you tell your target audience why it works.
Do they have the ability to link?
This is crucial and, probably, one of the most overlooked parts of the content-based link
building. You can go to a lot of effort to create what genuinely is a fantastic piece of content,
but, if the people who care about it do not have the ability to link, it may not work as a link
building piece. The ability to link is crucial. If the people who care do not actually have blogs or
websites, you’re not going to get links. You may get social shares, which is great and will get
some traffic to the content, but, if the goal is links, you’re probably not going to succeed.
Let’s go to the extreme to demonstrate this. Imagine you owned an online store selling socks
and you created a great piece of content about different sock types and how different types of
socks can help with different types of activity. You think that the target audience for links is
sock bloggers, but, when you do your research, you can’t find any sock bloggers. Who is going
to link to your content?
In this case, you may need to expand the target audience for links to fashion sites, which may
give you more targets, but you’d probably need to tweak the angle that the content takes, too.
Let’s look at a less-extreme example. You put together a piece of content targeted at CEOs of
large companies. It is titled, “Everything a CEO needs to know about SEO in less than a
minute.” You believe this content can work because CEOs are notoriously busy, but, as their
company probably has an online presence, they want to know about SEO but do not have
hours to read up on it.
However, many CEOs probably do not have their own blog where they may link to your
content. Sure there are exceptions; blogs from Brad Feld and Rand spring to mind, but, in
general, there aren’t that many. This means that the target market for consuming your content
is different than the target market for who may link to it.
This isn’t a problem most of the time, but most SEOs do not think about this subtle distinction.
So they end up targeting the wrong people for links and end up being disappointed, no matter
how good the content is.
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So what is the answer?
In this scenario, you need to spend some time researching what CEOs read, where they hang
out online, and who influences them. The places that you identify now become your target
market for links. So instead of outreaching to CEOs (who are way to busy to reply to you, let
alone link to you) you’re contacting the places they read such as The Economist, which lists
CEOs as one of its most popular reading demographics.
Find link targets and prioritise
There are a host of ways to find websites that may be interested in linking to you. The volume
can depend quite a bit on your industry because some lend themselves better to blogging than
others. As an example, if you’re in the travel industry, there are many, many blogs on a range
of sub-topics. So you have quite a big set of websites to research and try to engage with. There
is a downside here though in that, in general, the bigger the industry, the more savvy the
blogger is, and the more likely they are to ask for money in return for linking to you.
In this section, I’ll outline my personal favorite techniques for finding link targets. In a later
chapter, there are links to lots of additional tools that you can use for finding link targets.
Advanced search queries
Every SEO needs to know advanced search queries like the back of their hand. This technique
is, pretty much, always the first thing that I do when starting the process of finding link targets
because I can usually find many websites within a matter of minutes – for free.
Going back to basics, briefly, an advanced search query is a technique for filtering your search
results to be a lot more specific than just using keywords. There are lots of different ways you
can do this; Google has a basic list here if you’re unfamiliar with them.
The best way to explain is to show you a few examples of ones that I use for finding link
targets.
Let’s say I work for a company that sells running trainers, clothing, equipment, etc., and they
have a really cool blog. I may want to get a few easy links by getting them listed on curated
lists of running blogs. I could start with a basic search like this:
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This would give us a few results to start working with, but the downside of this search is that
some of the results we find are pre-compiled lists of sites in the format of “Top 50 sites of
2012” etc. These types of lists don’t tend to be updated very often. What we want instead is
lists of running blogs that look like they are constantly maintained and not in any restrictive
format such as “top 50” etc.
We can do this using an advanced search query like this one:
Before I show the results we see, let’s take a quick look at what is going on here.
The quotation marks around running blogs tells Google to only show us results that have this
exact text on the page. Next, we have “inurl:links” which tells Google to only show us results
that have the word “links” in the URL. So it will not show us this URL:
www.example.com/running-resources
But it will show us these, which is the results of the query above”
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Without even clicking through to them, these look like much more targeted results that I stand
a chance of getting a link from. After clicking through, I found that two out of three were
relevant and they both asked for suggestions for sites to be added to the list, that’s not a bad
result from the first couple of results!
You can use the same type of search but switch out the word “links” with “resources”:
This also gave me pretty good results and a few potential links just on the first page I looked
at.
Let’s look at another couple of examples. Keeping with the theme of me trying to get links for
my fitness blog, but this time I want to do some guest posting, I may use a search like this:
Instead of the inurl: query, I’ve used intitle: instead. This tells Google to only show me results
that have the words “guest post” in the META page title. The theory is that many bloggers will
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highlight the fact a piece of content is a guest post in the title of the post, which is often used
as the META page title, too. If a blogger is willing to accept guest posts from other people, they
may also be willing to accept one from you, too.
Just the first few results look quite promising:
Hopefully, by now you can see the power of advanced search queries – and we’ve only used
two!
There are, literally, thousands of combinations of keywords plus advanced search queries that
you can use. Rather than list them all here, you should definitely checkout this post on SEO
Takeaways which is awesome and lists of 10,000!
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is, probably, one of my favourite tools for finding link targets because it allows
me to also find influential people on Twitter, which is a nice bonus to have when you’re
prioritizing who you’re going to contact. If you’re unfamiliar with Followerwonk, take a look at
this page on SEOmoz (who acquired the tool in 2012) for more of an introduction.
Here is the process I love to use when finding link targets using Followerwonk.
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Start with a simple search from the “Search Twitter bios” section of Followerwonk:
Here are the results I get:
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Once you’ve downloaded the results into a spreadsheet, you can start filtering and sorting. The
first thing I tend to do is filter out those who do not have websites listed in their Twitter bio.
From my 328 people that I downloaded, this left me with 253 – pretty good! Now I can just
start going through this list, judging the quality of the sites and adding them to my outreach
list if they’re good targets. But I can do a bit of extra filtering first, especially with some of the
really neat tools that Followerwonk gives you such as engagement score, likelihood to tweet,
and retweet score.
Next up, I’ll import this list of websites into BuzzStream, which will automatically start to
gather various bits of information for me, such as:
★ PageRank
★ Domain Authority
★ MozRank
★ IP address
★ Contact details if it can find them i.e. email address and contact forms
★ Linked social accounts such as Twitter / Facebook
So I can log into BuzzStream a few hours later and have all the information I need to either
start looking at the sites or do some more filtering. I tend to get rid of any domains that have
no PageRank or are a PageRank 0. If I have lots and lots of targets, I may also filter out
PageRank 1 websites. If I have a very large list, I’ll also filter out any results where BuzzStream
has not been able to find contact details.
This whole process takes about 15 minutes of work from me. I’m sure you could make it
quicker!
SEOmoz competitive link finder
This is a really cool tool from SEOmoz that can give you some quick win link targets. The tool
works by looking at which websites link to a few of your competitors; the theory being that if
they’re willing to link to your competitors, they may link to you too. This can give you some
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nice link targets but you should not rely on this technique alone because you really want to be
getting links that your competitors can’t get.
You simply enter your own website, along with a few competitors, and hit search. The tool will
then search the Mozscape index to find those quick win link opportunities.
You can then go through the results and see if there are any link opportunities for you to
pursue as well.
Gathering links targets in bulk
There are a few techniques I like to use for gathering link targets in bulk. Most of the time, I
prefer to do stuff manually because I get a much better feel for how good the websites are,
but there are times when I want to gather in bulk, such as when I’m a bit short on time. This
section outlines a few methods for doing this but with keeping quality at the forefront of our
minds.
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BuzzStream link prospector
I feel that the key strength of BuzzStream is with the CRM features, but it does have a nice
little tool for gathering link targets in bulk, too. You’ll notice a few similarities here with the
earlier section on advanced search queries. We’re not changing the way we find sites, but we
are taking out a bit of the manual work and letting BuzzStream do some of it for us.
Here is the process that you can use here.
When you open BuzzStream, you’ll see the prospecting button at the top:
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Click on this and you’ll see the following, I’ve entered some example searches:
This will start the process and BuzzStream will go and run these searches for you on Google.
Once it is finished, you’ll get an email so you can go in and start filtering the results. Simply
click on the link in the email to view the results.
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Here is a snapshot of the results I was given:
You will notice an extra column; this is where you can accept, reject or delete the link targets
that BuzzStream has found.
But I still have 101 websites to look through. I want to get that down to a more manageable
size, so the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of any domains where BuzzStream has not
been able to find an email address:
The cross in the middle rejects these link targets. The symbol to the right of this will blacklist
them, which means BuzzStream will not show them to me again in future searches.
I’m aware that I could go and check these websites manually for contact details, but,
remember that we’re finding and filtering in bulk here, so we need to be quite harsh and quick
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with our decisions. If you already have quite a small list, you could also keep link targets
where BuzzStream has found social accounts such as Twitter or Facebook because you can
always reach out via these if you want.
Once I’ve done this, I’ll go and filter by the PageRank column and remove any domains that
have a PageRank score of 1 or below. I will also go and remove any that have a Domain
Authority of below 30.
This leaves me with a more manageable list of 34 websites, all of which have an email address
and good domain metrics. All in all, this took me about 15 minutes.
Next step is to go through these websites and make sure they’re good enough quality to
contact and if they are, you can start your outreach.
Easy web scraping
No coding knowledge required – I promise!
You can also do a bit of scraping yourself without needing to learn any code. If you do want to
learn a bit more about basic scraping which involves a bit of code (copy and paste mostly),
then checkout this guide on Distilled.
If you don’t fancy learning any code, then simply download and install Scrape Similar for
Google Chrome, which makes scraping elements from a page super easy.
So what can you scrape?
The two common things that I use Scrape Similar for, when it comes to link building, are:
★ Scraping search results from Google
★ Scraping a big list of link targets from one page (without having to copy and paste each
one)
I’m sure there are many more uses, this is one of them, but the two above are my favourites
so I’ll outline the processes here.
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Scraping search results from Google
Let’s go back to our advanced search query for finding running blogs with resource pages. The
first thing we need to do is change our default Google search settings after our search so that
we display 100 results per page instead of 10. We can do this here:
Then scroll down to see these options:
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Now return to your search results, right click on the first one and click “Scrape Similar”:
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This will give you an output that looks something like this:
Then, simply export to Google Docs, and, within a few seconds, you’ve captured 100 potential
link targets that you can now start filtering and sorting.
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Scraping a list of link targets from a web page
The principle here is pretty much the same, but let’s say we searched for something like “list of
running blogs” and found this list:
Now it would be a bit time consuming to go through each one and paste the URL into our link
target list. Instead, simply right-click on one of the URLs, select “Scrape similar”, and the tool
will pull all the URLs from the page and let you export them to Google Docs!
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A quick note on oDesk
Another way of gathering link targets in bulk is to outsource the work to a worker on oDesk,
this can be a really good way of getting a list if you haven’t got the time yourself. You do need
to be careful, though, and a bit of trial and error is needed to get the process right, as well as
getting the right people.
I’m going to be covering the use of oDesk in a later chapter on outsourcing your link building.
Filtering link targets
Now that we have our big list of link targets, we need to do some serious filtering to get the list
down to a manageable level, as well as getting rid of low-quality websites and those which are
not relevant.
We touched upon this a little already when we looked at using BuzzStream for link
prospecting, but here I’m going to explain the manual process a bit more as I appreciate not
everyone has access to tools for this job. Any tools or techniques I mention here are free to
use, you can use all of these or just the ones you prefer. The one thing I’d highly recommend is
to have a manual check of websites before you do outreach to them. This helps reduce the
chances of you emailing someone totally unrelated and getting negative responses.
Use raw domain strength metrics
Before we start manually looking at websites, we want to get rid of any that do not have
enough strength in terms of domain metrics. This ensures that we’re not spending valuable
time looking through websites that are not that strong.
My favorite place to do this is in Excel and using a few plugins, the main one being SEO tools
for Excel, which can quickly grab the PageRank of my list of link targets. As mentioned earlier, I
tend to get rid of any websites that are PageRank 1 and below.
You can also grab metrics such as Domain Authority and MozRank using this awesome plugin
from the guys at SEOgadget. I tend to remove any domains with a DA below 30.
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Use influencer / multiplier effect
This is a bit of a manual process if you want to do it properly, but you can use PageRank and
Domain Authority to give you a pointer, too.
The idea here is that you identify the websites that are most influential; therefore, if they
promote your content, it has a lot more chance of being seen by more people. If you know
your industry well, then this doesn’t actually take that long, even if you’re doing it manually.
For example, if you are in the technology space, then you know that TechCrunch and Mashable
are big sites and ones that you want to highlight.
If it isn’t this obvious, here are a few things to check on the websites as you’re looking at them:
★ Following on social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest
★ Number of comments on their posts
★ Other places they write i.e. newspaper columns
I actually really like this simple diagram from this post by Justin Briggs:
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If you can segment your link targets into buckets like this, you can easily see which ones need
more time from you.
Conduct outreach
You’ll find that outreach is a big part of your job when it comes to link building, especially in
the early days when you’re still trying to build up the reputation of your website and do not
have many existing relationships that you can leverage. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t need
to do outreach, you could just create great content and the links would take care of
themselves. This is actually true for a number of websites online. Take SEOmoz as an example.
Do you think that Rand does outreach for the blog posts that he publishes? Nope. He gets links
and social shares because he is in a very influential position, having worked hard for a number
of years to get there.
Unfortunately, for most of us it isn’t this straight forward. You could create the greatest, most
creative content in the world, but it will mean nothing if no one ever sees it. You often need to
give it some promotion in order for it to stand any chance of getting traffic, let alone getting
links and social shares. As time goes on, and you become more established, you may find that
things become easier because your target audience may actively seek out your content or they
may subscribe to your RSS feed. This is the long term goal, but knowing how to effectively
promote the awesome content that you create is crucial if you ever want to stand a chance of
getting the links you need in order to compete.
With that in mind, I have written this section to start off at the basic level, where most of us
will start out. It will progress through to some more intermediate and advanced stuff, as well
as give some tools and tips to help overcome some of the most common problems with
outreach.
Links vs. relationships
There is often talk from SEOs along the lines of, “You should focus on building relationships,
not links.” While I tend to agree with this, it isn’t quite that simple most of the time, and I think
it can sometimes make you lose sight of what you are actually trying to get in the first place.
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I totally agree that building solid relationships in your niche is vital to long-term success, but
like any relationship, there is an element of give and take. The person you’re speaking to will
want something from you and, of course, you want something from them. Never lose sight of
this because, fundamentally, this is a commercial, business relationship and you need to think
of it as such. Otherwise, you’re in danger of not actually getting what you want.
One thing that should be said here is that you are not getting links from websites; you’re
getting links from people. Sure, there are a bunch of websites out there where you can stick
your link or even buy a link and there is no level of control i.e. nobody manually checks your
website. This is what made link building very easy at one point; you didn’t need to worry about
dealing with people who have emotions. You just got the easy links, avoided the people on the
other end, and, to be honest, it worked.
Times have changed though. Sure you can still buy links, and even a handful of automated
web directories can still give you decent links. But now your job as a link builder is harder. You
need to have the ability to communicate and engage with people in order to get the truly great
links. You need to be able to know what makes someone tick, what triggers him or her to take
action, and what interests them.
All of these skills not only help you with outreach, but they also help you to create content that
truly appeals to people. Doing this makes your outreach not only easier, but, also, a lot more
fun. There is nothing worse than seeing rejection after rejection when doing outreach (I know
how it feels, trust me). If you’re trying to promote something that just doesn’t appeal to
people, you’ve lost before you’ve even started. As the saying goes, “You can’t polish a turd.”
The key takeaway here is to remember that there is a person on the other end of the email
you send. How would you prefer to be contacted by someone? What would make you reply?
And, importantly, what would make you delete the email?
Bear this in mind when you do outreach.
Crafting your outreach message
There are various things to think about when crafting your outreach message. Something to
note is that outreach doesn’t have to be confined to email. Picking up the phone to someone
can not only be more effective, but, also, take up less time. I understand that picking up the
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phone can be hard, but, if you have good verbal communication skills, then I’d certainly
encourage you to use them. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people! I’m not a big fan of
the phone at the best of times; so pretty much all of the outreach I’ve done has been via email.
I know that many SEOs feel the same; so pretty much all of this section will be about email
outreach. But the principles can be applied to most forms of communication.
It isn’t about form; it’s about the message. Just take a look at this post on SEOmoz, where the
writer got a link by sending a letter to someone! One of my colleagues at Distilled, Hannah
Smith, once did exactly the same and got a very good link for her insurance client.
There are only three real things you need to think about when crafting your message:
★ Personalization
★ What you’re offering
★ A call to action
If you can really focus on these parts, most of your job is done. Let’s look at them in a bit more
detail.
Personalization
Many bloggers who you contact, particularly popular ones, will receive many outreach emails
every day. Unfortunately, for our industry, most of them are based on a standard template,
with little to no personalization, and do not offer anything of real value. Bloggers delete these
or mark them as spam.
This means that you need to put some extra effort into making your message stand out, the
place to start is personalization. You can’t expect to get a great response rate from sending out
template emails. If anything, you run the risk of getting a negative response. You could even
risk damaging the reputation of the website that you’re representing. If you’re outreaching to
high-level influencers, this is the very last thing that you want to do.
The thing is, personalizing your emails can take up time. This is the main reason that lots of
SEOs choose the lazy route and send out the same template to lots of link targets. What I hope
to show you in this section is that there are a number of ways to personalize an email without
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it having to take lots and lots of extra time. Not only will this mean you get a better response
rate, but it puts you in a much better position to build a relationship.
Personalizing an email is not actually that difficult and need not take lots of time. The time it
does take is well spent as you will get more (and better) responses. There are two core ways
you can personalize an email:
★ Name
★ Mention something specific to them
Not that hard right? Let’s look in a bit more detail.
Name
This should be a no brainer; starting an email with someone’s name is a must, if it is possible.
Sometimes it isn’t possible, as some people do not list their name in an easy to find place. But
here are a few tips to help you find someone’s name quickly:
★ Check header and footer first for an “About” page
★ Click through to social profiles as their name may be listed there, in particular if they
have a Google+ page which nearly always lists someone’s name
★ Put their email address into Rapportive to see what it finds about them
★ Look at blog posts to see if they use their name as the author
★ Do a WHOIS lookup on the domain to see if it is there
If you absolutely can’t find a name, use something like:
★ Hi guys,
★ Hi there,
★ Hey,
I’d probably recommend staying away from something like, “Hello Webmaster,” or similar, as a
lot of automated email tools will use this.
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Mention something specific to them
This is another key way of making an email personalized and really isn’t that hard to do. When
you’re doing your link target research, you can actually cover this step very easily. So when the
time comes to send the email, you can pull in your research and email it very easily and
quickly. There are multiple things that you can mention about someone in order for them to
see that you’re a genuine person:
★ A recent blog post they wrote
★ A recent comment they made
★ A recent tweet / social update they made
★ An opinion they hold
★ Something from their about page i.e. an interest
It can take less than a minute to find one or two of these, and, if you can do it when you’re
doing your initial research, it hardly holds you up at all when sending the emails.
What you’re offering
It would be a pretty pointless email, if you don’t tell the person what it is that you’re emailing
them about! At the same time, you want to keep things simple and easy to digest.
Remember earlier on, we asked the question, “Why does someone give a shit about my
content?”
Well, now is the time when the work answering that hard question comes into play again. The
answer to this question can be used in your outreach emails because it can tell people why
your content matters to them and why they should take the time to share it.
Communicate to them the value of what you’re offering, and tell them why it is of interest to
them and their audience.
A call to action
The other key thing to include in your outreach message is what you actually want the person
to do. Many SEOs can skate around this topic and not tell the person why they are being
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contacted. Something else to bear in mind is that the action you want someone to take isn’t
always to link to you. If you’re contacting someone with a high number of Twitter followers, it
may actually be in your interests to ask them to tweet your content. The advantage here is that
the effort it takes to tweet something is a lot lower than linking to it.
Examples of outreach emails
Below I’m going to share some outreach emails that I have used and managed to get a few
friends to share, as well as a few that I’ve received! I want to demonstrate the difference
between good and bad outreach emails using these examples.
I probably wouldn’t recommend taking these examples and re-using them exactly as they are,
but I would definitely encourage you to look at what helped them work or not work. Then take
those principles and apply them to your own efforts.
I’d also advise you against over-thinking outreach, hopefully by now you realise that my own
approach to link building is based on keeping things simple. Don’t worry about tiny details
such as how many words to use, whether you should use your own name or someone else’s,
whether you should use bullet points or not. Seriously, just remember what we’ve talked
about:
★ Personalization
★ What you’re offering
★ A call to action
Let’s start with the good examples and see what we can learn from them.
Good Example 1
This email was reaching out on behalf of an online marketing blog, looking to pitch a guest
post. The response rate was very good and a number of links resulted. Here are a few reasons
why I think this one works:
★ It is clear that you’re a real person by asking them to Google you
★ You have shown you’re a good writer by giving examples of previous work – the more
high profile these sites are, the better
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★ You’ve offered to share links to other articles too
★ You’re offering to share some ideas for blog posts too to open a discussion
★ You’ve included links to social accounts so they can check you out there too
Hi (NAME OF BLOG) or (NAME OF EDITOR),
I'm just emailing to see if I could pitch you an article for (NAME OF WEBSITE)?
I'm currently a freelance online marketer and I'm trying to raise my profile in the
industry. I've already blogged on websites such as (EXAMPLE SITE 1) and
(EXAMPLE SITE 2) (if you Google my name - they should pop up on page 1 or 2) - and
I think your website would be a great place to write for next. Alternatively, if you
want me to send over some of the URLs of those articles - let me know, as it's no
trouble.
If you're interested in this proposal, would you let me know? I already have some
great ideas for blog posts I'd love to run by you, then I could send them over and see
what you think.
Looking forward to your reply.
Hope you're having a lovely day.
(YOUR FULL NAME) plus links to Twitter / LinkedIn etc
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Good Example 2
This template is aimed at a more casual blogger, probably part-time as opposed to
professional. It was on behalf of a travel website, it was well received. Here are a few reasons
why I think this one works:
★ Gets to the point very quickly with what you’re offering
★ Includes previous examples of writing
★ It pitches a few ideas up front which makes it very easy for the blogger to say yes
Hi (NAME OF BLOG OWNER),
I'm just dropping you an email, as I'd love to pitch you an article for your blog if
you're still on the look out for any additional guest contributors? I noticed you have
accepted posts from other authors, so wanted to get in touch!
In the past I’ve blogged for (EXAMPLE 1) and (EXAMPLE 2) - so you can be sure of
the quality of the piece I'll be sending over to you, and the knowledge that will go
into it.
I was thinking perhaps one of the following titles:
★ 5 incredibly romantic travel destination ideas
★ 6 ways to improve your chances of getting upgraded on a long-haul flight
★ 10 of the best roof-top bars in New York City
If you like the sound of these, let me know which title you like - and I can get writing
it for you! Of course, feel free to pitch any other ideas you may have, if none of these
are what you're after.
Looking forward to your reply,
(YOUR NAME)
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Good Example 3
This was a recent template that I used when trying to get bloggers to take part in a series of
blog posts where I’d interview them. This was done as a social play because they all had good
followings on Twitter, so I wanted to increase awareness of the company I was representing.
It ended up working very well despite only targeting a small number of bloggers. Here is why I
feel it worked:
★ Plays on their ego – being interviewed is always nice even when you’re busy
★ I offer them something in return – links and recognition
★ The work for them is not much – just a few questions to answer
Hi (NAME),
I hope you're well!
I'm contacting you to see if you'd mind me asking you a few questions about your
profession and publishing the answers in the form of an interview on our blog –
(BLOG LINK HERE) - obviously I'd love to include links to your website / social
networks and a picture too.
I'm currently trying to put together a series of interviews with top UK (PROFESSION)
to get an insight into your knowledge and hopefully, to help the readers of our blog
who are aspiring (PROFESSION).
I'd love to know more about what inspires you and what tips you'd give to young
(PROFESSION) either doing it as a hobby or trying to get into the industry
themselves.
I appreciate you're a busy person but if you could spare a bit of time to answer some
questions, I'd really appreciate it!
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Thanks for your time.
(YOUR NAME)
(NAME OF WEBSITE + SOCIAL LINKS)
I also share some templates later in the case studies section.
Bad Example 1
Hopefully you can see why this is a bad email pretty quickly. I don’t think I need to pick it apart
– not that there was much to pick apart anyway!
To make it clear too, this was the FIRST email sent. There had been no prior discussions about
pitching a guest post or anything like that. When I dug into it a little bit, I also discovered the
website they were representing was de-indexed in Google. I wonder why.
Hi,
I have attached one unique guest content for your site [BLOG URL]. Please review
my content and publish my article. I hope you will then send me link to article.
Waiting for your reply.
Thanks & regards.
(NAME)
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Bad example 2
Another bad one and it’s pretty obvious why. Another thing to add which I can’t really show
here is that the first sentence was a different font and size to the second one. A tell tale sign of
a template email sent to lots of people at once.
Hey,
I've found your website and I'd like to propose an article on Perth, Australia for your
website [WEBSITE URL].
Let me know if you think this is a good idea, I have it ready written. it will be a 500+
word article with original information.
[FIRST NAME]
Following up
Always, always follow up on your outreach. I can honestly say that on most link building
campaigns, I’ll get more links as a result of my follow ups than I do on the first round of
emails. The fact is that people are busy, they get lots of emails and if you don’t catch them at
the right moment, your email will get buried very quickly and forgotten about. This is even
truer since the growth of smart phones and people checking email when they’re out of the
office and not in a position to link to you.
Keep your follow up short and sweet; you’ve already sent them the main details in your first
email so you don’t need to repeat it all over again. Something that can work well here is to
actually reply from a colleagues email address. This not only makes you seem more legitimate,
but gives you a nice reason to follow up because you can say something like this:
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Hi John,
I’m just following up on an email that my colleague James sent last week regarding
our guide to the best movies of 2012. He is out the office today and asked me to
follow up with you to make sure you got his email and see if you had any questions
at all?
Thanks!
Steve
Nice, simple, to the point, and doesn’t sound automated or like spam.
Because of the importance of following up, you need to have a good system to remind
yourself to do it and to keep track of people who have replied – the last thing you want to do is
follow up with someone who has already replied!
There are a few tools that can help with this and I review some of them below.
Dealing with negative responses
Not everyone is going to reply to you, that is the nature of outreach and you need to be able to
handle rejection. Sometimes you will get a reply, but it won’t be a positive one. This happens
and, instead of letting it get you down, you should do your absolute best to learn from it and
even turn it into a positive response.
Always reply. Don’t just ignore negative responses. If you ignore them, you stand very little
chance of working with that person in the future. If you’re working in a relatively small niche,
then this is not a great position to put yourself in.
When you do reply, be polite and accept their opinion. But ask for any other feedback that you
can get. Remember our exercise earlier, when we were getting feedback from our team? We
asked them to reply using the following:
“It works because…”
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“It doesn’t work because…”
Obviously, directly asking them to reply in this manner may not go down too well! But try to
bear this in mind, and ask them for feedback on what you pitched them. Ask what they’d
prefer instead; ask what content they’d love to see produced or what data they’d like to see
visualised.
This is your opportunity to establish a relationship. Sure, this first effort hasn’t resulted in a
link for you. But imagine if you got a great bit of feedback for a content idea, then a few weeks
later you go back to the person and tell them you’ve worked on it. You’ll get a much better
response second time around!
Dealing with requests for payment
I can pretty much guarantee that, at some point or another, you’ll get a reply from a blogger
who is willing to link to you, but they want to be paid for it. In fact, I published the results of an
experiment I once ran in the travel industry to see how many bloggers asked for payment.
This is a tough one, and it is your choice on whether you want to go the route of paying for
links. I will try and offer a few things to bear in mind:
★ It is buying links, no matter which way you cut it. You’re breaking Google guidelines and
with this comes risk. You need to ask yourself if it is a worthwhile risk to take.
★ Where do you draw the line? Will you pay just this once? Or will you pay everyone who
asks?
★ If you do pay, is the link going to look like a paid link? Does the website in question
clearly sell links to anyone who asks? If they do, you may want to rethink your decision.
If you can clearly see it, then a member of the Google web spam team will, too,
Personally, I’d politely decline the offer of a paid link, make a note of the website, and move
on. But that’s just me.
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Reporting on link building campaign and learn how to
improve
The final step in the process is to report on your efforts and evaluate the results. At this point,
you should also take some time to see what you can learn and improve on.
Pre-deliver the report
The contents of a report should not come as a surprise. If the only time you communicate
success (or indeed failure) to a client is via the monthly report, then you’re failing. Monthly
reporting, or any kind of regular reporting, is good but it should not replace regular
communication, including the phone and face-to-face meetings. Therefore, your client
shouldn’t be 100% surprised when they read a report from you because you should also be
communicating with them regularly, so they know what is going on.
This helps you in a number of ways because you’re pre-delivering what the report contains. If
you’ve had some problems throughout the month then it is much better to address them and
try to solve them right away, rather than wait until the end of the month and give the client a
nasty surprise. This also helps because you may even be able to solve the problem altogether
and not have to mention it in the report – thus helping you in the future at the inevitable point
where clients review all monthly reports.
Written communication sucks
One of the problems with reports is that they can often be interpreted in a number of ways.
This is particularly true if you’re reporting on SEO and link building because there isn’t always a
fixed standard of what is good and what is bad. Because of this, try to schedule either a call or
a meeting to discuss the report verbally. One way to do this is to schedule a call, then send the
report over just before the call. Then you can talk the client through it step-by-step and answer
questions or concerns they have straight away.
This has another effect too – it forces you to communicate regularly with clients and know
exactly how they’re feeling throughout a project. You’ll be able to sense when they are happy
and potentially avert problems by anticipating them in advance. You’ll also be able to get more
information from them over the phone or in person. So if you include a plan or strategy in
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your report for the next few weeks of activity, the client can sign it off or highlight potential
problems immediately. If you just sent the plan via email, then it may take them a few days to
read it and perhaps longer to highlight the problem to you – by which time you may have
already started work.
Don’t report on too much or focus on the wrong metrics
There are many metrics we can report on; it can be tempting to report on as many as we can
find. But this probably isn’t a good idea because the client may not know which metrics really
matter to them, and, if they just see numbers going down, they could be unhappy, even if
those numbers are not the ones to focus on.
Let’s imagine that your report includes the following metrics and compare them in nice color
graphics to the same time period the previous year:
★ Traffic
★ Number of links built
★ PageRank of the links built
★ Domain Authority of the links built
★ Revenue from organic search
★ Rankings
★ Pageviews
Now, let’s imagine that compared to the same month in the previous year, the following
metrics have improved:
★ Traffic
★ Revenue from organic search
However, compared with the previous year, the following metrics have declined:
★ Number of links built
★ PageRank of the links built
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★ Domain Authority of the links built
★ Rankings
★ Pageviews
Would the client be happy?
It depends on how good they are at focusing on the right metrics and their understanding of
SEO. Ultimately, you need to care about traffic and revenue. Yes, the other metrics are
important to keep an eye on and monitor over time, but they should not be the big focus of
the report. Month by month, you probably aren’t going to consistently increase every single
metric. But as long as the overall trend shows an increase in traffic and revenue, then you
should be comfortable knowing that you’re doing your job – and your client should be happy.
Because of this, you should be careful how you present your metrics to the client. One thing
you can do is put the really important metrics in the main body of the report and put the
secondary metrics in an Appendix. This means that they are there if the client needs them, but
they are not the focus.
Know what the client cares about
Leading on from the previous section, it is important to know what your client really cares
about. If you’re working for a large company, and your main contact is the Head of SEO, you
need to know how they are being measured by their boss, who may be the Head of Marketing.
What KPIs are they measured on and how often are they checked?
Ideally, these things should be discovered at the start of the project in the kick-off meeting.
This means you can focus on them right away and help your contact hit their targets.
Remember this:
Make your contact look good in front of his boss
If you can do this, you’ll be his friend (and his SEO) for a long time!
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Know who is going to see the report and talk their language
Most of the time, especially in large companies, your main point of contact will be the only one
who reads the report on a monthly basis. So you need to make sure you cater it directly for
that person, which is nice and easy.
However, every so often someone else may want to review the work you’re doing. In the
extreme case, the CEO of a company may take a keen interest in how their company is
performing through SEO and want to see your reports. It is important that you are made
aware when this happens so that you can tailor the report for someone who, quite frankly,
doesn’t care what PageRank or Domain Authority is. They want to see real numbers and to see
that things are moving in the right direction.
If you are in this situation, the best advice I can give is to try and arrange a meeting where you
can actually present to the CEO alongside your point of contact. Again, written communication
isn’t great, so presenting in person, particularly to a non-SEO, is very important.
Why reporting on number of links built per month is bad
Related to this, setting targets for number of links built per month is a bad idea, too. When you
do this, I can pretty much guarantee that the quality of links being built will suffer. It is simple
– you focus on hitting a single number, say 20 links a month. No mention of quality or what
the end goals of those links are. I know what you’re thinking:
“Well what about saying 20 links per month on domains that are PR3 and above?”
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Nope, that will not work either. This screenshot should explain all:
This is taken from an email I received from a company in India who do “link building”. So if I
spend $60 on 20 PR3 links, then I have hit my target for the month – woohoo! Ok, it doesn’t
work like that.
Hopefully you get the point. I’m going to reiterate a point from earlier:
Links do not pay the bills; they are simply a means to an
end with the end being a business goal of the company
If links do not help you hit a business goal – which I guarantee the link packages above will
not, do not build them.
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I love this post from Justin Briggs on the Raven blog which discusses this more and provides
examples of things that are better to report on such as:
These two graphs alone mean much more than any report on the number of links you’ve built
because they show value to a business.
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Example structure of an SEO report
To summarise my approach to this, I’ve outlined what structure you could use as a basis for
your reporting.
Executive summary – assume the client doesn’t read anything else in the report apart from
this section. Include everything they absolutely need to know here. Then paste it into the email
you send, too.
Key reporting metrics – this section should include the data that your client really cares
about and make a difference to their business. Include a simple graph, and, if possible, show
the trend over the last six months and compare to the same period the year before.
Activity summary – tell the client what you’ve actually worked on this month and the status
of it. For example, you may include things like the content you’ve published or the outreach
that you’ve done. Something you can also include here is a reminder to the client on what
you’re waiting for from them i.e. you’re waiting for a piece of data or their sign-off on a piece
of content. But you should be communicating this to them outside of the report anyway.
Planned activity summary – tell the client what the plan is for the next few weeks and how
this fits in with the overall strategy of the project.
Appendix – this is where you can include additional information and metrics. If you want to
include things like page views, time on site, actual links built, etc., then this is the place to do it.
Make sure you take a look at the sample SEO report PDF that I’ve provided as part of this book.
Before moving onto the next section, here is a quick recap of the entire process:
★ The sales process: selling a link building campaign
★ Kicking things off: questions to ask yourself or your client
★ Identify the business goals and how link building will help reach these
★ Identify your assets, resources and USPs that help with link building
★ Run analysis on your existing link profile and competitors
★ Identify the techniques you plan to use
★ Prioritise your techniques based on time and resources
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★ Plan your activity over the next few months
★ Prepare or create your link building asset
★ Find link targets and prioritise
★ Conduct outreach
★ Follow up
★ Report on link building campaign and learn how to improve
I’d encourage you to refine this and add your own steps based on the campaign you’re
working on. Hopefully this gives you a good basis to work from.
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SCALING LINK
BUILDING
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This is one of the most common questions I get asked – how to scale link building.
Scaling link building post-Penguin
Before April 2012 and the Penguin update, it wasn’t that difficult to answer. The techniques
that used to work very well were super-scalable:
★ Directory submissions
★ Article syndication
★ Press releases
You could just throw a bit more budget at these, and you’d get more links. It was nice and
simple, and it worked. But those days are gone and while some sites can still get away with
these techniques, I’d steer well clear of them.
What does that leave us with, when it comes to scaling?
Not a lot, which I actually think is correct, when it comes to link building. When you try to scale
something, it can be very easy to lose the level of quality and control that you may have had.
Scaling something often means taking the human element out of something, which, when it
comes to link building, can be quite risky. At a time when the focus should be on quality rather
than quantity, scaling link building is tough to do.
My advice would be to concentrate on improving processes and becoming more efficient. This
can lead to you building more links with the same amount of time invested – without any loss
of quality.
What we can scale
There are a few things that are still scalable, but they are not the parts of the process where
the links are actually placed. The parts of the process that are scalable start much earlier than
that.
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Processes
If you can pick apart the entire process for a particular task, you can look at all the different
parts and see which parts can be scaled. This is what scaling is all about. You may be able to
see certain parts that can be automated or outsourced to a team of people who can do it
cheaper or quicker than you. For example, you may be able to hack together a Google Doc
spreadsheet that you can use to gather link targets very quickly, rather than doing it by hand.
Immediately, you’ve increased the efficiency of a part of the process. If you can apply this to
more parts of the process, it can all scale very quickly.
Assets
A lot of SEOs think of link building as a one-off piece of work. You create a piece of content, do
outreach for it, and, then, stop. Rinse and repeat, and do it all over again. While this can work,
it doesn’t scale link building very well.
What if you were able to create a linkable asset that attracted links by itself, well after you’ve
finished your initial outreach? What if you could create an asset that you could do outreach for
over and over again – and get links without having to create more assets?
Both of these can help you scale link building because all of a sudden, you’re getting links to
something you only need to build once. So when you’re creating content, determine if it has
long-term potential for links or if it is a one-off piece. If it feels more long-term, then you
should prioritise it because the links will scale themselves.
Try to think of content that is “evergreen” and has continuous appeal to a large market of
people who can link. If your content is too specific and appeals to a small set of people, you
may get links but there are only a certain number of people who can link to it. So you’re
unlikely to get links over a long period of time because you’ll have exhausted your link targets
pretty quickly.
Another way to scale assets is to create a template that can be reused. This can work very well
when working with datasets. For example, you may build an interactive infographic using
some JavaScript and CSS. The code for this may be reusable for the next piece of content you
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create – all you need to do is switch out the data. This is easier said than done, but it is
certainly possible.
People – oDesk (proceed with caution)
Later we will talk about using oDesk as a way to hire people to support link building. In my
opinion, this is an area where you can add some scale, and, if you have the right people, you
can keep a good level of quality, too.
But the processes you provide people need to be watertight. If you’re going to scale up and
increase the hours you use on oDesk, you’ll need to make sure that every single worker knows
what he or she are doing. You can only do this by providing an easy to follow process that
clearly outlines the quality standards that you expect.
I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong with scaling something like link target
research; this is pretty low risk. As long as you have good workers, the data gathered should
still be good enough to use and all you’re doing is gathering more of it.
If you have a good team of workers and managers, you can also scale outreach, but I’d be
very, very careful with this because it is your client’s reputation on the line. As we discussed,
scaling can reduce quality, when contacting websites, you don’t want to lose quality.
This is why you will probably need managers, at this point, who can sit in between you and the
team of workers. When you scale up the number of people who work for you, it can be hard to
keep track, and you don’t really want to be spending time managing a big team of people in a
different time zone! So you should look for the stand-out workers who may be able to manage
the team. This means they take responsibility for the work being done and the results. They
will also manage the training of new team members, which you can keep an eye on to make
sure that the quality standards are still being met.
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LINK BASED PENALTIES
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SEOs know how important links are to the search engines, when it comes to determining
rankings. We have examined the emergence of links as a key ranking factor and the affect they
have had on the work of SEOs. Because of these things, link building has become open to
abuse by SEOs and website owners who want to take a short cut to ranking well. Software
exists which can build links automatically while you sleep, link brokers allow you to buy links,
and networks of websites have been built to sell links from. All of these things allow you to get
links, but not the type of links that Google wants you to get or the ones they want to reward.
They are hardly ever editorially given, they are paid for or auto-generated which means they
are probably low-quality.
Google does not want links like this to manipulate their rankings. It does not want a website
ranking number 1 for a certain keyword because the owners or SEOs know how to manipulate
link building and game the algorithm. Because of this, it has developed algorithms to detect
unnatural link building, as well as employing a dedicated team of engineers who work to stop
people manipulating their rankings.
This web spam team, currently led by Matt Cutts, has the power to apply penalties to websites
if they feel that the websites are partaking in practices that go against Google’s guidelines. This
team also works on developing scalable algorithms that can apply penalties without the need
for a member of the team to personally look for bad practices. The web is just too big for
Google to police, so it prefers to detect bad link building practices algorithmically and apply
penalties in the same way. Traditionally, it has also preferred to be cautious when it comes to
applying penalties.
However in 2011 we saw Google shift its stance a little and become a bit more aggressive. The
rollout of the Panda update penalized a lot of websites that probably should not have been,
Google created the facility for these websites to alert Google to this, which allowed Google to
make changes to the algorithm to try and take account of it. It went a step further in 2012 with
the Penguin update, which again, caught a number of websites that shouldn’t have been
caught. This has shown that Google is willing to be much more aggressive that they used to be
when it comes to fighting web spam.
At some time or another, you may find yourself working on a website that appears to have
fallen afoul of a link-based Google penalty. If you are engaging in bad link building practices,
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then the chances of this happening are clearly improved! But you may also be in this position,
even if you do not engage in bad link building practices. For example, a company may come to
you after working with another SEO agency that caused a Google penalty to happen, but they
now want you to help them get out of the situation.
Because of this, you must be aware of several things when it comes to link based penalties.
★ How to detect them
★ How to diagnose the exact cause
★ What to do in order to lift the penalty
We will examine each of these in more detail. To handle link penalties, you need to become
pretty comfortable with handling lots of data and running analysis of that data to find patterns
that may indicate problems. Excel will become your new best friend if it isn’t already.
How to detect and try to lift a link penalty in 9 steps
Generally, there are two ways that you may become aware of a penalty being (or about to be)
applied to your website:
★ An unnatural links warning message in your Google Webmaster Tools console
★ A drop in traffic and rankings from Google organic results
Step 1 – Verify the data
If either (or both) of these things happen, first thing you need to do is to verify what you’re
seeing to make sure that the problem is real. An unnatural links warning is pretty clear, but a
sudden drop in rankings and traffic could be for any number of reasons:
★ Your server may be experiencing problems, stopping people and search engines from
seeing it
★ Your analytics tracking code may be broken (this happens more than people realize)
★ Your rank tracking software may be reporting wrong data
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★ Someone may have accidently blocked your whole site in robots.txt, added a noindex tag
to the homepage or put rel=canonical on every page pointing to the homepage – trust
me, these sound silly but they happen!
★ Seasonal flux in traffic
★ Your site has been hacked in some way or infected with malware
So my first step is to make sure that the data I’m seeing is correct by ruling out the above
scenarios.
Step 2 – Look for patterns in the traffic / rankings drop
The next step is to start to figure out where the traffic drop is coming from. Generally, there
are two patterns that you can look for to begin with:
★ Loss of traffic for certain types of keywords
★ Loss of traffic for certain types of pages
If you’ve been hit really badly, you won’t be able to find a common pattern because your
entire website will be penalized. This seems to have happened a lot with the Panda and
Penguin updates which, in the severe cases, will affect the traffic of the entire domain, rather
than just certain pages that are the offending ones.
If you haven’t been hit quite that bad, you may be able to identify certain keywords or pages
that are hit and work on fixing those.
Something else you should quickly check here is whether the drop in traffic coincides with a
Google update, particularly a Penguin update. You can cross check with this awesome Google
algorithm update list or you can use this little tool, which overlays known Google updates
against your Google Analytics data.
Let’s dive into Google Analytics and look at the process we need to go through.
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First, segment by Google organic traffic:
Then filter by Google traffic only:
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Now, to start with, let’s filter so we get a list of landing pages from Google organic. If you’re
looking for keyword patterns, select keyword from the list instead:
Now comes the time for a bit of trial and error. You need to identify the page types that you
have and filter by those. For example, some websites have patterns where all of their product
pages have /p/ in the URL. Others have category pages which all have /c/ in the URL. So you
need to start by filtering by these so that you can see if a certain type of page has been
affected. You can do this by using the advanced filter:
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Then type in your page type or your keyword if you’re looking for keyword patterns:
You are looking for evidence of no decline in traffic for certain types of pages or keywords or
very sharp declines in traffic, basically anything that looks out of the ordinary compared to the
website as a whole.
An extra note on finding keyword patterns – this is becoming increasing harder with the rise of
(not provided) so it is worth remembering this. You may struggle to find patterns when a large
proportion of your keyword data is being lost. Also, it is worth checking for drops in traffic
from long tail and short tail keyword types, too. You can do this with some advanced segments
in this post by John Doherty on SEOmoz.
If you are fortunate enough to spot patterns, either in the pages that are affected or the
keywords, then you can carry this information into your link profile analysis.
Step 3 – Get all of your links
The next step is to analyze your link profile, I have covered this in great detail in the previous
section on link profile analysis. I’d highly recommend you become familiar with general
analysis and various link metrics before you start diving into trying to diagnose penalties.
You need to get as much data as you possibly can before doing your analysis. So go to Open
Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, AHREFs and Google Webmaster Tools to download a full list of the
domains linking to you and the individual pages linking to you. Grab all the information that
these tools give you – we can remove any duplicates from the list in a minute.
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Download all of these links into an Excel file, I like to put them into separate sheets first and
then create a single sheet with all of them. It looks something like this:
You need to pull all of the data from different tools into a single sheet, which means stripping
off some of the data points that you may not need. This will mean choosing between a few key
metrics, too. These are the ones I tend to keep when doing link analysis:
★ Domain Authority
★ Anchor text
★ Header response code
★ Target URL of link
★ Page title
★ Followed vs. nofollow status
★ PageRank (we’ll get this ourselves as none of these tools give us this metric)
To get the Domain Authority of links from Majestic, AHREFs and Google Webmaster Tools, you
can use the excellent Mozscape API extension for Excel from the guys at SEOgadget which can
fetch this for you.
Sidenote – this extension can also fetch Majestic data too, so if you prefer to use Majestic
metrics such as Citation Flow and Trust Flow, you can do that.
You’ll need to do quite a bit of duplicate removal, moving columns around and copying and
pasting, but, eventually, you should end up with a big list of links with all the metrics you
require to start your analysis.
There are three steps to your link penalty analysis:
★ Find the low quality links
★ Find the sitewide links
★ Find the over-optimised anchor text
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These are the signals of bad links and exactly what Google looks for when combing through
your link profile. If you find yourself with a penalty, these are the types of links that are most
likely to be causing the problem.
Step 4 - Find the low quality links
I like to start by finding links with very low PageRank scores on their homepage. I covered how
to do this earlier but here it is again for easy reference.
Once you have your linking domains in a spreadsheet, you’ll need to use the excellent SEO
tools for Excel plugin to fetch the PageRank for each one. This will take a bit of time,
particularly if you have a lot of domains.
You simply select the cell where you want the PageRank to appear, and select this from the
SEO Tools menu:
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Then, enter the cell of the domain you want to check. You can simply then copy the formula
down an entire column and leave Excel for a few minutes whilst the PageRank is gathered for
each domain.
Once it has finished running, you’ll have a list of all linking domains along with the PageRank
of each one:
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From there, you can make a simple pivot table using the following options:
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This will give you a table and a graph that looks something like this:
See the links in the -1 and 0 columns? Those are the ones we want to focus on and, probably,
remove. Take a closer look at these by filtering your spreadsheet, and then move them into
another tab such as this:
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Step 5 - Find low-quality sitewide links
Next we need to find low-quality sitewide links, I like to prioritise these because, if you need to
get them removed, you are only contacting one person to get a large number of links removed
in one go.
In order to do this, you’ll need to use a few simple techniques in Excel to count the number of
links coming from a single domain.
First, you need to copy all of your individual links into a new sheet, note you are copying
individual links – not linking domains. You also want to keep the anchor text for each link too.
So you’ll end up with something that may look like this:
Now we need to clean this list up so that we get just the linking domains. There are two steps:
★ Do a find and replace on “www.” and replace with nothing
★ Do a find and replace on “/*” and replace with nothing
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This makes the list above look like this:
Now we need to visualize this data using a lovely pivot table. Select pivot table from the Excel
menu, select both columns of data, and click OK.
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Now you want to select the following:
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This will give you a table like this, and you can sort by the number column to get something
like this:
This gives us the exact information we need – which domains are linking to us the most. Now
we can grab the PageRank for these domains, and, if any have a score of -1 or 0 plus lots of
links, those should be prioritised when trying to remove them.
Step 6 - Find over-optimised anchor text
The next step is to look for too much anchor text that may be making your link profile look
over-optimised. You can of course do this using the features of the individual tools, but
remember that you’ve pulled all our link data into one place, so you want to check the anchor
text of every single link we can find so that we have a clear picture.
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The technique for this is very similar to the previous one for finding sitewide links. We just
need to use slightly different data when creating the pivot table:
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This should give you something like the following:
As you can see, the anchor text of my own link profile looks pretty natural! However, if you
find that most of this list is made up of commercial keywords, you may have a problem. The
next step, if this happens, is to take a closer look at the websites linking to you with the
commercial anchor text. If the quality of these websites is very low, then they are contenders
to be removed.
If a link has the combination of the following:
Very low PageRank (-1 or 0) + commercial anchor text +
sitewide = prime candidate for removal
Let’s quickly catch-up – at this point, you should have a list of links that you believe are lowquality,
based on the steps and analysis above. You should also be sure that you’re actually
suffering from a penalty as opposed to a problem with data or reporting.
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Step 7 – Link removal
Now the really hard work begins – trying to get links removed. The problem is that the links
that you most likely want to remove are on low-quality websites. This means that they may not
be maintained very well, and it could prove very hard to contact someone who controls the
links. However this step is still crucial because, if you plan to use the link disavow tool and
submit a reconsideration request to Google, you need to show that you’ve at least tried to get
links removed.
The approach here isn’t too different from the one you’d use for standard outreach –
★ Find contact details
★ Craft outreach message and contact
★ Follow up
Also, with link removal, it is worth moving all of the URLs and details into a Google
spreadsheet. This means that when you submit a reconsideration request, you can share a link
to the spreadsheet and the web spam team can easily see what you’ve done.
Find contact details
With a task like this, and the likelihood that you’ll need to contact a lot of websites, it is
probably worth utilizing an outsourcer to at least find contact details for you so that you can
speed things up a bit. You can also use a tool like this one from SEOgadget, which may be able
to find contact details for you.
Remember to keep everything recorded in your Google spreadsheet.
If no contact details can be found, then record this in your spreadsheet, too, and add a note
saying that, for certain sites, you did your absolute best but couldn’t find anyone to contact.
Craft outreach message
As with standard outreach, you should keep the message simple and to the point. I’d advise
against being too aggressive and be as polite as you can, the last thing you want to do is annoy
the person you’ve contacted and have them flat out refuse to remove the link.
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It is also probably best to be open and honest about why you’re asking for the links to be
removed. Tell them that you’re concerned that the link may be harming your reputation with
Google.
Write a generic template and personalize it with the person’s name if you have it and mention
the specific pages containing your links. Don’t make the website owner work hard to find your
links; make their job as easy as possible.
As you contact each website, make a note in your Google spreadsheet of the exact date that
you’ve contacted them and list the contact email address, too.
As you start getting replies to your emails, be sure to keep a note of the response and whether
the link has been removed. If someone flat out refuses to remove the link, make a note of this,
too, and take a screenshot of their email. Upload this screenshot to another Google document
and link to it from your spreadsheet. This helps prove your case when you say you can’t get a
link removed.
Follow up
Make sure you follow up at least once. When you follow up, make another note in your
spreadsheet so that Google can see the process you’ve gone through.
Again, keep the follow up short and sweet, and paste in your original email so they know
exactly what you’re referring to.
Step 8 – Link disavow tool
Once you’ve done absolutely everything you can to remove low quality links, you may decide
you want to use the link disavow tool from Google. This blog post gives a pretty good step-bystep
guide to using the tool, so I won’t repeat it all here. There is also this video from Matt
Cutts, which gives a few more details about the tool too.
This is a relatively new feature of Google Webmaster Tools and SEOs are still figuring out
exactly how it works and what the consequences are. If you’ve not come across it yet, the tool
is designed to allow website owners to tell Google about bad links which are pointing at their
website. There may be a number of reasons you’d want to do this:
★ You (or your SEO agency) has built bad links in the past and you’ve struggled to get them
removed
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★ You feel you have been the victim of a competitor pointing bad links at your website in
an effort to harm your rankings
You certainly shouldn’t use this tool if you’re not totally confident in identifying low-quality
links, initial reports say that it is quite powerful, and Google also advises caution when using it.
Dr Pete wrote a great post on SEOmoz shortly after the tool was released.
As mentioned, it is still quite a new tool but there are a few stories of it helping websites
recover from penalties:
★ http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-disavow-tool-released-we-tested-it.html
★ http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-tool-worked-16108.html
★ http://www.seowizz.net/2012/10/the-disavow-tool-works-real-sites-real-recoveries.html
★ http://www.seowizz.net/2013/01/google-disavow-tool-10-insights-from-4-months-oftesting.html
Step 9 – Reconsideration request
After going through all of these steps, if your traffic still hasn’t recovered, it may be time to file
a reconsideration request. A reconsideration request can be filed via your Google Webmaster
Tools console and you should take time over writing it because it will go straight to the Google
web spam team.
Something to remember is that if you’ve messed up – admit it. Remember that Google has all
the data it needs and can probably find out more than you can imagine. If you hide stuff, it
isn’t going to look too good to the person reviewing your request.
If you have built bad links in the past, tell Google exactly what techniques you used and why.
Be honest about whether you’ve used an outsourcer or an SEO agency to build links or have
used link networks – they can probably find all of this anyway; so you may as well be open
about it.
The goal of a reconsideration request
The goal of a reconsideration request is to tell Google you’ve stopped whatever you were
doing wrong. Make a clear and compelling case that this is the truth. You also need to show
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what you’ve done to try and fix the problem. If you can do this, then you have a good chance
of having the request accepted.
What to include in a reconsideration request
Here is a brief checklist for what to include:
★ Say what you’ve done to fix the problem i.e. removed links
★ Say what you’ve done to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again
★ Details of link networks or companies you used to build the bad links
★ Links to supporting documents, preferably Google Docs
Now in a bit more detail.
Give Google assurance that you will not do the bad practices again in the future and show
them evidence of this. Google wants some evidence that as soon as they lift the penalty, you’re
not going to go out and build spammy links again. One client, whom I worked with a few years
ago, showed how they’d hired a team of content writers and PR people who were focusing on
writing and promoting genuinely good content. They included some links to recent content
they’d written which was a world away from the low-level content they were sending out
before. Matt Cutts also referred to a company who had put a training program in place, which
educated their staff on SEO and told them which techniques to stay away from.
The work you did in documenting all of your work with the link removal will also help at this
point. Include links to all your Google Docs within the request, and explain the process you’ve
gone through to try and clean up the bad links. Make sure you link to Google Docs and no
other websites or file downloads – they may not get opened for security reasons. Whereas the
web spam team are able to view Google Docs without being worried about their computer
getting malware, etc.
If you have used SEO companies in the past that have built bad links and seem to have caused
the problem, Google also likes to hear about it, as well as link networks that you may have
used in the past. Some may not agree with the principle of doing this, but it is your call and
could help in showing good faith and wanting to show you’ve changed your ways.
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BUILDING A LINK
BUILDING TEAM
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Whether you’re working at an agency or are in-house, the time may come when you need
to scale up your link building by getting more people on board and, possibly, building a
dedicated team. The advantages should speak for themselves, but it isn’t that easy to find
really good link builders.
This section will talk about building an effective link building team and give you an idea what
you should be looking for when hiring.
Do you even need a link building team?
The idea of having a team of link builders working for you is a pretty sweet one. Link building
is hard, so the idea of being able to delegate work to a specialised team is a nice thing to have.
But you need to think hard about whether you actually need a team and ask yourself
questions such as:
★ Do I have enough work to keep them busy month-to-month?
★ Do I need full-time people or can I use freelancers?
★ Do I have additional resources to support them i.e. designers and writers?
★ How are my existing team members coping with link building?
★ How would my existing team feel about handing over client work to someone else?
As you can see, there are a number of things to think about, and the decision isn’t one that
you should take lightly. Let’s look at them in a bit more detail to try and help you if the time
comes to make a decision.
Do I have enough work to keep them busy month-to-month?
This is probably one of the more crucial ones to answer for the health of your business and
one you should be asking regardless of what role you’re hiring for. You should either be close
to capacity and expecting to exceed it very soon, or already over capacity and having to turn
away work before you commit to hiring more people.
Even if you are at capacity or close, you should look at whether your current projects are longterm
or could end suddenly. Ideally, you want to have a good proportion of your work to be
on going, retained contracts, which are far more stable and reliable than one-off projects.
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Do I need full-time people or can I use freelancers?
You may be at a point where you are busy but not quite busy enough to warrant hiring more
full-time staff. In this case, you may want to just look for someone who is part-time or even a
freelancer to help take some of the work from you and your team.
There are other advantages to hiring freelancers, too. The risk is generally lower because
you’re not committing to a salary, and, if this is your first time hiring for link builders, you can
test the water a little and start to get processes in place. So when the time comes to hire
someone full-time, you already have a base to work from.
I’ll explore this in a lot more detail below in the section on outsourcing your link building.
Do I have additional resources to support them i.e. designers and writers?
If you are looking to create link building assets for your team to use, then you need the
resources to create those assets. Even if you’re doing something as simple as guest blogging,
you still need to think about who is going to create the content for that. Will you need to
outsource it? What kind of additional costs will that bring, and can you afford it? Is it worth
hiring a full-time writer too?
The alternative is to try and hire link builders who are also writers, but this makes hiring a lot
harder and to be honest, I’d rather my link builders spend time trying to get links rather than
writing content.
How are my existing team members coping with link building?
If your existing team members are doing link building just fine, do you need to create a
separate team to take the work off their hands? The question here is whether your existing
team members could be spending their time elsewhere rather than building links. This is a
tough call to make, and you, ultimately, need to think of how best to utilize their time – both
for your business and the business of your clients.
How would my existing team feel about handing over client work to someone
else?
Leading on from the previous question, how would your team feel about giving responsibility
to someone else? Personally, I’m very protective of my clients, particularly if I’ve been working
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on them a long time and built a good relationship. Because of this, I may not want to hand
over link building to someone else.
On the other hand, some team members may really want to spend their time on other stuff,
so they will be more than happy to hand over some work. The point here is to speak to your
team first and get feedback on what would work best for them and their clients.
Hiring link builders
Whether you’ve decided to hire full-time, part-time, or freelancers, the next few sections
should all be applicable and help you find the right people.
Characteristics of good link builders
From experience, good link builders have a slightly different mind-set than other SEOs. That
isn’t to say that an all-round good SEO can’t be a great link builder or vice versa. But you
should be aware that link building requires a few specific skills that may make a difference to
whether you hire someone to be an SEO or a full-time link builder.
Here are what I believe to be the characteristics of a good link builder.
A thick skin
A link builder needs to be able to handle rejection well and not let it get him down. The very
best link builders will not get a 100% response rate every single time. Some replies can be very
negative, so it is important to be able to handle this well and most importantly, learn from it.
Determined
Leading on from the previous point, you need to be determined and keep pushing forward
with outreach and trying to get links even after rejection. Link building isn’t hard, technically,
but it can be very easy to give up if things don’t go well right away.
Sensitivity
This sounds like a strange one but bear with me. A good link builder should be able to identify
link targets that are likely to say yes, this requires some sensitivity as to how that person
writes and engages with other people online. It also requires sensitivity when it comes to
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speaking with that person via phone or email. A good link builder can sense if a particular
person may be a bit closed off to link approaches and be able to find a way around it.
Organized
Link building can get a little bit hectic sometimes, particularly if you work for an agency and
work across multiple clients. If you’re doing a good job, then your inbox should be full of
replies from different people across different industries. So you need to be organized enough
to not send the wrong reply to the wrong person! You also need to be able to keep a track of
efforts and report on them.
Empathetic
Somewhat related to sensitivity, a little empathy goes a long way. It can really help you to put
yourself in the position of the person you’re trying to get a link from. Understanding their
concerns, challenges, and opinions can help you craft your message better.
Hustle
Having a can-do attitude and being prepared to get your hands dirty is essential. As I
mentioned earlier, link building isn’t technically hard, but you do need the ability to just get
your head down and get stuff done.
Sales experience
Not strictly essential but a big advantage. I’ve often felt that sales people make great link
builders because they have a lot of the characteristics above naturally. They know how to talk
to people, know how to pitch something and know how to get what they want.
Additional resources:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-makes-an-effective-link-builder
★ http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/link-building-seo/hiring-help-characteristics-of-awinning-link-builder/
★ http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/what-to-look-for-when-hiring-a-linkbuilder/
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Interview questions
With the characteristics of a good link builder in mind, we now need to think about what
questions we can ask at an interview, which allow us to find them.
There are loads of questions you can ask, but here are a few that I like to ask and ones that
I’ve found from various bits of research. I’ve tried to keep these focused on hiring link builders
rather than SEOs in general.
If you could get any tool built to help with link building, what would it be?
With this question you’re looking to learn about the person’s understanding of what you can
automate and what you can’t. Also what you should and shouldn’t automate. For example, if
an answer you get is “a tool that automatically emails all my link targets” then I’d be a bit
worried. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d really want to automate, plus tools like this already
exist!
You can also dig a bit further ask them to explain the process that the tool would go through.
If you have a whiteboard, get them to sketch out the process on it. This allows you to see how
they take apart a problem and create a process to automate solving it.
We have a client in the xyz sector, find some websites who you may want to get
links from and explain why
This is a good exercise to give them and actually watch the process they go through. I’d use a
real client example here if you can, ideally one that you’re actually link building for because it
will give you a good frame of reference for what a good answer is.
An ideal answer would be them finding a good quality, relevant website that you stand a
chance of getting a link from. But for me, it is more important for them to show a good
process for finding that website. Being blunt, they may just get lucky and find a good website,
but the process itself is harder to get right so this is what I’d be concentrating on.
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Find contact details for example.com
There are two levels to which this can be answered. An average answer would be the
candidate finding a contact form or a catchall email address such as contact@example.com. A
good answer would be the candidate finding a person’s name and personal email address.
You can set this up quite well by giving them a website where the contact details aren’t too
easy to find, but can be found somehow through a bit of digging around.
Imagine you send an outreach email but get a negative reply, how would you
respond?
You’re leading them into the answer a little by saying that you should reply and not ignore the
person. But a good answer will include trying to build a relationship even after the initial
rejection. They should also make reference to trying to find out why they said no and what you
can learn from it.
If I gave you a list of 10,000 possible link targets, how would you start sorting
them out?
If their answer doesn’t include the word “Excel” then that is probably grounds to not hire
them .
Here you are looking for them to demonstrate how they would start slicing bit sets of data. In
particular you want to listen for what metrics they’d use to start filtering the link targets and
how they’d go about gathering those metrics. These metrics should allow them to prioritise
the link targets effectively.
Keeping the team motivated
As we’ve discussed, link building can be tough. Keeping a link building team happy and
motivated is very important if you want them to thrive, get results, and grow. A lot of the
things I talk about in this section are not just applicable to link builders, though; the principles
can be used to keep pretty much any group of workers happy. This even includes when you
outsource your link building; it is just as important to keep workers happy if they are not in
your office every day.
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Give people ownership and responsibility
This is one from my own experience and is often over looked. Good workers will want
responsibility and will want to be given ownership of their own projects. As soon as you spot
potential in someone, start giving them responsibility and encourage them to take ownership
of things that interest them. This, in itself, can help keep someone motivated because they
have their own responsibilities and projects to work on and improve.
Incentives
Cash related or not, the right incentives at the right time can make a difference to someone’s
performance and keep them motivated. However I’d encourage staying away from focusing a
link builder on links alone, I’d try to incorporate targets that are a bit bigger which they
influence. For example, referring traffic via links they’ve built or increase in rankings for pages
they’ve built links to. Yes, a link builder’s job is to get links, but never forget (or let him forget)
the big picture.
Non-cash related incentives can work well and things like gift vouchers, nights out at a nice
restaurant, or a few bottles of beer.
Training
Never stop investing in training your staff; ask them what skills they want to improve and try
to arrange training sessions to cover them. With SEOs, this can include sending them to
conferences of which there are many around the world. This can also build their confidence,
as it will give them opportunities to network with other SEOs and share experiences.
Recognition
Bonuses are great, but just recognizing the good work that someone has done can go a long
way towards keeping them happy and motivated. In particular, if the recognition comes from
someone in a senior position and it is genuine. Make sure you’re regularly telling your staff
when they do a good job, give them public praise too so that the rest of the team is aware.
Ask for feedback
It is a good idea to get feedback from your employees on a regular basis. Ask them how happy
they are in their role, how it could be improved, if they feel supported, and how you could
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support them more. Doing this every few months can give you a really good idea of how happy
everyone really is, then take steps to improve things.
This may be hard to do sometimes because it may mean you hearing some hard truths, but
over time you will be in a much better position to keep a happy and motivated team.
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OUTSOURCING YOUR
LINK BUILDING
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Whether you’re in-house or working for an agency, outsourcing can be a viable option
when it comes to link building. However it can be a bit risky to hand over control of your link
building to someone outside your company, particularly in light of Google being more
prepared to penalize for low-quality link building.
This section will talk about a few areas of outsourcing link building, starting with what an inhouse
SEO should look for if looking for an agency to work with.
For in-house SEOs – choosing an agency
There are a lot of very good SEO agencies around the world, many of them blog and speak at
conferences. But does that mean you can trust them with your link building? Being honest, no.
This section outlines a number of things you should be looking for and asking about when
choosing an agency to work with.
Experience in a similar industry
This isn’t a deal breaker, but certainly an advantage. If the agency has worked in a similar
industry before, they will have a few things that can help you:
★ A knowledge of the competitiveness of the industry and what it takes to get results
★ Existing contacts who they may be able to leverage for you
★ A knowledge of customers and what types of content they engage with
Approach to link building
You should ask what their overall attitude and approach to link building is, and ask for a few
examples of techniques that they have recently used for other clients. You ideally you want to
hear them talk about techniques that will not only help get links but also promote the business
well and bring targeted traffic too.
Things that I would NOT want to hear from a company include:
★ Directory submissions
★ Article syndication
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★ Press releases
★ Blog commenting
★ Forum links
★ Social / web 2.0 profile links
These are all techniques that were hit pretty hard in 2012 and are ones that pose a lot of risk
to websites. Some of these can still be helpful in some circumstances, but I wouldn’t want to
hear an SEO company suggesting these as their key techniques.
Things that I’d like to hear instead are:
★ Turning your website into a resource that deserves links
★ Building relationships with relevant and influential bloggers
★ Content-based link building
★ Earning links
★ Utilizing your USPs to get links
These are the things that are going to get the types of links that Google wants to reward and
whilst they are more effective in the long term, they are much lower risk.
Approach to content creation
Given the role of content in link building, you should ask the potential agency how they create
content and the process they use when doing it.
It isn’t a deal breaker if they do not have internal resources for writing and design, but it can
be an advantage because you can often speak to them directly and communication / briefing
is generally a lot easier.
The more important thing to discover here is the process they use. Ask questions about how
they decide what content to create, the format it will take, and how they plan on promoting it.
This can give you good insight into how they will create content for you, and you should be
able to see what processes they have in place.
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References and results
It is your right to see references and results from other clients that an SEO company has
worked with. This may mean you need to sign an NDA in order to proceed, but that shouldn’t
be a problem.
I’d be very wary of any companies that are not willing to refer you to previous and current
clients for reviews. It isn’t always possible for them to reveal all of their clients, but it is
unusual for them not to be able to reveal any at all.
Also, there is nothing to stop you doing your own research. Many companies will list previous
and current clients on their website, so you can always try to contact someone there directly
and see if they’re happy to chat to you.
Approach to reporting and account management
You should get a feel for what it will be like actually working with the agency. For example, if
you phone up with a question, will you be able to speak directly with an SEO or will you need
to speak to an account manager? Related to this, you should find out whom your main point of
contact will be and to what extent they will actually be doing the work and managing the
project. While account managers aren’t necessarily a bad thing, you need to make sure that
they are close enough to the project to give you answers and feedback when you need it.
Also ask what a typical report looks like and what is included. To me, a good answer would
include them talking about what metrics matter to you and reporting on those.
Something else I’d like to hear from an agency is that they focus on building a good
relationship with you and truly understanding how your business works. This demonstrates
that they care about the long term and are not just looking to make a quick buck from you.
Outsourcing to oDesk
This is applicable to most SEOs, whether you’re in-house, agency, or working for yourself.
oDesk can be a great place to find workers at a low hourly rate. At first it can be a bit daunting
because you’re passing work to people whom you have never met and are probably in a
different country, but there are tasks that lend themselves to outsourcing with little risk.
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In this section we will go through a simple process for finding people on oDesk and
outsourcing various link building tasks.
What can you outsource?
It isn’t a great idea to try and outsource every part of your link building, there are certain parts
that you’ll want to keep control of, particularly if you’re new to outsourcing and working with
people on oDesk. Let’s take a look:
Finding link opportunities
This is pretty low risk because it is purely a research task. It is simply researching possible link
opportunities based on a set of criteria, which you define. You can of course use scrapers and
tools to do this, but you can add a human element, which tools are not able to do.
You can get as general or as specific as you want with this task. It can range from something as
simple as finding generic blogs, up to finding ones that already accept guest posts. But
remember that the more complicated you make a process; the clearer you need to be with
your worker selection and your brief.
Finding contact details
Again, this is pretty low risk. At worst the worker may find the wrong contact details and you
email the wrong person, but that isn’t exactly the end of the world. With this task you can give
the worker a list of websites that you’ve already filtered and approved for their quality and
relevance. Sometimes it can take a while to find contact details, particularly when you’re
working through lots and lots of websites. So outsourcing this task to someone else can
certainly save you quite a bit of time.
Word of warning here from my own experience – manually sense check the work that has
been done before making payment or giving a rating. I outsourced a task like this once and
found that many of the email addresses were simply input as info@domain.com. While this
can be normal, there were a higher proportion of these than I’d have expected. I only realized
this when I started sending emails and got way too many bounces. Upon further inspection, I
noticed that pretty much all the bounces were from the info@ email addresses. However, by
this time I’d already paid and rated the worker! Suffice it to say, I didn’t work with him again.
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Contacting bloggers
This one is a lot more risky in my opinion, if you want to do it properly, at least. There are two
approaches you can use here which offer different levels of risk, but the lower you want the
risk to be, the lower your response rate is likely to be:
★ Setup a free email account for the worker such as a @gmail.com address and in their
outreach email, do not mention the name of the client or who they are representing
With this approach, your client is somewhat protected if something goes wrong. For example,
the worker messes up the template or you email someone who clearly doesn’t want to be
emailed regarding SEO and links. However, there is a downside here in that the email address
and the email itself are liable to look a bit spammy. This can decrease your response rate,
particularly from higher-level bloggers who want to know who they are dealing with before
engaging in conversation.
★ The second approach is to setup a genuine email address using the client name or the
name of your company, thus making it perfectly clear who you are representing.
This can improve the chances of someone replying to you because the email naturally looks
more legitimate. However, there is one obvious downside here – if the worker makes a
mistake, then you’re open to damage to your reputation.
Whichever approach you choose comes with some element of risk, much in the same way that
you run a risk when choosing an SEO agency. But with oDesk that risk is a lot higher because
you have a much more limited idea of a workers reputation and competence. Plus, they are
likely to be in another country where you can’t meet them face to face, and many workers on
oDesk do not list English as their first language.
Define the process – step by step
The next step is to define the exact process of the task that you’re outsourcing. This is where
you need to spend a decent amount of time, but it should be worth it because you’ll get much
better results.
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Look at the task you’re outsourcing, and write down exactly how you would go about doing
this task step by step. Go over it several times to make sure that you do not forget anything.
You should also include free tools that you’d use as well, which the worker can download and
use themselves, but you should try to limit these if you can so that you don’t complicate things
too much.
As you write the process, do it yourself and take screenshots as you go, or even record a short
screencast. This will take time, but it will be worth it and you only need to do it once for each
task. You won’t need to do it each time you hire more people for the same task.
I prefer using Google Docs for this because it is very easy to share, and I can also see when
someone has opened and viewed the document. So if a worker starts on a task without having
opened the document, I can contact them and double check that they know what they’re
doing.
Once you’ve got the process written down, try to get someone else to review it for you and
make sure you haven’t missed anything obvious.
Post a job description
Now the fun really starts. It is time to post a job description to oDesk and start getting
applicants. This is another step that you should not rush though; a good job description will
increase your chances of getting good applicants. You can also use the job description itself to
filter out bad applicants, too, with a little trick that I like to use.
oDesk also allows you to set minimum requirements that the applicant must have before they
apply, this is where you can request things like excellent feedback scores and certain
qualifications if necessary.
Rather than talk about theory, I’m going to share a job description that I posted a few months
ago so you can see what I mean.
Here is the advert:
Title: Website / blogger researcher required
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Description: We're currently hiring for a web researcher. Initially on an hourly contract which
could lead to a long-term contract for the best applicants.
The role would include the following tasks:
★ Finding blogs and websites within certain industries (for example, travel, finance, sports)
that meet a certain criteria
★ From the blogs and websites that meet the criteria, gathering various pieces of
information about them such as contact email and name of the owner
We're looking for applicants with the following skills:
★ Excellent English language skills, both verbal and written
★ Excellent attention to detail and ability to follow instructions
★ Trustworthy and reliable
★ Motivated by targets
We're willing to add bonuses for exceptional work and results.
In your application, please summarise what you believe the tasks to be. This is to show that
you've read the full advert and completely understand the tasks you'll be working on.
Note the final two lines – this is a test for the applicant and makes the job of filtering them a
lot easier. When going through the applications, I immediately decline ones who have not
done this simple task. It doesn’t matter if they match all my other requirements, if they haven’t
done this, then they haven’t read the job advert properly, which isn’t a good sign.
For ones that have read it, it gives me a chance to grasp their written English skills because
they need to rewrite the task in their own words. Again if they do not do a very good job of
this, I decline their application on the basis their English isn’t very good or they do not
understand what the task is.
I then set the rest of the requirements that can vary, but are generally:
★ Feedback score of at least 4.50
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★ Fluent English, written and verbal
★ Hourly rate of $1.00 - $4.00 per hour
★ At least 100 hours logged on oDesk
Note that workers can apply without all of these, but oDesk will highlight this in this
application and tell you how many they have.
You will also need to decide whether you want the work to be billed by the hour or if you want
to pay a one-off cost for the work. I prefer to pay by the hour for these kinds of tasks, but will
limit it at first. So, when I first hire someone, I’ll give him or her a 10-hour limit and then
review when the task is completed. If the work is good, I’ll keep working with them. If it isn’t
good, I’ll end the contract and give them feedback.
Filter applicants and hire
It isn’t unusual to get a few hundred applicants for a role like the one that I posted above. This
particular advert received 76 applicants in about 12 hours, at which point I closed the advert
and starting filtering the applicants.
This isn’t the nicest job to do, but it has to be done and you need to pay attention to it. The
people you choose will be your workers and you need to do your best to make sure they’re the
right people for the job.
As mentioned in the previous section, my first step is to decline applicants who have not
followed the instructions in the advert. I then decline other applicants using the following
rules that I test against their application:
★ Written in broken or bad English
★ Seems too generic and looks like it has been copied and pasted
★ Doesn’t talk about any similar experience for the role
★ Doesn’t even mention the role itself
★ Their feedback score is below 4.50 (highest score is 5)
★ They do not have much feedback or oDesk history – I usually look for more than 100
hours of time logged
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I do not tend to interview people. I will hire based on their application and give them the job
on a trial basis with a limited number of hours. Most of the time, I will hire two people for the
same role and then choose the best one to continue working for me.
You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned hourly rates when filtering. On the whole, I’m
happy to meet what they ask for as long as it is within the budget I’ve defined. It only becomes
a factor for me if someone is offering to work for stupidly low rates like 10 cents an hour. I’d
decline their offer if they offered to work for this, something just doesn’t feel right about that
or sit well with me.
Send over the brief
The work you get back will only be as good as the brief that you give. The brief needs to be
clear and understood before they start working.
Here is an example brief for this kind of task:
Task summary: Your task will be to find interior design / home improvement blogs (for
example blogs that talk about decorating your home, home improvement, home furnishings)
that meet a certain set of criteria which is outlined below. The blogs that you find that meet
this criteria should be added to the Google Doc spreadsheet that is linked below and the
various pieces of information need to be filled in.
All blogs you add to the approved spreadsheet must meet the following criteria:
★ Must be interior design / home improvement themed
★ Minimum PageRank 2 on the homepage
★ Has been updated with a new blog post within the last 3 weeks
★ Has a contact form or an email address (include in the approved spreadsheet)
For each blog that you find that meets the above criteria, please gather the following details
and enter them into the spreadsheet:
★ Name of the blog
★ URL of the blog
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★ Homepage PageRank
★ Twitter Account if they have one
★ Google+ page if they have one
★ Their email address or the URL of their contact form
★ The title of a recent blog post they wrote
I actually used this brief recently, and it worked very well. For a cost of about $30, I managed
to get a list of about 200 blog and all the details above. That is not bad value for money!
Review the work
Another reason I like using Google Docs is that I can review work very easily by just opening
the relevant spreadsheet. I can see what data they have gathered so far, do a few spot checks
and generally make sure they are on the right track. It is worth doing this as soon as you can
after they start working. On one occasion I noticed that the worker was inputting email
addresses as name (at) example (dot) com because they were copying and pasting. So I asked
them to write it correctly which would save me time later. It is better for you to catch stuff like
this earlier than wait until they have done hundreds of them!
oDesk also has a neat little feature that allows you to see snapshots of the workers screen
when they are working on your task. So you can have a flick through and check this out if you
want; this is a good idea for first time applicants in particularly.
I then do another review when their hours are complete and spot check the work. If I’m happy
with it, I’ll keep them working and may increase the number of hours I give them, too. If I
don’t need them for the time being, I’ll end the task but make it clear that I’d like to work with
them again and give them first option on new jobs that I have.
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MAKING LINK
BUILDING HAPPEN –
EFFECTING CHANGE
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One of the challenges that many SEOs have is actually getting stuff done. We are somewhat
reliant upon clients to sign off on the work we want to do. If we have a content idea, then we
may need to get the client to say yes before we can go ahead. Or we may need to get their goahead
before doing outreach. These little things can make getting stuff done quite hard and
slow us down quite a bit. There are a number of things you can do to try and overcome these
problems, mainly focused around getting closer to your clients so that you build a solid
relationship with them. This helps to get sign off a bit quicker, as well as building trust in your
ideas.
Getting close to clients
You’ll be amazed what can happen when you are close to your clients and have their trust.
Everything, not just link building, becomes a lot easier and far more enjoyable. Here are a few
ways you can make this happen.
Take clients for lunch or beers
Here is a tip for you that works amazingly well. When trying to schedule a meeting with a
client, suggest one of the following:
★ 11am and we can go for lunch afterwards
★ 4pm and we can go for a beer after work
These allow you to have the meeting but combine it with a bit of social time, too. This social
time can be invaluable when it comes to building a great relationship. You’ll be amazed what
happens when you go for a beer with a client and start talking about non-work stuff. I can
honestly say that the clients whom I am closest to (and have done the best work for) are also
the ones I have been drunk with at some time or another!
Call them at least once a week
Email sucks for building relationships. Try to make sure that you speak to your client on the
phone or see them face to face at least once a week. The value of speaking on the phone is
huge:
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★ Clients feel more cared about if you take time to call them, especially out of the blue –
unscheduled calls show that you’re thinking about them
★ They drop little nuggets of information that you may not have got via email
★ You can chat through ideas and get feedback instantly, rather than waiting for an answer
via email which could take a while
If you manage a team, spend some time trying to encourage them to speak to clients on the
phone. You can even try and bring out their competitive side and see who can call all of their
clients every single week, with prizes for SEOs who do it.
Work in a client’s office
This is golden; I can honestly say that this has helped me with a number of projects in the last
few years. When you work at a client’s office, you get to spend time with more of their team,
getting closer to them in the process. It also means that you can overhear conversations as
well as take part in meetings.
You don’t even have to be working on that client if you spend a day in their office. You can
spend time on other client work too, it is just being there, and your presence, which can make
the difference and be valuable to them.
True story – One of my previous clients had weekly planning meetings where they would map
out the work for their developers. In this meeting they had a big pile of cards, each one had a
task or group of tasks written on it and the planning meeting would prioritize all these cards,
then developers would be assigned them.
I took part in one of these planning meetings and literally sat there in the corner quietly. But
during that meeting, the cards with SEO tasks on them got prioritized an assigned to
developers. After the meeting, two things happened:
★ The CTO came up to me and thanked me for being at the meeting, saying just being
there meant that the SEO cards were looked at and dealt with
★ The developers who were given the SEO tasks came up and spoke to me to clarify exactly
what they had to do. I then stuck around for a bit and made myself available to them if
they had more questions – one of the tasks was done within the hour!
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Trust me; this works. It will help you get more stuff done, get sign off, and, ultimately, build a
better relationship with your client.
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SOCIAL SIGNALS AND
THEIR AFFECT ON LINK
BUILDING
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I wanted to talk briefly about social signals, their emergence as a ranking factor and
consequently their potential effect on link building.
Social signals as a ranking factor
There are lots of factors that the search engines can use to determine rankings, we’ve
discussed how there are hundreds of them and how links is probably the most powerful.
Social signals have emerged as a new signal because of the growth of various social networks,
in particular, Facebook, Twitter and, more recently, Pinterest. Social signals is a whole new
dataset to be used and can provide the search engines with more information about a
particular URL or domain.
There are also a few advantages to using social signals:
★ The barrier to sharing a URL on social networks is a lot lower than placing a link on a
website – it can take a few seconds
★ More people are active on social networks more of the time so there is a lot of data
available to use – many people do not have their own blogs or websites and therefore do
not have the ability to link. However many have social network accounts and the ability
to share content
★ In terms of ranking fresh content, social signals can give the search engines a much
better idea of when fresh content deserves to rank i.e. breaking news. It can take a bit of
time for links to build up to a new URL, whereas social signals can happen very, very
quickly and show the search engines that a particular piece of content is “hot” and
deserves to rank for fresh queries
For these reasons, social signals have been adopted by the search engines as extra signals.
Bing and Google confirmed this in an interview with Search Engine Land in 2010.
The launch of Google+ in June 2011 was another clear step towards social for Google, an area
where it had previously not done too well with its Google Buzz product which was
discontinued in October 2012.
Now, Google was able to get data directly from users who adopted Google+ and setup profiles.
It also had the added feature where users could link their profiles to their content and,
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effectively, tell Google which content belonged to them. This is partly how social signals affect
link building.
Social signals and link building
There has been some discussion about social signals being the new form of link building and
to a certain extent, it is. However, I wouldn’t go as far as saying they are replacing links,
certainly not any time soon. Matt Cutts also appeared to confirm this in July 2012, saying that
things may change in the future, but links are more powerful right now.
So for the moment, social signals are not going to replace link building. However they should
still be part of your overall online strategy. Social networks provide a great opportunity for
many companies to engage with users and ultimately, drive more traffic and revenue. This is
key for most companies and probably the biggest benefit of investing in social.
There are other benefits, too, though, including the impact on search results; there have been
numerous case studies showing that social shares can sometimes impact rankings. It does
seem to be a short-term impact though which makes sense as social signals can indicate
freshness. Once the social signals have died down a bit, the page may drop back down the
search results.
Another way that social may affect link building will be discussed in the AuthorRank section,
which is up next. We’ve seen that Google is trying to determine who is responsible for a piece
of content and perhaps give that content a boost as a result. This could also mean that the
links from content like this is also worth more. So, as an example, getting a link from Rand
Fishkin could actually mean more than a link from myself, because he is more authoritative
than me.
In terms of how this affects you and your work, it means that you should be trying to think
about social, in particular Google+ when building links. There are some more tips on this in
the AuthorRank section next.
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THE CONCEPT OF
AUTHORRANK
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You may have heard of AuthorRank, it received very little attention until 2011 / 2012 with
the appearance of Google+, which gave people the chance to associate themselves as the real
authors of a piece of content. AuthorRank is also known as AgentRank based on the wording
of a patent filed in 2007 and written about by Bill Slawski.
The original patent talked of a digital signature that authors could use to mark their content as
their own. This digital signature could then feed into the ranking signals used by Google and
may be used to alter them. So a blog post that has been written by an authoritative person on
a particular subject may rank better than a blog post that has no author tied to it at all. In
essence, Google is looking at who wrote a piece of content and using that person’s reputation
as a signal.
Doesn’t this digital signature sound a bit like Google+?
Imagine that by declaring yourself as the author of a piece of content, that content
immediately gets a few extra points in the eyes of Google and rankings? If Google was able to
use Google+ to determine how authoritative a person was in a particular field, they could
assign scores to them and the content they write which gives them an edge over someone
else.
When you think about it, it actually isn’t that hard for Google to take signals from Google+ and
try to determine how authoritative a person is, they could look at things like:
★ Number of people who have someone in their circles
★ Number of times their posts are shared
★ Number of comments they get and from who
★ Number of +1’s their posts get
★ The authority of the websites they post content on (connected to their Google+ profile of
course)
★ Links to other profiles such as LinkedIn, Twitter etc
These are just a few, there are probably many more that Google could use if it wanted to. You
can certainly see how it is possible for Google to do this.
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How AuthorRank and link building fit together
You may be asking yourself what this has to do with link building! Well, imagine that instead of
www.distilled.net linking to www.seomoz.org, Google was able to say that it is Paddy Moogan
linking to Rand Fishkin. All of a sudden, Google has a new way of determining the value of a
link by looking at who is linking.
In this post on SEOmoz, Tom Anthony illustrated this very well:
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This shows the number order of the web that we’re used to, websites linking to each other.
Now let’s take the author data we could get from Google+ and lay it over the top:
Now, instead of standard links, those links are given by specific authors. The authority of these
authors could be used as an extra signal by Google when determining the power of a link.
Again, Bill Slawski wrote about this in 2011 in relation to Google+. You should also checkout
this great post from AJ Kohn on AuthorRank.
This changes how you think of link building – in a very good way! This should encourage you to
engage with bloggers who are influential in their niche because if Google is able to make
progress with this system and identify people, those links may be worth that little bit extra.
How to benefit from AuthorRank
Let’s make things actionable and look at how to start using this principle in your work.
Setup Google+ profiles and add mark-up to your blog
The first thing you need to do is to get your bloggers and content writers setup on Google+,
and get the mark-up implemented on your blog. There are some simple instructions from
Google on how to do this.
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Use Google+ mark-up in your guest blogging
If you’re guest blogging on other people’s websites, start linking these articles to your Google+
account. Obviously, you can’t add the full mark-up that you’d add on your own website, but
you can add a link in your bio to your Google+ profile and by adding ?rel=author to the end,
Google can recognise you as the author.
For example, a link to my Google+ profile would look like this:
https://plus.google.com/104334957300160196129?rel=author
You can test that your mark-up works ok by putting the page into the rich snippets testing tool.
Find people on Google+ to engage with
If Google is putting such a big effort into Google+ and rewarding strong authors, it is a good
idea to try and engage with people who are using it. You can do standard searches of Google+,
or you can use this really cool tool from SEOgadget that lets you search bios on Google+ for
people relevant to your industry.
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LINK BUILDING
TECHNIQUES
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There are loads of ways to build links. As we’ve discussed, the ones that you choose should
depend on how competitive your industry is and what resources you have at your disposal.
You need to think about how much time you have and whether you have access to content
writers, designers, developers, authoritative people in your company, etc. If you can weigh all
of these things up, it should give you a better idea of which techniques you can prioritise.
Remember the list of questions you need to be asking yourself here:
★ The goals of the business
★ The assets and resources you have available to you i.e. design
★ The types of links you need based on your own link profile
★ The types of links you need in order to compete based on the link profile of your
competitors
★ The amount of time you have
At this point, I’m also going to highly recommend you check out this epic list of link building
strategies from Jon Cooper. It is easy to filter and sort which unfortunately is not possible in
this book!
Here are a number of techniques in more detail. I’ve explained each technique using the
same structure:
★ A definition of the technique
★ The types of links you can get with this technique
★ The process you use for this technique
★ Further reading and resource for this technique
These should not only educate you on the technique, but also help you go and apply it straight
away if you choose to. Make sure you refer to the chapter on how to choose your link building
techniques if you’re not sure which techniques you should be using.
You will also notice that I’ve tried to include opinion from Google on certain techniques where
possible, while I don’t advise that you take everything they say as 100% true, I do think you
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should know what they have to say. It can give you an indicator of what to avoid and what to
be careful of.
Article submissions
Side note – it is unfortunate that the first technique in the list is this one, but I can’t help
alphabetical order! But I wanted to include it for completion and to tell you to be careful and
mainly avoid it.
Definition: Link building using article submissions involves writing a piece of content which is
then submitted to an article directory, it then contains one or two links back to your website.
There are two ways this can generate links to your site. The first is by you submitting content
to lots of these article directories, either manually or by using some kind of automated
software. The second is by other people going to the article directory and using your article on
their own site and then keeping the link in place.
Types of links you get: Pretty low-quality although you can get high volume and domain
diversity. You can usually also get the keyword anchor text of your choice, much in the same
way you can for guest blogging. However, you have far less control over the quality of sites
that your content will appear on, especially if you use automated software to syndicate
content.
I very rarely recommend article syndication as a link building tactic now, there are odd
occasions but on the whole, I don't recommend it. Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about
article marketing in 2011 and a follow-up in 2012.
It is pretty clear that Google does not see it as a quality link building tactic, and it is, no doubt,
working on spotting these links algorithmically and discounting them.
The process: The article syndication process can vary depending on whether you are using
automated software or whether you are submitting to article directories manually. I'm not
going to recommend automated software here so I'll just go through the manual process.
1. Register an account and setup a profile at article directories
2. Create your content either yourself or using a content writing service
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3. Add a bio and your links to the end of the article
4. Submit to your chosen article directories
Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources on article syndication:
★ Article Marketing for SEO by Michael Martinez
★ Article Marketing and Submission WBF by Rand Fishkin
Being interviewed
Definition: This technique involves offering an interview to a website or blog within your
industry. In return they give you a link. This works particularly well if you have a prominent,
public facing person within your company, who is well known within the industry or if you
have subject matter experts who regularly speak at conferences.
Types of links you get: You can usually get some high quality links using this technique
because you can select which blogs and websites you reach out to. However, this technique is
quite reliant on you having someone of interest at your company! Otherwise the higher
quality, influential websites may not be interested. If you can get them, these links can be incontext
and dropped into the intro to the interview, so they will be positioned near the top of
the content. You may also be able to get some custom anchor text if you ask for it.
The process: As mentioned previously, this technique is reliant on you having someone within
your company who is influential or respected enough for people to want to hear from. It is
also reliant upon you having access to this person or being able to answer questions on their
behalf – with their sign-off.
★ Find someone within your company who is happy to be interviewed
★ Find relevant blogs within your industry who may be interested in asking questions and
publishing the answers
★ Email the blogs you find and pitch them the interview
★ If they reply positively, ask them to put together questions they’d like to ask
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★ Send the questions to this person for them to answer, or answer on their behalf and get
them to sign-off on them
★ Send the answers to the blog, along with a picture and short bio of the person
interviewed, this is where you include the link
If possible, ask them to add the picture and bio to the top of the published article
Blog commenting
Definition: This technique involves going to other blogs and leaving a comment on their blog
posts. Most comment systems will give you the option of linking your name to a website, so if
your comment is approved, it will contain a link back to your website. Most of the time, this
link will be “nofollow” which means that Google will not pass link equity across it. However,
you can sometimes find blogs where the blog comments are followed links.
This is actually quite an old technique and was massively utilized when most blog platforms
left comment links followed. In general, it has a bad reputation as a spammy technique
because many people use it to get high volume of links. However, if used correctly, it can be a
legitimate technique and a good way of interacting with relevant bloggers in your niche.
Types of links you get: As mentioned, most blog platforms will add the “nofollow” attribute to
the link so you may end up getting lots of these types of links. This isn’t necessarily a bad
thing if there are other reasons for the comment, such as participating in a blog discussion or
trying to interact with good bloggers in your niche.
If you choose the spammy route, it is possible to use software to find blogs that allow
comments to have followed links. If you choose this route you can often get high volumes of
links and sometimes, the anchor text of your choice. However this is not a recommended way
of using this technique.
The process: I’m not going to outline the spammy way to carry out this technique because it
isn’t one that I’d recommend doing. Here is a more legitimate way of blog commenting:
★ Find relevant, quality blogs in your niche that have comments open on their posts
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★ Observe the author’s blog posts and if they make a point you agree with or want to
debate, go and lead a genuine comment on the blog post
★ In the name field, put your own name and put your website in the URL field
★ If approved, the comment will link back to your website
★ Keep commenting and genuinely engaging with bloggers, this can lead to other benefits
and ultimately, the chance to get good quality, editorially given links instead of blog
comment ones
Additional resources:
Here are some additional resources on link building using blog comments:
★ Blog commenting as an inbound tactic by Rand Fishkin
Book bait
Definition: This technique is a variation of ego bait. The idea is that you get a number of
bloggers to contribute to a piece of content. For example, you may contact lots of successful
business owners and ask them to each contribute some content on what they’ve learned over
the years. You then collect all the answers into a single piece of content. However, rather than
just publishing these ideas into a blog post, you collect them all into a book instead – then you
print it and send each of the contributors a copy.
This is very different to how many companies try to engage with other people online and can
leave a lasting impression. You can then follow up via email and ask them to share links to
online versions of the book.
Types of links you’ll get: This technique could get you a reasonable volume of links if you
contact and get good responses from enough people. You do need to make sure you engage
with people who are likely to share links to the book afterwards and to make printing a book
worthwhile, you should contact lots of people.
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The process:
★ Identify the theme of your content that will be published, try to focus on providing really
useful content to your audience
★ Find lots of bloggers / experts on this topic area and collect their contact details
★ Craft your outreach message, customize it and send out to your contact list
★ Collect all responses into a single document and format it with images of the
contributors
★ Follow up with any contacts who haven’t replied
★ Use a service such as Lulu to get the books printed and mail them to the contributors
★ Create an online version of the book and offer it for sale very cheaply or with proceeds
going to a charity
★ Follow up with the contributors after a few days to ask them to share the online verison
Broken link building
Definition: There are two slight variations of this technique. First, you can run some link
analysis on the links already pointing at your website to see if any are broken. By “broken”, we
mean that the link is pointing to a 404 page for example. The second variation on this is to
look for broken links that point to a site similar to yours. You can then contact the website
where the link is hosted, tell them about it and conveniently mention that they could link to
your awesome site as well.
Types of links you get: You are probably not going to get huge numbers of links with this
method as there is quite a large manual / human element involved in the research and
outreach. However it can be a relatively quick way of getting links and perfect if you do not
have many resources for other big link building ideas. You do stand a chance of getting the
anchor text of your choice but it isn’t 100% definite.
The process: As I mentioned, there are two variations of this technique and the processes are
quite similar, but I’ll explain them separately here.
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Process one:
★ Run a link analysis tool like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO on your own website
★ Drill down to find pages on your own website that have links pointing at them
★ Sort the results by Header response code (you may need to export to a CSV)
★ Filter by 404, 500, 503 to find the broken pages
★ Go to these pages and verify they are broken
★ You can now either fix the page if it isn’t meant to be broken
★ You can 301 redirect the page to a similar page
★ You can contact the person who is providing the link and ask them to change it to point
at a page that is working
The last option takes more time but ultimately can make those links matter just a little bit
more.
Process two:
★ Find websites or links pages that seem good quality and relevant to your website
★ Install and run the Broken Link Checker Chrome plugin on the page
★ If you find broken links, email the owner of the website and let them know
★ In this email, also mention that you have a good resource that could be added to the
page or replace the broken link
The idea with this process is to give you a “hook” to get the attention of the person you’re
contacting. Telling them about broken links is a good thing for them to hear about so you’ll
have their attention.
Additional resources:
Here are some additional resources for broken link building:
★ Guide to broken link building by Napoleon Suarez
★ 36 broken link building resources by Citation Labs
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★ Broken link building from noob to novice by Anthony Nelson
★ Broken link building from your competitors by Wil Reynolds
★ Broken link building bible by Russ Jones
Building a tool / app
Definition: This technique involves building some kind of small tool or app that performs a
useful, specific function. This function should be useful to people within your industry. It
should also be relatively simple and focused, i.e. you’re not looking to build a huge piece of
software that could be a product in itself. A few examples of this in practice could be:
http://www.dry-it-out.com/cooling-calculator - an air conditioning calculator
http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm - calorie calculator
Types of links you get: This technique can enable you to get very natural links over a long
period of time. This is because if your tool or app is genuinely useful, it will become more like
reference material and people will naturally share it with others. So you do not have to keep
doing outreach for it month after month. This means that it can get you very natural anchor
text too.
If you make your tool or app embeddable, you can probably control the link a little. So you
can specify the anchor text and the page that the link points to and, if the person embedding it
doesn’t edit, this will remain in place. Because of this, you should be quite careful that you do
not use commercial anchor text as it may mean you end up with lots of commercial anchor
text pointing at your website which doesn’t look very natural. If you build links to your website
with commercial anchor text, you want to have some level of control of them in case Google
does flag it up as spam.
The process: With this technique, the process can be quite complicated depending on the
complexity of the tool or app you’re building. But you should try to keep it as simple as
possible.
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★ Research your industry to find problems that people have – can you build a small app or
tool that will help solve this problem?
★ Email a few bloggers in your industry and ask them if a tool to solve this problem would
be useful to them. You can also ask the question on somewhere like Quora or on
relevant forums. This helps gauge the interest in your idea
★ If the idea looks like it is of interest to people, work with your developers or hire a
developer to build out the tool. Remember to keep it as simple as you can
★ Test the tool with the bloggers who you contacted in step 2 and get their feedback.
Iterate on this and improve if you can
★ Once completed, add the tool to your website and start promoting it to bloggers within
your niche
Buying links
Definition: It is actually quite hard to define exactly what a paid link is; I could say that it is the
exchange of money in return for a link that passes PageRank. But what if I give someone a
cash discount on one of my products in exchange for a link does that count as a paid link? For
completeness, here is the Google definition of paid links. But even that isn't 100% clear, to be
honest.
Types of links you get: Pretty much anything you want, if you pay enough. Some of the
reasons people buy links is that it is easy to get the exact match anchor text you want, pointing
to the exact page you want, and it’s usually on a high authority domain. Sounds perfect right?!
The problem is that there are many types of paid links, most of which will give you all of these
things, but some can be spotted very easily spotted by Google and competitors. Leaving a
footprint when you buy links can be very dangerous, for example if you use a public link
buying network. See what Google did to this public link network when it traced it all.
If you are a bit smarter about buying links, then it can be near impossible to find out. It takes
a lot of effort to cover your tracks, though, which is why many people go for the easy option of
using a public network. The thing is that no matter what way you do it, you are still taking a
massive risk with your website if you buy links. If you are an agency and you buy links for a
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client, you should at least make them 100% aware of the risks - namely that if Google find out,
they can lose all the Google traffic overnight.
The process: Sorry I'm not going to go into the process on this one, I'm not going to
encourage anyone to pursue this technique as it is risky, particularly if you do not have much
experience.
Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources on link buying, as well as examples of sites being caught:
★ JC Penney caught buying links and penalised
★ Overstock penalised after offering discounts to students
★ 10 things to learn from the JC Penney SEO Fiasco by Rishi Lakhani
Buying established blogs / websites
Definition: There are two slight variations to this technique. The first one is to buy an
established domain that has lots of good links pointing at it, then you move all the content to
your own website and 301 redirect all the pages. Effectively, you are consolidating the website
with your own and passing link equity to your website. The second variation is to buy a
domain, keep it as it is, but just add links to your own domains. This will funnel some of the
good link equity to your own website and you’re in full control of the link.
Types of links you get: With the first method, all the links that you get will be going via a 301
redirect which we know loses some of the link equity. We don’t know exactly how much is lost,
but it is believed to be a relatively small amount. So you will get some link equity to deep
pages on your site, but you may also get irrelevant anchor text if people have linked to the
previous website using their brand name.
With the second method, you have 100% control over the link including the anchor text and
the page it points to. If you are smart and strategic about this, it can give some of your key
pages a nice bit of link equity and anchor text. You should be careful not to overdo it, though.
The process: There are multiple ways you can buy a domain so outlining a process here may
not be very useful. You can contact a website owner directly to negotiate a sale, you can hire a
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domain broker to find possible acquisitions for you, or you can go to a domain marketplace
like Flippa.
Directory submissions
Definition: Before the age of modern search engines (yes there was such a time!) users would
find their way around the Internet by clicking on hyperlinks and using web directories. These
directories allow website owners to submit their details and if they are good quality, the owner
of the directory would include their link within the relevant category. Fast forward over fifteen
years and web directories still exist but in reality, normal web users do not use them much.
But SEOs still use them because they are relatively easy to get links from. Some will be free
and others will be paid.
Here is some guidance from Matt Cutts on how Google handle paid directories.
Types of links you get: Usually low-quality except for a handful of pretty big directories which
are still maintained and only accept quality websites. You can often get anchor text links from
lower quality directories, particularly if it is a paid directory. Higher-quality directories will
only use your business or website name as the anchor text of the link. Directories can also be
good for domain diversity.
The process: The process for getting links from directories is very simple but also very boring.
You can often outsource this work to companies who will submit on your behalf and charge a
small fee per directory they submit to. This can be a good solution but you should make sure
that you get accurate reports of the work that has been done. Here is the manual process:
1. Find quality web directories (links below on this)
2. Go to their guidelines and make sure that if they charge a fee, it isn't for guaranteed
acceptance but for the review of your website
3. If happy, go to their submission form and fill in the details
4. If you paid, make sure you follow up if your link hasn't gone live to see if you've been
rejected and why
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Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources on building links using directories:
★ Link Directory Best Practices for SEO by Cyrus Shepherd
★ Link Building with Directories by Wordtracker
★ List of Web Directories by SEOmoz
★ Matt Cutts on Paid Directories (video)
Embeddable photos
Definition: If you have a website that lends itself well to publishing lots of high quality photos,
then this can be a great technique. If your photos are truly high quality and are unique, you’ll
probably find that people will often copy your photos, republish them and unfortunately, will
not give you the credit. This technique involves adding a simple script to your images which
means when someone right clicks on them, they are given an embed code to use.
Take a look at a demo here - http://www.paddymoogan.com/embeddemo/
The process:
★ You can download the script behind the demo here
★ You’ll need to edit it to suit your own website and code
★ That’s it!
Getting links that your competitors have
Definition: This technique involves running link analysis on a competitor to find out which
websites link to them. From this, you try to find out which of these websites may also link to
you. You then reach out to these websites using the same method as your competitors to try
and secure the link to you.
Types of links you get: The quality of link you get here can vary massively depending on how
well your competitors have been link building. There is also the problem that your
competitors may be getting some of their links because of a really good USP they have which
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you don’t. Add to this the possibility that some competitors will be using spam techniques to
get links, and you may find that your time is better spent elsewhere. Most of the time, the
types of links you get can be of moderate quality but the very fact that you can replicate them,
means that they are not likely to be the absolute best you can get.
Something else to note here is that whilst this technique can be useful to get quick wins and a
few easy links, it is not one that you want to base your link building strategy around. Your
core link building strategy should actually be focused on getting the links that your
competitors can’t. This can help make the difference when it comes to rankings and traffic.
The process: For this technique, the process is pretty straight forward but it can take some
time to filter through the links and find the ones that are of good quality and that you can
replicate.
★ Run your competitor through a backlink analysis tool like Open Site Explorer or Majestic
SEO
★ Sort the links by the highest Domain Authority or Trust Flow
★ Go through the links you find and see if you also have a chance of securing a link from
the same website
★ Optional: you can download your competitors links into a spreadsheet, then search for
words such as “guest post” “competitor” in the Title and URL fields. This may produce
some links that you can replicate
Additional resources:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/competitor-analysis-for-linkbuilding-a-guide-for-peoplewho-hate-linkbuilding
★ http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/link-building-analysis.html
★ http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/the-potential-pitfalls-of-competitor-analysis/
★ http://searchnewscentral.com/20110117113/Link-Building/how-to-performing-acompetitive-link-analysis.html
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Getting links from customers
Definition: If you can incorporate this into your process, this can be a great way of getting
good links that your competitors won’t. The idea is that you run campaigns that encourage
your customers to link to you. You can do this by following up with them after they have
purchased and asking them to blog about their experience. Another way is to add an optional
field to your customer registration process that asks customers if they have a blog, you can
then segment by this and run campaigns that target these customers.
Types of links you get: You are not likely to get a high volume of links with this method
because many customers may not go to the effort of writing about their experience. However
you do have an advantage in that these are the types of links that your competitors may not
get. You are also likely to get deep links to product pages and branded or partial keyword
match anchor text. This technique is probably best suited to ecommerce websites.
The process:
★ On your order confirmation emails, add a simple, short sentence that suggests if
customers have a website, that they link to you
★ Add an optional field to your customer registration form along the lines of “Do you have
a blog? If so, enter it here”
★ Then make sure you follow up with these customers after their purchase
★ You can also segment your mailing list to include those who have a website – then send
email campaigns to them with incentives to link should as competitions
Additional resources:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/headsmacking-tip-1-link-requests-in-order-confirmationemails
Getting links from your copied images
Definition: If someone takes an image that you own and uses it on their own website without
giving you credit for it, you can contact them and ask them to link to you because it is your
image. This can work very well because it’s a totally legitimate thing to ask and many people
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will comply without thinking about it because the other option is for them is to remove the
image. There are a few methods for doing this and you can even actively add high quality
images to your website in the hope that people will use them.
Types of links you get: This method isn’t massively scalable because it involves manual work to
find the images that have been copied and you need to send a customised email. You will
probably get branded anchor text pointing to your homepage and the websites will probably
be good quality. You can also make sure that you only contact high quality websites and not
lose time contacting ones where the link may not add much value for you.
The process:
★ Get the URL of your image by right clicking on it and selecting “copy image URL” or
similar
★ Go to Google images and click on the camera icon
★ Paste in the URL that you just copied and click search
★ Scroll down to see pages that have used this image
★ Click through and verify it is your image
★ If there is no link in place, contact the website owner and ask them for a credit link
below the image
Additional resources:
★ http://www.paddymoogan.com/2012/04/10/infographic-link-building-reverse-imagesearch/
★ http://kaiserthesage.com/images-link-building/
Giving discounts / free products away
Definition: This technique involves contacting relevant bloggers within your industry and
offering them free products to review and / or discounts on your products for a review. This
technique can be a little bit gray-hat because it may be interpreted as paying for links. Google
has been known to not take kindly to this type of link building so you should be very careful
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with its application and be aware of the risks. Google has gone as far as listing it in their
Webmaster guidelines as a tactic they don’t like.
However, this technique can work very well if you have low-cost products that you don’t mind
giving away or can give discounts on. You can also get quite creative with the way you use this
technique so that you’re not explicitly giving products away for links.
Types of links you get: Given that you are offering free products to bloggers, you can be quite
strict with them about the way they link to you. For instance, you could probably ask them to
use the exact anchor text of your choice and link to the page of your choice. But, as
mentioned, this can be a risky technique and pushing the anchor text too far can send signals
to Google that this link isn’t as natural as they’d like. So you should use some caution here.
The quality of link can be mixed here because some of the larger, more influential blogs may
have policies in place that means they can’t be seen to endorse certain products and if they
do, they must clearly explain that this is a commercial piece of content. Things can also get a
little messy here because of laws in different countries when it comes to online advertising.
The process: If you’re confident in pursuing this technique and have product to give away,
here is the process you can use –
★ Find out internally how much product you can give away and how many links you are
expected to get in return. E.g. for every $100 of product, you need to get two links
★ Find relevant bloggers within your industry who look like they are independent and not
part of a larger company – this makes it more likely that they control editorial policies
and can accept products to review
★ Categorise them by the type of product you’re prepared to offer them and start
contacting them
★ Ideally you want them to review new products that are just coming onto the market, this
gives you additional benefit of marketing your new product
★ Contact them and offer them the chance to review your product for free, perhaps even
offer them an additional product to give away to their readers
★ If interested, send them the product
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★ Give them some time to use the product, then follow up to get them to write a review on
the blog
★ You could ask them to include certain things in their review, such as images and to
review certain features. This helps make sure the review is in-depth and not just a few
lines of text
Additional resources:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/99-ways-to-build-links-by-giving-stuff-away-and-improveyour-brand-too-14029
Guest blogging
Definition: Guest blogging is the process of writing a piece of content which is then placed on
another website, often with a link back to your own website in the form of a bio box or
sometimes from within the content itself.
The types of links you get: One big advantage of guest blogging is that you can usually link
back to your own website with the anchor text (keyword) of your choice. This is because the
site owner usually lets you write a short bio which is attached to the end of the content.
Another benefit of guest blogging is that you can really filter out low quality websites and
concentrate solely on high value sites. Yes, these are harder to get and may take time, but
guest blogging is one of the easiest ways of getting links from good authority sites. You can
also get good domain diversity with guest blogging as well as getting links from the same site
over and over if the site owner likes your content. This is good for getting different anchor text
and deep links to lots of different pages.
One big disadvantage of guest blogging that you should be aware of is that it is quite hard to
scale while keeping the quality high. A couple of videos by Matt Cutts toward the end of 2012
pointed out that guest blogging was a legitimate tactic, but strongly implied that the quality
mattered a lot in how much those links would help.
The process: The guest blogging process is a relatively simple one but it can take some time
from start to finish. This is because you need to prospect link targets, filter them, contact
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them, produce content and wait for it to be published. Here is a simplified process for guest
blogging:
1. Use Google to find websites that are likely to accept guest posts
2. Gather contact details and link metrics for the websites you find
3. Prioritise your list by the best link metrics and write outreach emails
4. Send outreach emails and keep track of who you have contacted
5. When you get a reply, start to write the content they want
6. Send the content over with your links inserted
7. Tweet and share the page where your guest blog is live
Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources if you want to learn more about guest blogging:
★ Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging by Viper Chill
★ Guest Blogging board by Ann Smarty
★ Guest Blogging Strategies WBF by Rand Fishkin
★ Guest Blogging as a Future-Proof Strategy by James Agate
★ Building a Content Fulfilment Machine for Guest Blogging by James Agate
Infographics
Definition: Infographics are actually a type of link bait which we have discussed above, so the
principles of that section still apply. But with infographics, we are talking about a specific type
of content which is usually a single graphic and will visualise some data or facts. The idea
being that other websites can also embed the graphic on their own sites and include a link
back to the original source on your site.
Types of links you get: When link building with infographics, you can give people the code
which allows them to embed it on their own sites. Within this embed code you can define
anchor text and target page, so you do have the opportunity to shape the link how you want it.
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However many people will not use the full embed code and will sometimes just link to you
using the graphic itself. So you usually end up with branded anchor text on a single page.
There are also lots of mid to low-level infographic focused websites that will link to you if you
send them your infographic. I put together a list of infographic sites here that I try to keep up
to date.
If you’re struggling to get design resource for your infographic idea, you can use a service like
Infogram that allows you to input data and design your own infographic very quickly. It
probably isn’t a good idea to do this all the time, but it can be a good way of proving that a
concept works. This can then be shown to your boss or client to convince them to give you
budget to hire a designer.
The process: The full process for creating and promoting an infographic is a really big one. So
I'll just outline the basic process here and link to some more resources below which you can
use for more information.
1. Define the concept of your infographic
2. Find relevant data for this angle
3. Do some pre-outreach to gauge interest on the angle
4. If good, proceed to design
5. Gather target list of websites
6. Give exclusives to high level targets
7. Publish infographic
8. Carry out outreach
9. After a few weeks, use Google reverse image search to find people who have used it but
not linked to you
10.Follow up and email these people
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Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources on building links using infographics:
★ 6 Steps to Making your Infographic Work by SEOgadget
★ Infographic Clean Up as Infographic Outreach by SEOgadget
★ How Many Links Should an Infographic Get by Distilled
Industry roundups
Definition: Here you will become a curator of content rather than a producer. The idea is that
each week (or whatever time period makes sense) you gather the very best content produced
from your industry and collate it all into a single blog post. You simply need to add a few lines
under each link to explain what it is about and why it has been included. You can then contact
all authors of the content you’ve curated and let them know. You don’t necessarily have to ask
them to link to it, many of them will share the page without being asked and even if they don’t,
this is a great way of building relationships with good bloggers.
Types of links you get: At first, you’re more likely to get social shares than links, which isn’t a
bad thing. But it will take a bit of time before you start accumulating links to this content. Once
you’ve established these as a regular feature on your blog and you’ve built some good
relationships, you will be in a position to start getting links back from the people you’ve
featured. These links are probably going to be branded and deep links pointing straight to the
page where the roundup is hosted.
The process:
★ Start collecting good articles from your industry. You can use tools like Google Reader,
Evernote or an app such as Flipboard to find good articles and save them
★ Once a week, write a blog post that features the best articles of the week and include a
short description of each one
★ Share this post on your social networks
★ Contact the authors of each post and let them know they’ve been featured
★ Continue this process on a regular basis
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Additional resources:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/content-curation-guide-for-seo
★ http://www.boom-online.co.uk/link-building-blog-round-ups/#axzz2H0Ni0Nse
Interactive infographics
Definition: I won't go into too much detail here because it is pretty much covered above,
except that in this case, there is an element of interactivity in the graphic. It can be powered
by something like JavaScript, CSS or Jquery and allows users to interact with it.
Types of links you get: There is a difference to static infographics in that interactive ones are
usually pretty hard to embed. So you tend to get very natural links that are placed on other
relevant sites who are interested in the angle of the graphic. Depending on the coding
technology you use, you may also attract links from very strong coding websites.
The process: Again, the full process is very long and can take some time, essentially the
process is the same as any link bait or infographic except for the coding and development
stage.
1. Define the concept of your interactive infographic
2. Find relevant data for this angle
3. Do some pre-outreach to gauge interest on the angle
4. If good, proceed to coding and build
5. Gather target list of websites
6. Give exclusives to high level targets
7. Publish infographic
8. Carry out outreach
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Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources for link building with interactive infographics:
★ 7 Examples of Interactive Infographics by Queness
★ Examples of Interactive Visualisations by SEOgadget
Link bait
Definition: Link bait involves creating a piece of content which is specifically meant to get
links. Traffic and social shares usually come as a natural result of good link bait, but the whole
point is to get links. The goal can be to get lots of links, or it could be to get links from specific
websites or even a single website.
Types of links you get: A good piece of link bait can get you lots of links which means great
domain diversity. On the whole, they tend to be editorially given which means they are exactly
the type of links Google wants to see. If you are targeting specific sites with your link bait,
then chances are these will be very high quality too.
One thing that you probably will not get from link bait is anchor text links. This is a trade-off
that happens naturally when you try to get high quality, editorially given links. High quality
websites will link to you how they see fit, which is usually a 100% natural looking link and
hence, no anchor text. Chances are the anchor text will be branded rather than a keyword.
The process: The full link bait process is potentially huge and can involve a lot of time and
research. I'm going to simplify the process massively here but I'll provide more resources
below where you can read more on this.
1. Concept research and brainstorm
2. Refining ideas and pre-outreach to judge quality of ideas
3. Concept sign-off and start of creation
4. Target outreach list put together
5. Sign-off on final piece of link bait content
6. Pre-outreach and exclusives offered if relevant
7. Launch of link bait and full outreach with social shares
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Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources and reading for link bait:
★ Link Bait Guide by Ed Fry
★ Creating Link Bait with Zero Budget by James Agate
★ Link Baiting Guide by Wiep Knol
Link exchanges / reciprocal links
Definition: You approach owners of other websites and ask them to link to you. In exchange
you will provide a link back to them. This is a very old technique and one that actually used to
work very well. That was up until the Jagger update in October 2005, when Google started to
actively penalize websites that over did link exchanges.
This isn’t to say that websites linking to each other will automatically cause you problems; on
the contrary, this is a natural act on the web. Consider how often Search Engine Land and
SEOmoz link to each other, they do it all the time, but they don’t get penalized by Google. The
types of reciprocal links that Google actively penalized are the ones where no value is added
for the user and the reason for linking was clearly just to get a link back. So if you have a page
on your website called /links.html, and it is jam packed full of hundreds of links to random
websites, all of whom link back to you from a similar type of page on their website, then
Google may not like it.
Types of links you get: If you do run with this technique, you can probably get anchor text
driven links but they are probably going to be from pretty low-quality websites who do not
have high editorial standards. You are also very unlikely to get much traffic, as the link will be
hidden away amongst loads of other links.
The process: I do not recommend link exchanges as a method of getting links to your own
website so I’m going to leave out the process here.
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Link reclamation
Definition: Finding incoming links to pages on your website which are broken. For example,
having a link pointing to a page, which, when it loads, gives a 404 error. It is a little unclear
whether these links are totally worthless, there is an argument that they still help the strength
of the domain, but I think that it is wasting a least some link equity. Instead of wasting this,
you should be trying to funnel all link equity to appropriate pages on your website rather than
ones that are broken.
There are two main ways you can fix this problem -
1) You can put a 301 redirect on the broken page which points to your working page. This is
easier to do because you are in control of the redirect and can point it wherever you want.
The slight downside of this is that a small amount of link equity is lost when you implement a
301 redirect.
2) You can ask the person who created the link to change it so that it points directly to the
correct page. This is a bit harder to do because you are relying on getting in touch with
someone else and them taking the time to fix the link. Some good website owners will do this,
particularly if they care about their website because they do not want broken links sticking
around. The upside of this is that you do not lose any of the link equity which you may if you
use the previous method.
Types of links you get: You are pretty limited here because these are not new links and you do
not really control them. You can't really get the anchor text of your choice unless you are
really cheeky and ask the website owner to change that as well as fixing the link itself. You
can get links to deep pages within your website if you wanted because you can 301 redirect
them to wherever you want.
The process: The process for link reclamation is quite straightforward and you can do it using
free tools which is handy.
1. Go to Open Site Explorer and enter your URL
2. Click on the Top Pages tab
3. Export the results to a CSV
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4. Once in Excel, filter out HTTP statuses of 200 and 301
5. See what is left, you'll probably have a mix of 404, 302 and 500
6. Check that these are actually broken by going to the URL and checking the HTTP header
7. Either 301 redirect the broken URL to another relevant one on your website where you
want link equity, or contact the site linking to you and ask them to change the link so it
isn't broken and points to the correct page
Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources for learning more about link reclamation:
★ Link Reclamation Best Practices on Search Engine Journal
★ Process for Link Reclamation using Majestic SEO by Dixon Jones
Live blogging an event
Definition: This technique involves attending an industry event and live blogging the
presentations. Live blogging is when you take notes from the presentations and publish them
straight away on a blog. This technique can also work well when combined with Twitter
because you can get lots of retweets, new followers, as well as tweets of your blog. It is not
uncommon to see a nice spike in traffic to your website when you use this technique.
Types of links you get: The volume of links you can get from this depends massively on the
niche that you operate in. If you operate in a niche where there are lots of bloggers who
attend events, you have a good chance of getting lots of links. But if your niche is quite small
and does not have that many bloggers, you probably won’t get as many.
However, the links you do get should be good quality and exactly the kind that Google want –
editorially given. You’re likely to get links from event roundup blogs or even from the
organizer of the event itself.
The process: The process isn’t very complicated but takes more offline organization than
online because you need to physically get yourself or someone on your team to the event. If
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they are going anyway, then it isn’t too much of a problem but if the event is paid, it can be
hard to get budget sometimes.
Bonus tip: offer to send your team members to the event for training but in return, ask them
to live blog notes for you.
★ Find events in your industry, if you’re not sure if any exist, try searching websites such as
Meetup or Eventbrite
★ Go to the event or send one of your team. Make sure they have a fully charged laptop, a
spare charger and if possible, a wireless internet dongle
★ Choose the speakers to live blog by looking at who is most influential online – these
people tend to have large followings and therefore there is more chance of sending
traffic to your blog
★ Before the speaker starts, write a quick bio about them and add a picture if you can find
one
★ Start to make notes as they talk
★ Every few minutes, hit the publish button to update the blog post
★ Keep republishing until the talk is over
★ Tweet the blog post immediately after and include the event hash tag if there is one
Monitor for brand mentions without a link
Definition: Sometimes on the web, people will mention you on their website but will not link to
you. Whilst Google is able to see this and may count it as a citation, it is not as powerful as a
link and, obviously, you are not very likely to get traffic from this. It is possible to monitor for
mentions of your brand and website, check to see if there is a link and if there isn’t, you can
contact them and ask for it to be made a link. The advantage here is that they have already
mentioned you; so if you contact them soon after they have published, they are likely to
respond positively.
Types of links you get: This is another method that can be quite hard to scale because there is
a lot of manual work to find the mentions and send the email. So you are not likely to get a
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huge volume of links with this method; however, the response rate can be quite good. You’re
most likely to get branded anchor text pointing at the homepage of your website.
The process:
★ Setup Google Alerts for your brand name and URL
★ When you get emails from Google Alerts, click on the links and quickly check for a link to
you
★ If one doesn’t exist, contact the website owner and ask if they’d mind making the
mention a link
Additional resources:
★ http://raventools.com/blog/google-alerts-for-link-building-and-social-monitoring/
★ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-ninjas-guide-to-google-alerts/48068/
Monitor for social shares of your content
Definition: If you create a piece of content and encourage social shares of it, you can monitor
for these shares and see if the person sharing has a website. If they do, then you can reach
out to them and see if they’d be happy be also link to it on their website.
Types of links you’ll get: This can give any piece of content-based link building a nice additional
source of links. The volume will depend entirely on how popular your content is on social
networks but if it works well, you should get some good links and from a variety of different
types of domains.
Process:
★ Once your content is live, monitor for social shares using a tool such as Backtweets or
Topsy
★ Click through to the social profiles of people who have shared your contact to see if they
have a website.
★ If they have, send them an email and thank them for sharing the content. Then ask if
they’d mind also sharing it on their blog
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Pay a leading industry blogger to write for you
Definition: With this technique, you approach an influential blogger in your industry and ask
him if he’d like to be paid to blog for you. The idea is that he is bringing his expertise, insight,
and social following towards your blog, and this can get you links and social shares. This
works well if the blogger has a large social following and has genuine insights on your
industry.
Types of links you get: Here you are likely to get natural pickup on the content because of the
influence the blogger already has. You shouldn’t need to ask for every single link that you get,
at least a few should happen naturally. Because of this, you’re likely to get very natural, noncommercial
anchor text and the links will be directly to the blog post itself, rather than to your
homepage.
The process:
★ Identify influencers in your niche who write often
★ Monitor their writing and see who gets the most links and social shares
★ Start to build relationships with the bloggers who seem most influential
★ After some time, invite them to blog for you and offer to pay them a fee for their time
★ If they accept, make sure you ask them to send the content out on their social networks
Press releases
Definition: The production of content which is meant to be newsworthy (quite often, it's not!)
which then gets syndicated across hundreds of news websites around the world. There is
usually a link back to the source or a URL reference along with contact details for more
information.
The types of links you get: If you have a genuinely interesting story that is of interest to
journalists and writers, you may end up getting some very high quality links from magazines
and newspapers. However, if you do not really have a story and are just relying on low-level
syndication, then the quality will not be that high. Also, because many news syndication
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websites accept many releases a day, yours can be buried quite far from the homepage very
quickly and end up not getting much link juice to pass along to your website.
One good thing about press releases is that they can give you domain diversity in terms of
links which is always good to have. But doing press releases over and over again, despite not
having a real story, probably means you will hit a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly.
I’d actually advise against doing them unless you have a genuinely newsworthy topic. Google
also confirmed their stance on this late in 2012, but it didn’t really come as a surprise to most
people.
The process: You'll notice that above I said that the content should be newsworthy. The
reality is that press releases are used by many SEO companies as a cheap and quick way of
generating lots of links. However the quality is not always top-notch and there is a point of
diminishing returns with press release link building because you end up getting links from the
same sites over and over.
Here is a brief overview of the process for link building with press releases:
1. Craft your story into a press release, remember to keep to the interesting angles and
include quotes
2. Insert links and contact details where needed - don't overdo it
3. Choose a time to syndicate your release
4. Send out to press release syndication websites (list below)
5. Monitor Google Alerts for links and check Google web search 24 hours after
Additional reading:
Here are some additional resources for link building with press releases:
★ Press Release Link Building Strategies by Linkbuildr
★ How to Write Press Releases for Journalists
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Places to syndicate press releases:
★ Business Wire
★ PR Web
★ PR News Wire
★ Market Wire
Profile pages for people
Definition: If you have senior figures within your company who speak at conferences, are
interviewed or are often quoted online, then you should make a profile page for them on your
website. This can be a good way of getting links whenever they are quoted.
You can do outreach to other websites who quote them and use their name and legitimately
ask for a link to their profile page. You can also use a tool like Google Alerts to monitor for
mentions of the person’s name too, you can then check these and see if there is a link or not.
Types of links you’ll get: Unless you have a very famous senior person at your company, this
isn’t likely to attract lots of links in a short space of time. It is more likely to be a long-term
strategy that earns you links, but they should be good quality links.
The process:
★ Create a profile page for the person in your organisation, include lots of information
about them and photos
★ Setup a Google Alert for their name, with a setting to email you whenever it finds a
mention. If this person has a very common name, it is worth adding a keyword or your
company name to keep the number of alerts you get under control
★ When you get an alert, go to that page and check for a link. If one isn’t present, reach out
to the website and ask them to make the person’s name a link to the profile page you’ve
created
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Reviving old, successful content
Definition: This technique involves finding content that may be a few years old but was very
successful at the time, then taking the idea and doing an updated version. The advantage of
this is that you already have a bit of assurance that the content was good because you can
check how many links it received and how many mentions it got.
Types of links you get: This technique can probably get you some good editorial links because
it is content based. This means you’ll probably also not be able to get the anchor text of your
choice. The links will also probably be pointing at an internal page on your website where the
content is hosted.
The process:
★ Search Google for themes related to your website plus an additional word such as
“guide” or “definitive” or “whitepaper”
★ Filter search results by date range and select a few years ago
★ Sort through the results and find interesting pieces of content (or images)
★ As you do this, have the SEOmoz toolbar installed so that you can check how many links
the page received – if it has got links, save these for later
★ Once you’ve found a piece of content, run a few more searches to see if anyone else has
produced similar content recently
★ Assuming no one else has, start working on updating the content idea with modern data
and design
★ Once complete, outreach as normal but you can also contact people who linked to the
original and tell them about your updated version
Additional resources:
★ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-arNSSTaOQ
★ http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/repurpose-content/
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Running a competition
Definition: This technique involves running a competition that aims to get people to link to
you as part of their entry. If you didn’t want to go this far, you could just run a standard
competition and try to get other websites to link to it and promote it to their readers. The
latter may not get you as many links but would be a lot easier and quicker to get going.
Types of links you get: In theory, you can get, pretty much, any type of link with this technique
because you define the rules of entry and, therefore, can tell people how they should link to
you. In reality though, you need to be careful not to push this too hard and end up flagging up
your links to Google because they are too optimised.
The recommendation I’d have is to allow the entrants to link however they want so that they
look truly natural.
The process: The process here isn’t too complicated but it can take some time to bring
everything together.
★ Identify your target bloggers and source a good prize that would be of interest to them
★ Reach out to a few influential bloggers and run the idea past them to make sure that the
competition makes sense and would appeal to them
★ Set the conditions of entry and put up a landing page for the competition. This page
should include the rules, the prize and a contact email
★ The conditions of entry in order to get a link needs to be something that makes the
blogger create or do something on their blog. For example writing a story or embedding
a badge as a sign that they have entered
★ Reach out to bloggers and let them know about the competition
★ Also reach out to the influencers you contacted previously
★ Collate all the entries, pick a winner
★ Publish an update to the landing page announcing the winner and thanking everyone
else for their entries
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Additional resources:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/running-giveaway-competitions-for-links-and-seo
Run a conference / meet up
Definition: While requiring a bit more organisation and investment, this technique can not
only get you links but help establish a community that likes you. The idea is that you run a
small, local meet up and invite one or two speakers along to cover topics that your audience is
interested in.
Types of links you get: If you encourage live blogging, you’re likely to get links from any live
blogs that get published. If you share a Twitter hash tag for the event, you’re also likely to get
social shares. You may also get good links from people who write in the days following the
event and summarise the speakers. These are probably going to be good quality links and
ones that you’re competitors are unlikely to get.
The process:
★ Go to meetup.com and search for any existing events in your area
★ If some exist, go along and get a feel for how they work and what coverage the
organisers get from the event
★ Start speaking to bloggers and influential people in your industry (who are based locally)
and see if they’d be interested in attending the meet up and / or speaking
★ Once you’ve got sufficient interest, book a small venue and get a page setup on
meetup.com
★ Try to get a bar sponsor if you can – free drinks is a great way to get people to attend
★ At the event itself, try to get business cards from all attendees and encourage live
blogging and summary blog posts – say you’ll link to them from your own website if they
let you know
Additional resources:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-complete-guide-to-link-building-with-local-events
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Translating content into other languages
Definition: Here we are talking about taking your successful, existing content and translating it
into another language. The idea being that, by doing this, you have more scope to get links
from different types of websites, particularly if there is no existing resource of that type of
content in that language.
Types of links you get: You’ll be getting links from a variety of different language domains that
can be great for link diversity. It can also be great if you’re planning on expanding into other
countries at some point because you’ll already have links from websites in that country.
The process:
★ Check over your website to find the best content so far, a tool like Open Site Explorer
and its top pages feature can help you do this
★ Once you’ve found your best content, do a quick translation of the title and see if it
already exists in the language you’re planning on using
★ If the content hasn’t been reproduced by someone else yet, hire a native language
speaker and get them to translate the content for you
★ You then need to seed it with key bloggers who speak that language, again you can use
your translator to help you with outreach and make sure they can understand you!
Wordpress Plugin development
Definition: This technique involves developing a new Wordpress plugin. You can get links
directly from blogs that use your plugin but this doesn’t happen by default, the user of the
plugin has to opt-in to giving you the link. But this isn’t the only way that this technique can
get you links; you can also get links from people who review and use the plugin.
In order to benefit from this, you should be sure to have a landing page for your plugin on
your own website; otherwise people will just link to the page on Wordpress.org where your
plugin is listed.
Types of links you get: You do have a chance of getting lots of sitewide links if you allow
people the option to link to you from the plugin itself -- mainly if your plugin is one that sits in
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the footer or sidebar. However, most people will not need to worry about this. In general,
you will get links from websites that review your plugin, so they will be editorially given, will
contain your branded anchor text and probably link to a deep page on your website.
The process: The process of developing a Wordpress plugin is quite complicated and requires
a really good Wordpress developer to work. The details of creating a plugin are outside the
scope of this book but I will outline the rest of the process. It is quite similar to the one used
for building your own small app or tool.
★ Research your industry to find problems that people have – can you build a simple
Wordpress plugin that will help solve this problem?
★ Email a few bloggers in your industry and ask them if a Wordpress plugin would solving
this problem would be useful to them
★ If the idea looks like it is of interest to people, work with your developers or hire a
developer to build out the plugin. Remember to keep it as simple as you can
★ Test the plugin with the bloggers who you contacted in step 2 and get their feedback.
Iterate on this and improve if you can
★ Once completed, add the plugin to your website and add it to the Wordpress plugin
directory, where it will have to be approved
★ Make sure you do outreach to bloggers who may be interested in using the plugin, ask
them for a review and within this, and see if they will link to you
Wordpress Theme development
Definition: You build a customized Wordpress theme and either give it away for free or sell it.
Within this theme is a link to your website crediting you as the creator, usually in the footer.
This is actually quite an old technique now and one that you should be very careful
implementing.
Types of links you get: To a certain extent, you can keep control of the link anchor text and the
page it points to. Many people who download and use a Wordpress theme will not bother
editing your link or deleting it. You will certainly get sitewide links because your link will be
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replicated across every page where the theme is used, so you may end up getting thousands
(or more) of links from a single domain using this technique.
However this technique can sometimes get you into trouble, particularly if you’re linking back
to a website that has nothing to do with Wordpress theme development. Here is a case study
by Ross Hudgens talking about when Google penalized a website who had lots of links with the
same characteristics as those we’re describing above. It is also referred to in this video by Matt
Cutts.
The process: Assuming you’re aware of the risks, here is the process for this technique:
★ Hire a developer to code your Wordpress theme, you can probably hire someone on
oDesk or elance
★ Decide which website and anchor text you’d like to target
★ Get your developer to add a credit link into the footer of the theme
★ Upload your theme to Wordpress here
★ To go a step further, you could also approach technology and Wordpress theme review
websites and asking if they’ll help promote it
Writing testimonials
Definition: This involves looking for companies that have provided you a good service, then
seeing if they want a testimonial from you for their website. This testimonial would include a
link to your website.
Types of links you get: This isn’t a technique that would get you a high volume of links and
isn’t very scalable. But it can get you links from some very niche and quality websites. It can
also get you links that your competitors may not be able to get, particularly if you use different
suppliers and service providers. You may be able to get the anchor text of your choice, but it
isn’t really good form to do this, you should really use the company name and have the link
pointing to your homepage.
The process: As I mentioned, the process for this isn’t too scalable because you don’t really
want to randomly email companies that you have relationships with and offer them all the
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same testimonial. You actually want to be quite selective here and choose the companies that
you have good relationships with. Otherwise, you may risk damaging those relationships and
causing bigger problems for your company.
Here is the process for this technique –
★ Get a list of all your companies suppliers / anyone you get a service from. If possible,
get their website address too
★ Try to put this list into an Excel document and use something like SEO Tools for Excel to
grab the PageRank of them all
★ Depending on the size of your list, you probably want to filter out any domains below a
PR1 or PR2. This helps make sure you’re putting effort into decent quality links
★ Now check within your company as to who is responsible for the relationship with these
companies and see how they feel about giving them a testimonial
★ Filter your list again to take out any that you can’t contact
★ Now reach out to these companies, preferably by phone and speak to the contact your
company has there, ask them if they’d like a testimonial
★ Assuming they say yes, make sure you also ask who is responsible for updating their
website as you may need to speak to them directly to get the testimonial and link added
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QUICK FIRE LINK
BUILDING TIPS
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As well as the processes above, I wanted to include a few quick tips that don’t need a huge
amount of detail for you to implement quickly. These are a combination of ways to get links
and general tips to make you more efficient.
Find competitors guest blog posts quickly
Here is a sneaky tip for you for when you’re doing competitor link analysis. If you happen to
find a guest post that they have placed, take a snippet of text from the author bio and search
for it in Google. This will tell you pretty quickly if they’ve used the same bio elsewhere. People
are lazy, I bet some competitors will leave this kind of trail behind and it’s a easy way to grab a
few links.
Start your prospecting at page 10 of Google
The natural thing for us to do when we look for link prospects is to start at page 1 of results.
But given the number of SEOs out there, plus the fact that many of us probably use the same
types of searches, the bloggers on page 1 and page 2 are probably going to get a lot of
outreach emails.
Why not start from page 10 instead? You can still check they are good quality but these sites
are less likely to be bombarded with outreach emails, so you may stand a better chance of
getting their attention.
Take bloggers to an event
If you have budget to spend (remember how cash can be a link building asset?) well this can
be a great way to use it. If you work in the car industry and are trying to get the attention of
car bloggers, why not take them to a car event or a racing day? This can be a great way of
building relationships and opening doors to influential people.
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Monitor Twitter for PR and Journalist requests
There are a couple of Twitter hash tags that PRs and journalists use when looking for help with
a story. The main two to monitor are #PRREQUEST and #JOURNOREQUEST. Set these up in
your Twitter account and check over them to see if any are relevant to you. You may not find
loads and loads of relevant requests, but it is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
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LINK BUILDING TOOLS
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There are many tools available to help you become a more efficient link builder. The one
thing to bear in mind is that you can’t build genuinely good links 100% with a tool. There
needs to be some form of human interaction, at some point, to ensure that the right level of
quality control is met.
Also, I’ve struggled to find a single tool that does everything I want when it comes to link
building. I tend to use a combination of small tools to speed up a few parts of the link building
process.
On a personal note, I don’t use that many tools. Honestly. I wrote about this on State of Search
so you can see which ones I favor and why.
I’m also a bit of a believer in doing stuff manually first; I like SEOs who know how to build links
without using any kind of tools. I feel that this helps develop your instinct much more and lets
you use your gut feeling when building links. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use tools if they can
help speed things up or make you more efficient, but at least be aware of the process behind a
tool so that you know exactly what is going on in the background.
To try and keep this list as up to date as possible, I’ve created this page that I’ll keep up to date
as I find and test new tools - http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-tools.html – this is
not linked to from my site, it is just for you guys so please don’t share it on Twitter etc!
Link analysis
Open Site Explorer
Link: www.opensiteexplorer.org
What it does: Open Site Explorer lets you run link analysis on pretty much any domain. It is
powered by the SEOmoz crawler which crawls and indexes backlinks. The data in Open Site
Explorer updates, roughly, once a month. I’ve personally found that the SEOmoz crawler tends
to crawl lots of domains but will not always crawl deeply within that domain. So if a link is a
few levels away from the homepage, then it may not show up in Open Site Explorer results.
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I do really like the interface of Open Site Explorer as it is super clear and easy to understand. I
also like the metrics that SEOmoz provide within Open Site Explorer such as Domain Authority
and Page Authority.
Cost: Free for limited use, full access requires a paid SEOmoz account starting at $99 a month
Related articles:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/help/ose-overview
★ http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/using-open-site-explorer-to-uncover-new-marketingopportunities
★ http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-use-buzzstream-with-open-site-explorer-fromseomoz.html
★ http://skyrocketseo.co.uk/4-ways-to-use-open-site-explorer-like-a-pro/
AHREFs
Link: www.ahrefs.com
What it does: AHREFs is the newest of the link analysis tools on the market. It updates once a
day and seems to provide pretty good, fresh link data. It is also pretty quick when diving
deeper into some of the numbers. It isn’t as pretty as Open Site Explorer but the data makes
up for this.
Cost: Free for a basic account, paid accounts start at $79 a month
Related articles:
★ http://ahrefs.com/tutorials/
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-tool-review-ahrefs-138676
★ http://www.seobook.com/ahrefs-review
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Majestic
Link: www.majesticseo.com
What it does: Majestic has its own crawler which is pretty powerful, in fact it did have a
reputation for being a bit too powerful and sometimes over-reporting on link numbers.
However this has improved greatly and it is probably my favorite link analysis tool right now
because of its freshness – it updates once a day and crawls quite deeply.
Cost: Free for a basic account, paid accounts start at $49.99 a month
Related articles:
★ http://blog.majesticseo.com/how-to-videos/
★ http://wiep.net/link-building-tools/majestic-seo/
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-building-tool-review-majestic-seo-103646
Microsoft Excel
Link: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/
What it does: If you’re an SEO and do not know how to use Excel, you’re losing out, big time. It
isn’t just useful for link analysis, there are a wide range of things that SEOs can use it for.
Cost: Free trial, you can buy on it’s own for $139.99
Related articles:
★ http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/
★ http://seogadget.com/category/microsoft-excel/
★ http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/
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Google Webmaster Tools
Link: www.google.com/webmasters
What it does: Google Webmaster Tools is a large toolset and link analysis is just one section.
Google shows you a sample of the links they have in their link graph pointing at your website.
Over time, Google seems to have increased this sample and are showing more links to
Webmasters than ever before. They actually seem to provide the most comprehensive list of
incoming links now, compared to the other link analysis tools above. This is a study by
SEOgadget which appeared to demonstrate this, but, as this article points out, you should try
and use all the data you can get your hands on.
Cost: Free
Tom Anthony’s link profiler
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity
What it does: This is a nice little Google Doc-based tool that allows you to do some quick
analysis on your link profile to find anomalies. You can also compare directly against
competitors to see who stands out and then dive into the possible reasons why. It is based on
Open Site Explorer data and you can use it with or without Mozscape API access.
Cost: Free
Link Research Tools by Cemper
Link: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/
What it does: This is actually a suite of tools, one of which is for link analysis. You can also do
other things like link prospecting, competitor analysis, and monitoring links that are live. It
pulls in lots of data from different sources, and they appear to crawl links to make sure they
are still live before letting you run analysis on them.
Cost: Starts from 199 Euros up to 1299 Euros
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Outreach
BuzzStream
Link: http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/buzzstream.html
What it does: BuzzStream is best described as a CRM tool for link building. It allows you to
manage your outreach by keeping track of who you’ve contacted, the emails you’ve sent, and
the links you’ve built. It can also help with link prospecting and is very good for pulling in a
range of metrics very quickly such as PageRank, Domain Authority and IP address. One feature
I also really like is that BuzzStream will automatically try to find contact details for a list of
websites that I give it. This can be a real time saver.
Cost: Free trial with paid accounts starting at $29 a month
Related articles:
★ http://www.seobook.com/comprehensive-review-buzzstream
★ http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/03/buzzstream-a-blogger-outreach-toolreview.html
★ http://www.paddymoogan.com/2012/07/02/infographic-link-building-using-buzzstream/
★ http://www.buzzstream.com/blog
Tout
Link: http://www1.toutapp.com/
What it does: Tout allows you to do a number of things related to email outreach. It can help
you track the emails you send, record stats on whether an email has been viewed, and if links
have been clicked on. It can also be used to schedule the sending of emails, and you can write
your own templates, which are quick to access. A quick note here is that the features that Tout
uses for some of the tracking may sometimes trip spam filters, as pointed out in this article by
SEER.
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Cost: Free trial with paid accounts starting at $30 a month
Related articles:
★ http://www1.toutapp.com/resources/tout-university/seo
★ http://mashable.com/2011/12/12/toutapp/
Highrise
Link: http://highrisehq.com/
What it does: Highwise isn’t designed as an SEO tool, but its features make it very useful for
keeping outreach organized. It can help you keep track of email conversations, remind
yourself to follow up, and allow you to keep all your link building contacts in one place.
Cost: Free trial with paid accounts starting at $24 a month
Boomerang
Link: http://www.boomeranggmail.com/
What it does: In terms of outreach, Boomerang has a couple of nice features. First, it allows
you to schedule emails to be sent at a specified time, which can be really useful if you’re doing
outreach to people in a different time zone to yours.
The other nice feature it has is the ability to remind you if someone hasn’t replied to one of
your emails. You can tell Boomerang to email you if someone hasn’t replied within a certain
time frame; you can then follow up with that person.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.seobook.com/smarter-link-building-gmail-and-boomerang
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★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkbuilder-gmail-productivity-setup-and-outreachexamples
★ http://www.paddymoogan.com/2012/01/16/using-boomerang-for-link-buildingoutreach/
Rapportive
Link: www.rapportive.com
What it does: Rapportive has two nice features for link building. It can help you create more
customized outreach emails because it will show you more information about the person
you’re contacting. As soon as you paste their email address into your Gmail, Rapportive will
look for any information it can find about them such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. This
allows you to find out a little bit more and maybe customize your email a bit more.
The other feature is that Rapportive can help you find someone’s email address. You can
effectively “guess” someone’s address, and, when you have got it right, their social networks
and picture will probably appear!
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.johnfdoherty.com/rapportive-linkbuilding-tool/
★ http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anybodys-email-address/
★ http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2075466/Rapportive-Robust-Social-Profiles-inyour-Gmail
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Xobni
Link: www.xobni.com
What it does: Pretty much the same as Rapportive but will work for those of you that use
Microsoft Outlook instead of Gmail.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.paddymoogan.com/2010/04/13/using-xobni-outlook-plugin-for-link-building/
Linksy Email guesser
Link: http://linksy.me/find-email
What it does: As the name suggests, this tool allows you to guess what a person’s mail address
is by providing their first name, surname and associated domain – such as the company they
work for or their blog. It will then show you if it matches the guessed emails to any records
online such as gravatars or social profiles.
Cost: Free
URL opener
Link: http://www.urlopener.com/index.php
Cost: Free
What it does: URL opener is a really simple tool that allows you to paste a load of URLs into a
box, then, with the click of one button, you can open every one of those URLs in a new tab.
This is really useful when working with lots of websites doing link prospecting. Rather than
having to open each URL one by one, you can just paste them into this tool and save yourself a
lot of time.
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Followup.cc
Link: http://www.followup.cc/
What it does: This tool is very similar to Boomerang in many aspects. It allows you to create
email reminders for yourself to make sure that you follow up on your outreach. You simply
bcc pre-defined email addresses into your email, and that is it. For example you could bcc in
1week@followup.cc and you’ll get a reminder in one week.
Cost: Free
Competitor analysis
Search Metrics
Link: http://www.searchmetrics.com/
Cost: Monthly subscriptions starting from $99 up to $949+
What it does: Search Metrics does all kinds of things such as rank checking, keyword research,
link checking, basically it covers a bunch of features all in one place, which is very handy.
However, the one thing that I find it useful for is getting a quick snapshot of my competitors. It
lets me get a rough idea of how they are doing in terms of traffic compared to my own website
and gives me an idea what keywords they rank for. It isn’t going to be 100% accurate, but it is
good enough for a quick comparison.
Related articles:
★ http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/searchmetrics-essentials-wow.html
★ http://www.stateofsearch.com/searchmetrics-essentials-a-must-have-for-internationalmarketers/
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Browser add-ons
SEOmoz Toolbar
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar
What it does: The SEOmoz toolbar allows you to run some quick on-page and link analysis on
the page you’re currently viewing. For example, you can quickly check the on-page elements of
a page such as page title, headers, use of rel=canonical tag, etc. It can also highlight nofollow
links for you, which is a pretty useful tool to have switched on. In terms of link analysis, the
toolbar can access some metrics such as Domain Authority, Page Authority and the number of
links pointing to a domain. One other thing which I love is the SERP overlay, which will show
you link data below each URL in a Google search result, so you can quickly compare their link
data.
Cost: Free after you register but requires a paid SEOmoz account ($99 a month) to access all
the link data
Majestic
Link: http://blog.majesticseo.com/development/chrome/
What it does: Currently only available in Chrome, the Majestic SEO extension lets you quickly
access link data for the URL that you’re currently on. It can give you the links to a URL, the
anchor text, the history of links and a lot more. It is super nifty for some quick link analysis.
Cost: Free for basic use (still lots of data) but if you want details, you’ll need a Majestic account
which start at $49.99 a month
Scrape similar
Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/
mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd?hl=en
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What it does: Scrape Similar allows you to quickly scrape text from a web page. This could be a
list of many links and you don’t want to go through each one and copy and paste one by one.
So Scrape Similar lets you right-click on one of them and quickly grab other links that are in
the same format.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy6iYcW8Thk
Check my links
Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/
ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf?hl=en-GB
What it does: This Google Chrome extension will check all links on a page and find which ones
are broken. It will then highlight them in red so you can easily scan the page and find broken
links. For link building purposes, this can help with broken link building as well as finding
broken external links on your own website.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/check-my-links-chrome-extension-a-link-builders-dream
Google Cache bookmarklet
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/some-nifty-seo-bookmarklets-to-make-you-more-efficient
What it does: This lightweight bookmarklet will check if the page you’re currently on is cached
by Google. This helps you in a number of ways because, if a page isn’t cached, it may indicate a
problem unless the page is very new and hasn’t been discovered by Google yet.
Cost: Free
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Finding link opportunities
BuzzStream blogroll checker
Link: http://tools.buzzstream.com/blogroll-list-builder
What it does: This tool lets you paste in a list of URLs and it will go and find if those pages have
blogrolls. If they do, then the tool will return a list of the URLs in those blogrolls. This can be
great for expanding your outreach list quickly.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/free-tool-build-outreach-lists-from-blogrolls.html
★ http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/using-blogrolls-to-expand-your-link-prospecting-lists/
Broken link finder by Citation Labs
Link: http://www.brokenlinkbuilding.com/
What it does: Broken link building is a tactic we’ve talked about in this book. This tool
automates a lot of the process and makes it a lot easier to find link opportunities and do
outreach. It will take a core keyword from you and run Google searches based on this, it will
then return link opportunities which you can sort and filter.
Cost: Packages start at $67 a month
Related articles:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible
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Ontolo
Link: http://ontolo.com/
What it does: Ontolo allows you to run automated searches for potential link targets. You
simply choose your parameters and keywords, then Ontolo will go and do the hard work of
scraping Google and will pull back a list of targets for you to approve or reject. For example
you could look for “links pages” about “pets” and get a list of opportunities into your account.
Cost: Free trial and paid accounts start at $97 a month
Related articles:
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-building-tool-review-ontolo-105801
★ http://wiep.net/link-building-tools/ontolo/
★ http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2072839/Backlink-Tool-Review-Ontolo
Link prospector by Citation Labs
Link: http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/
What it does: The link prospector allows you to find link targets quickly. You can define the
keywords that are related to your website along with the types of link you are looking for, then
it will search Google for you. You can then filter through the results to find which ones you
want to outreach to.
Cost: Free trial, monthly plans start at $27
Related articles:
★ http://pointblankseo.com/link-prospector
★ http://wiep.net/link-building-tools/link-prospector/
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-building-tool-review-link-prospector-120992
★ http://www.seobook.com/citation-labs-review-heres-why-i-use-it
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Group High
Link: http://www.grouphigh.com/
What it does: Group High lets you find bloggers who you may want to outreach to and start
building a relationship with. You can use Group High to find bloggers or you can import your
own lists of bloggers. It will then go and find lots of metrics about the blogs and try to find
contact details too.
Cost: Approx $3000 a year
Related articles:
★ http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2012/01/25/is-your-blog-in-this-pr-database-of-1-3-millionblogs/
★ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/does-grouphigh-take-the-pain-out-of-bloggeroutreach/45627/
SEOmoz link intersect
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
What it does: Powered by Mozscape, the link intersect tool will tell you who is linking to your
competitors but not to you. This can help you find some easy link opportunities because if a
website is linking to several of your competitors, then they may link to you as well.
Cost: Requires a paid SEOmoz account, starting at $99 per month
Related articles:
★ http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-use-buzzstream-with-the-competitive-linkfinder-from-seomoz.html
★ http://seogadget.com/linkbuilding-tool-tip-seomoz-link-intersect-top-pages-on-domain/
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Wordtracker link builder
Link: http://www.wordtracker.com/linkbuilder
What it does: This software from Wordtracker (famous for their keyword research software)
allows you to identify link opportunities by looking at who links to your competitors but not
you. You can then filter by various methods and add the best sites to a list that you can then
work through.
Cost: Free trial with paid accounts costing $69 per month
Blogger Link Up
Link: http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/
What it does: Blogger Link Up is a mailing list that you can subscribe to. For SEOs, you will
receive a list of bloggers who are looking for people to send them guest blog content. So it can
be a nice easy way of finding some link opportunities. You will need to keep a close eye on
quality though because a few low-quality websites can appear sometimes.
Cost: Free
Guestr
Link: http://guestr.com/
What it does: Guestr is a website where bloggers can register their interest in having people
send them guest post content. You can also register and browse the various categories of
blogs to find ones relevant to your niche and contact them from within the Guestr interface.
Cost: Free
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My Blog Guest
Link: http://myblogguest.com/
What it does: My Blog Guest was setup by an SEO named Ann Smarty. It allows bloggers and
SEOs to connect with each other. As an SEO you can find bloggers who are in your niche and
happy to accept good quality guest post content.
Cost: Free
Blogdash
Link: http://www.blogdash.com/
What it does: Blogdash allows bloggers to register themselves and make their details
searchable on the website. You can filter by categories to find bloggers whom you may want to
engage with.
Cost: Basic membership is free, full access starts at $29.99
Local Citation Finder by Whitespark
Link: https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
What it does: Focused primarily on improving local SEO rankings, the local citation finder will
help you find places where you can list your business online. You won’t always get a link
(hence the word citation), but this can be a great way of finding some easy link opportunities.
You start with a local keyword and the tool will look for opportunities for you. You can then
use the interface to keep track of your work and where you have listed your business.
Cost: Free for a basic account, paid accounts start at $20 a month
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Raven
Link: http://raventools.com/
What it does: Raven does lots and lots of things, but, in terms of link building, it can help you
find link opportunities and manage the outreach that you carry out to these websites. It also
pulls in data from Majestic which allows you to run link analysis on any domain.
Cost: Free trial, paid accounts start at $99 per month
Related articles:
★ http://skyrocketseo.co.uk/raven-tools-review/
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-building-tool-review-raven-tools-95727
★ http://www.seobook.com/raven-seo-tools-review
★ http://www.sugarrae.com/link-development/organizing-link-development-raven-toolsreview/
Link building query generator by Stoked SEO
Link: http://stokedseo.co.uk/2012/10/17/query-generator/
What it does: This is a simple Google Docs based tool, which will generate a bunch of search
queries based on a keyword that you give it. You can enter a keyword, choose the type of link
opportunity you’re looking for, and then open the query links directly into a Google search.
Cost: Free
HARO – Help a Reporter Out
Link: http://www.helpareporter.com/
What it does: HARO is a service that alerts you when reporters and writers are looking for
news sources. These are generally high level writers so you’ll always need to provide
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legitimate, quality sources, but, in return, you could get good mentions and links from high
quality websites.
Cost: Starts from $19 a month
Related article:
★ http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/better-than-link-building-authority-building-haro/
5963/
Followerwonk
Link: http://followerwonk.com/
What it does: Followerwonk is primarily a Twitter analytics tool, but it has one nice little
feature that allows you to find people on Twitter who have websites, influence, and are
relevant to you. It is the Search Bios feature which we have looked at already.
Cost: Free version but requires an SEOmoz Pro account ($99 a month) for full features
Related articles:
★ http://www.oxondigital.co.uk/how-to-use-followerwonk-to-support-your-twitteroutreach-campaigns/
★ http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/10/26/turning-seo-link-building-into-seo-audience-targetingwith-twitter-profiling/
Zemanta
Link: http://www.zemanta.com/
What it does: There are a few ways to use Zemanta, from a link building point of view you are
able to add your website’s content to the Zemanta database, this means it will be displayed to
bloggers who are looking to quote sources of information when writing content. This works via
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a plugin that sits in their CMS while they are writing. So if a blogger is writing about SEO, they
will be shown content related to SEO which they may want to link to in their article. The same
principle also works with images.
Cost: Works on an impression basis, the more impressions you are given to bloggers, the more
you pay.
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LINK BUILDING CASE
STUDIES FROM MY
OWN EXPERIENCE
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One of the key things I wanted to include in this book right from the start was real
examples of link building – good and bad. The only way I can do this is by giving you examples
from my own experience. I’ve built a lot of links, but I’ve also failed a fair few times too – not
scared to admit it!
So this section has a number of examples that I am able to share, however, with all of these, I
haven’t been able to tell you exactly who the client was. I hope you understand the reasons for
this, but the main reason is that they all operate in very competitive markets and sharing exact
information on links and sources could damage them – the last thing I want. Having said that, I
have tried to give as much information as I can.
Case study 1 - Ego bait for links in the garden sector
Background: This client operates in the garden sector and is a very large UK ecommerce
website. The goal was to get links from some influential bloggers who operated in the garden
sector space – of which there were are fair few. These bloggers had strong websites and big
followings, so getting them on board with the brand and happy to endorse them was a key
goal.
What I did: I started with a simple ego bait campaign and it was on a pretty small scale, I
targeted just 10 websites that I wanted to get a link from. These websites fit a set of criteria:
★ Had a homepage PageRank score of 3 and above
★ Talked specifically about the products sold by my client
★ Had clear authors i.e. I could find their names
★ Had clear contact details
★ Had a decent community of followers
I used simple Google searches to find these sites, looking for things like “gardening bloggers”
and “home and garden blogs”. After I’d found these 10 websites, I went to each one and wrote
a paragraph describing what they covered, what made the website good and why someone
should take the time to read it. I also picked out a noteworthy piece of content if I could find
one.
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I then created a new page on the client’s website – I had to use their news section rather than
a blog – and pasted in the content I’d written about each website. I also included the title of
the website, a small screenshot and a link to them.
Getting my hook: As I was doing this, I realised that I needed to find a way of getting them to
want to link back to the page. Yes, I was going to ask them; but is there a way I could make it
worth their while without paying them?
The answer was to make a competition out of the page. So I rewrote my introduction and the
title of the page to be something along the lines of “Vote for your favourite UK garden
website”. My thinking was that I’d allow regular website visitors to vote for their favorite
website by placing a voting widget on the page. My hook was in place – if a website wanted to
win the vote, they’d need to link to the page so that their visitors could go and vote!
I created a free poll using Poll Daddy, pasted the code onto the page and I was ready to
promote it.
How I did outreach: Promotion was pretty simple – I just emailed the 10 websites I’d found
and told them about the competition I’d put together. I didn’t make a point of asking them for
a link. Instead, I just said that they were free to share the poll with their readers so they could
vote for them. This meant that they naturally linked to the page.
Result: Out of 10 emails, I got 7 links. I was pretty happy with this because I probably only
spent half a day of time on this, plus two of the websites on my list were the BBC and
About.com! So I was pretty happy and got some nice links. In fact, one blogger I contacted
asked if I could create a badge for her to embed on her site. So I quickly got our designer to
create a small badge which we sent her.
Case study 2 – photos to get links in a very technical, B2B
industry
This is probably my most successful piece of outreach in terms of time spent and conversion
rate. I have to also admit that it wasn’t planned at all; I saw an opportunity and got to work
without really thinking too much about it.
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Background: My client operates in a very technical industry. It has a decent community of
active bloggers and a wider appeal to technology websites, so link targets aren’t in short
supply. However, I was having problems with making this client link worthy – their website was
quite old and in all honesty, didn’t deserve links, so outreach was really hard.
That was until the client called me one afternoon and told me that the BBC had picked up on
one of the stories from their PR company but not included a link. The client was asking if we
had any BBC contacts that we may be able to hit up, so I started the process here to try and
get in touch with someone.
The hook: While this was happening, I took a closer look at the coverage and the reason why
the BBC had covered my client. The reason was that they had a genuine news story connected
to the London 2012 Olympics, so it was pretty timely. But more importantly, I noticed that
they’d republished a photo that my client owned the rights to.
I had my hook!
What I did: When someone republishes a photo that belongs to you but doesn’t link to you,
you have a perfectly legitimate reason to contact them and ask for a link. So I set about finding
other websites that had also used the photos and coverage the client’s story.
I used three techniques to do this:
★ I ran basic Google searches for the client’s name plus the headline of the story, along
with a few variations
★ I ran the photos through Google image reverse search
★ I setup Google Alerts for the client’s name plus the headline of the story
Through all of these methods I was able to find loads of websites that had covered the stories
and used the photos. I went through these one by one and checked to see if they were linking
to the client. A fair few were already linking, but I found 16 websites who weren’t.
The outreach: I managed to find contact details for all of these and quickly started to email
them. I thanked them for covering the story and using the photos; then politely asked for
them to add a credit link for the photos to the homepage of my client.
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Result: Out of the 16 emails I sent, 15 linked to me. I was pretty happy with that! The only
reason that I missed out on one of them was because he’d already linked to a press release
from my client which was hosted somewhere else. Otherwise, I’m sure I’d have gotten 100%.
Case study 3 – sports related interactive infographic
Background: This client had a blog and had done a few bits of content before, but we wanted
to create better content and get more diversity into their link profile. We also wanted to get a
bit of volume as well as the quality.
The content we made: So we created an interactive infographic that looked at the history of
football games between clubs over many years. Users could filter the data within the
infographic to view their own team and could see a range of statistics related to them.
Because this was interactive, it was quite hard to share and embed on other websites – this
caused us a few problems because a few bloggers wanted to embed it for their users. They
really liked the functionality and how the infographic worked, but they wanted their users to
interact with it on their own website. Our time was quite limited so we were not able to do
this, unfortunately. The best we could offer was for the blogger to take a screenshot and use
that instead.
This meant that it probably wasn’t as successful as it could have been, but it was the best we
could do with what we had in terms of budget.
What I did: For link targets, my brief was to get quantity so I set about finding a big list of
relevant link targets. I started first by finding lists of sports bloggers in the UK which gave me
lots of good sites to look through. I then started finding bloggers who wrote specifically about
the teams that we featured in the infographic. After this, I discovered a small community of
websites that covered football statistics and data visualization; so I added them to my list, too,
and made them a priority.
I found all of these simply by using a few advanced search operators and finding lists of
bloggers – very, very simple.
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Result: Approximately 80 websites contacted, 22 links built. I was reasonably happy with this
given the time I had but felt I could have done better if I’d have been able to offer the
interactive infographic as embeddable.
Case study 4 – building links to a microsite
The background: I wanted to include this case study because it is a little bit different in the
approach. This campaign was actually one of my hardest ones because, no matter what we
tried, we couldn’t get content added to the client’s website. We’d been promised a new CMS
and blog for over a year and it had never materialized. So, in the end, we took things into our
own hands to prove a point and to show what we wanted to do – by doing it.
What I did: We setup a microsite using a simple Wordpress installation. On this we built a one
page infographic around an upcoming sports event in the UK – so we knew lots of blogs would
be talking about this story so there would be lots of link opportunities for us.
I wanted to share what worked best with this case study.
The outreach: We asked bloggers about what we had in mind BEFORE we even started design.
So we came up with the idea, got a bit of data and put together a few lines of text describing
what we were doing. We also put together a few bullet point “headlines” of what data the
infographic would visualize.
This was sent to a few bloggers and we asked for their opinion on what we had, in particular
we asked:
★ What they liked
★ What they didn’t like
★ What was missing
The final point was crucial; they were able to tell us exactly what was missing from our data.
We weren’t subject matter experts, but these guys were; so they were in the perfect position to
tell us what was interesting.
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We took this feedback and gave it to our designer. Once the final infographic was created, we
sent it again to the people who gave us the original feedback. We also sent it to other related
bloggers and it was received pretty well.
Result: Approximately 110 websites contacted, approximately 35 links built. It actually did a
lot better on social media and got lots of tweets and Facebook likes, so we were very happy
with the traffic it received and it ranked very well around the time of the sports event that it
was covering.
Once the client has a CMS and blog in place, we will probably move the content and redirect
the link equity using a 301 redirect or the rel=canonical tag. This will naturally lose some of the
link equity but this is what we had to do in order to get stuff done!
Case study 5 – guest blogging in the design industry
I wanted to include a case study on guest blogging because I know it is a popular tactic right
now and I wanted to share how I’ve used it. This particular case study isn’t actually from a
recent client but the numbers and conversion rates are pretty typical for my own work. I’ve
used approximate numbers in this case study because I no longer have the exact list of
contacts and links that I got.
Background: The client in this case wanted volume of links and whilst they didn’t want low
quality, they understood that their website wasn’t very link worthy which reduced their options
quite a bit when it came to techniques to use. Rather than wait around and wait for them to
make the site link worthy, I started with some guest blogging to get a few links coming in.
Their niche lent itself to design, which opened up a decent community of bloggers, even at this
time which was a couple of years ago.
What I did: I used a few advanced search queries to find websites who had posted guest posts
previously and were design related. This gave me a huge list, which I went through manually
and checked the metrics for – at the time I didn’t have the tools to do this automatically! I
ended up focusing on a list of about 20 who I’d contact with my first round of outreach.
The outreach: I quickly brainstormed five or six possible article titles that may interest the
design bloggers I was contacting. I picked two or three for each email I sent, tweaking the ones
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I chose based on the site itself. For example if they had a Wordpress category, I’d be sure to
include an article on Wordpress.
The email was very simple and focused them on the article titles I was pitching and gave a
little bit of background on the client, looking back on this, I probably didn’t need the client
background.
The result: I had to do a follow-up email for a few of the bloggers but from about 20 emails
sent, I placed 12 guest posts. At the time, I used exact match anchor text pointing back to the
client category pages but if I did the same again now, I’d focused mainly on branded or partial
commercial keywords as the anchor text.
Other public link building case studies
After some digging around, I was also able to find a few public case studies from others, so
I’ve listed them here too. It is quite hard to find actual link building case studies, for the same
reasons I’ve not been able to be as detailed as I’d like with my own above. But hopefully these
should all be used to you:
★ http://unbounce.com/content-marketing/how-and-why-you-should-be-guest-bloggingwith-case-study-kinda/
★ http://onlinemarketingbanter.com/guest-blogging-a-real-life-case-study/
★ http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/8-brands-that-benefit-from-guest-blogging/
★ http://thinktraffic.net/50-guest-posts-one-day
★ http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2194396/How-Guest-Posting-Propelled-One-SiteFrom-0-to-100000-Customers
★ http://www.seosmarty.com/case-study-how-i-got-10-easy-links-to-my-infographic-in-twodays/
★ http://seoroi.com/case-studies/broken-link-building-a-case-study/
★ http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/offline-is-the-new-online-link-building-strategy-case-study
★ http://www.linkbuildr.com/blog-commenting-link-building-case-study/
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AMAZING, CURATED
LINK BUILDING
RESOURCES
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Every once in a while, an amazing blog post or guide is published that really stands out
among standard blog posts. Here is a list of my favorites that you should definitely read if you
want to learn more about link building beyond what I’ve written:
★ The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever by Jon Cooper
★ The Noob Guide to Link Building by Mike King
★ Link Building A-Z Glossary of Terms
★ Outreach Specialists Bible by Dave Snyder
★ Outreach Letters for Link Building (with examples) by Peter Attia
★ The 6 Month Link Building Plan for an Established Website by James Agate
★ Link Building Strategies by Jon Cooper
★ Turning Link Building into SEO audience targeting by Richard Baxter
★ Google Algorithm Change History
★ 10 Illustrations on Search Engines’ Valuation of Links
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BLOGS TO FOLLOW
FOR LINK BUILDING
TIPS
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There are lots and lots of blogs out there that publish some great content on link building;
this list includes some of my favorites that I’d recommend that you keep an eye on. If they
have link building categories, I’ve linked straight to those:
★ SEOmoz
★ Distilled
★ SEOgadget
★ SEER Interactive
★ PointblankSEO
★ BuzzStream
★ Search Engine Land
★ SkyRocket SEO
★ Kaiser the Sage
★ Ross Hudgens
★ Linkbuildr
★ Link Spiel
★ State of Search
★ SEObook
★ John Doherty
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PEOPLE TO FOLLOW
ON TWITTER FOR LINK
BUILDING
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Here are some people on Twitter who constantly share great content, not necessarily 100%
link building but certainly worth following for a wide range of content:
★ Wil Reynolds
★ Justin Briggs
★ Ross Hudgens
★ Richard Baxter
★ Gianluca Fiorelli
★ Aleyda Solis
★ Shelli Walsh
★ Debra Mastaler
★ Garrett French
★ Julie Joyce
★ John Doherty
★ Mike King
★ Bill Slawksi
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GOOGLE WEBMASTER
TOOLS VIDEOS ON
LINK BUILDING
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Matt Cutts, Head of the Web Spam team at Google, often records videos that answer
questions related to SEO. You can view the channel or follow Matt here, but below are some
direct links to videos related to link building. You should bear in mind that some of these are a
couple of years old and things may have changed. Also remember that you should carry out
your own testing to see what you find, don’t always take what someone else has to say as fact.
I’ve created a playlist here which you can subscribe to and I’ll keep this updated with new
videos as they are published:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcv76e4r5v-Se6LrDlP1ZI-xIuFU-GQc3
I’ve tried to include videos from the last two years so you have as much up to date information
as possible.
★ Does Google take action on spammy guest blogging activities?
★ If I haven’t been participating in link schemes, do I need to worry about my links?
★ What is Google’s thinking about links from article marketing, widgets etc?
★ What are some effective techniques for building links?
★ Does anchor text carry through 301s?
★ Negative SEO
★ Why do paid links violate Google guidelines?
★ How will Google interpret links to URLs with campaign tags?
★ Link disavow tool
★ What is Google’s view on guest blogging for links?
★ Does PageRank flow through image links?
★ Are paid directories held to the same standard as paid links?
★ Do URL shorteners pass anchor text?
★ Is there such a thing as building too many links?
★ Are nofollow links irrelevant?
★ Is the order of links on a page important?
★ Are links in footers treated differently than paragraph links?
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SEO CONFERENCES
THAT INCLUDE LINK
BUILDING SESSIONS
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SEO conferences can be a great way of expanding your knowledge and to meet people
within the industry, particularly if you’re new and are looking to learn quickly. After a few
conferences, you may find that you do not learn as much as you used to, but I’d still
encourage attendance if you can because the networking can be very valuable. I’ve probably
learned just as much from the conference sessions as I have from chatting to people one-onone
in the bar following the conference.
SearchLove
Link: http://www.distilled.net/events/
Run by Distilled, SearchLove is a two-day event covering a range of online marketing topics,
several of which are usually related to link building. Covering the UK and US, the events
happen a few times a year and are always highly rated by attendees. There is a single track of
sessions and each speaker is given at least 30 minutes for their talk. Previous conference talks
are available on video too. They are free if you join DistilledU.
Where – London, Boston
LinkLove
Link: http://www.distilled.net/events/linklove-london/
Also run by Distilled, LinkLove is a one-day event where every session is on the topic of link
building. It is run in the UK once a year and similar to SearchLove, is a single track where
speakers get at least 30 minutes for their talk.
Where – London
MozCon
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/mozcon
Run by SEOmoz, MozCon is a three-day event held every July in Seattle. It covers a very broad
range of topics, probably verging more on general marketing as well as online marketing. The
sessions are single track and each speaker is given between 30 – 45 minutes for their talk. You
can buy videos of previous years online.
Where – Seattle, US
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SMX
Link: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/
SMX is a very well established conference and held in many countries around the world each
year. Each event also usually has an Expo hall with various exhibitors, which are usually a mix
of SEO companies and software vendors. There are usually several tracks covering organic and
paid search, beginner to advanced. Each session usually has 3-4 speakers which means each
speaker has about 10 minutes each for their talk.
Where – Israel, San Jose, Munich, Paris, London, Seattle, Stockholm, Las Vegas, New York,
Toronto, Sydney
SES
Link: http://sesconference.com/
Standing for Search Engine Strategies, SES is another event that is both a conference and expo.
It is held in lots of countries around the world and covers paid search, social, and SEO. It runs
on several tracks and each session usually has 1-3 speakers who get 10-15 minutes each.
Where – London, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Berlin, Chicago,
Singapore, New Delhi
Think Visibility
Link: http://thinkvisibility.com/
Run by Dom Hodgson twice a year in Leeds, Think Visibility has quickly become a favorite
among its attendees from the UK and Europe. It is a one-day event and usually has two tracks,
each session is usually about 45 minutes long and covers a range of topics including SEO,
affiliate marketing, design, and analytics. It is just as well known for the great social, fun aspect
as it is for the conference sessions.
Where – Leeds, UK
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SAScon
Link: http://www.sascon.co.uk
Short for “Search and Social conference”, and held in Manchester once a year, SAScon is a twoday
event that is growing in popularity and attracts good speakers. The content is varied but
usually includes one or two link building sessions. There are two tracks and most sessions are
usually made up of 3-4 speakers who get about 15 minutes each.
Where – Manchester, UK
PubCon
Link: http://www.pubcon.com/
PubCon is a US-based conference with events currently being held in Las Vegas and New
Orleans. It lasts for four days in total and also features an expo hall. The sessions cover paid
and organic search.
Where – Las Vegas and New Orleans
Affiliates4U
Link: http://www.a4uexpo.com/
As the name suggests, A4U is focused more towards affiliates but is still a good event and
often includes link building sessions. It is a two-day event, held once a year in London and
mainland Europe; previously it has been held in Munich but is being held in Amsterdam in
2013. It attracts a very wide audience from lots of backgrounds, which make it very good for
networking too.
Where – London and Amsterdam
You can view a full list of events for 2013 in this great post on State of Search.
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A-Z GLOSSARY OF
LINK BUILDING
RELATED TERMS
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This section is a quick reference guide for a range of terms used in this book that are
specifically related to link building.
Anchor text – part of a link that is clickable for the user, usually highlighted in a different
colour and underlined.
AC Rank – standing for “A citation rank” this is a metric used by Majestic SEO to give a value to
a particular page based on the number of domains linking to it. It is measured from 0 – 15
with 15 being the highest.
Advanced search query – a query that you can use to tell the search engines to return a
specific set of results compared to standard keyword searches.
AuthorRank – also known as AgentRank, a value assigned to a document based on the
reputation of it’s author, perhaps changing the way that document ranks and the amount of
link equity it can pass to other pages.
Authority – Often used to describe a website or a person who is influential in their field of
work.
Branded keywords – Keywords that include the name of a brand, company or website.
Broken link – a link that when clicked on or crawled by a search engine returns an error code
such as 404, 410 or 503.
Cached page – the version of a web page or document stored by the search engines on their
servers.
Commercial keywords – Keywords that include words that a particular website wants to rank
for that are not it’s own brand name.
Content – the information on pages of a website, can include text, images, videos, audio files
etc.
Crawling – refers to search engines bots (or spiders) that moving around the web, collecting
information and storing it in a database for analysis, then this information may be added to an
index.
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Deep link – a link that points to any page except the homepage of a domain.
De-indexed - when a particular page is not in the index of a search engine, usually meaning it
will not appear in search results.
Directory – a website that collects and categories lists of links to websites.
Domain authority – refers to how strong a domain is by looking at the number of quality links
pointing at it. Commonly referring to a metric used by SEOmoz to measure the strength of a
domain, giving it a score between 0 – 100 with 100 being the highest.
External link – a link on a domain that points to another domain.
Followed links – links that the search engines count in their link graph of the web.
Footprints – often referring to patterns displayed by various links that are similar to each
other. Can be used to identify link networks or automated links.
Guest posting – writing a piece of content for a domain that is not yours and giving it to them
in return for a link to the domain that you do own.
HTTP status code – the response code returned to a search engine crawler or web browser
when a page is loaded. Most common codes include 200, 301, 302, 404 and 500.
Inbound link – a link from another domain pointing at your domain.
Infographic – a visualization of data or information into an easy to consume form than text
content.
IP address – stands for Internet Protocol address. Every computer connected to the Internet
has a unique number assigned to it that is known as an IP address.
Link bait – a piece of content created with the specific purpose of attracting inbound links or
attention.
Link building – the process of acquiring links from other domains to your own, usually
through some intentional or passive activity.
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Link profile – a list of links pointing at a single domain.
Link removal – the process of removing links to a domain.
MozRank – a metric used by SEOmoz to determine the strength of a domain based on the
quantity and quality of links pointing at it.
Negative SEO – the practice of building low quality links to a domain that you do not own,
with the goal of reducing it’s organic search rankings.
Nofollow link – a link that is not counted by the search engines in their link graph.
Page authority – the strength of a single page on a domain, commonly referring to a metric
created by SEOmoz which assigns a score between 0 – 100 based on the quantity and quality
of links pointing at it.
PageRank – invented by Larry Page, this is what Google use to measure the strength of a
page, based on the quantity and quality of links pointing at it.
Paid links – links that are acquiring by exchanging money.
Penalty – refers to the search engines reducing the rankings of a particular page or domain
because of violating their guidelines. Can be manual or algorithmic.
Penguin – a Google update first launched in April 2012 focusing on reducing the rankings of
websites that had been over-optimised.
Reconsideration request – sent by a Webmaster to Google if their website has had a penalty
applied to it, in the hope of having that penalty lifted.
Redirect – used to direct users and search engines to a different location to the link they
originally tried to visit. Usually with a HTTP status code of 301 or 302.
Sitewide links – external links that are placed on every (or the majority) of pages on a
website. Common examples include blogroll links or footer links.
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Spam links – links that are not editorially controlled, produced in large numbers and
automated by software. Usually add no value for real users.
Toolbar PageRank – The PageRank seen by users, not the actual PageRank of a page. Usually
updated by Google every few months.
Unnatural link warnings – messages sent by Google to Webmasters to inform them of the
presence of what they believe to be unnatural (also known as low quality or spam) links.
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CONCLUSION
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Well, that’s it. For now.
I’ll be updating this every so often and you’ll be the first to know about it and receive free
updates as soon as they are published.
I hope that you’ve found this book useful and take away whatever you can to help you build
more links and increase the visibility of your websites online. I’d love to hear your feedback
and what you’d like to see in future updates, feel free to email me –
paddy@linkbuildingbook.com.
I’d like to thank each and every one of you who have trusted me enough to invest in this book,
I really do appreciate it and I hope I get the chance to meet you in person at some point.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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To Ellie who supported me throughout the writing of this book, right from the moment the
idea came about whilst we were walking together in Barnes, London in April 2012, through to
the many late nights in New Zealand when I was up writing to get everything finished. You’ve
been there.
To everyone at Distilled for giving me the knowledge, confidence and support when I’ve
needed it. I couldn’t ask for a better team to work with or a better company to work for.
To Rand Fishkin and Andrew Dumont at SEOmoz for the help and encouragement right at the
start of this project. Also to Ashley Tate for helping me with the launch.
To my friends in the SEO industry who have let me bounce ideas off them, given me advice
and taken time out to help me, in particular – Danny Denhard, Paul May, James Agate, Shelli
Walsh, Paul Madden and Shaad Hamid.
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