Content-Based Link Building Strategies Beat Penguin Every Time
Anyone who follows SEO news knows that content based link building is the heir apparent to paid link networks. Of course talking about this new link building strategy and actually implementing it into your content marketing strategies are two, entirely different matters.
Shifting away from paid link networks and other less-than-Penguin-friendly strategies takes time, but pays off in solid, organic links that are very valuable for SEO purposes.
Jon Cooper is a Florida-based SEO consultant whose Point Blank SEO firm specializes in link building strategies. He recently posted a comprehensive list of link building strategies and here are some of the best content based techniques from his post.
- Guest Blogging - It’s the big buzzword in SEO circles, and for good reason. Finding an authority site that’s willing to publish your content and links is a huge deal. Don’t forget to take Neil Patel’s advice and link your guest blog post to a dedicated landing page for readers of your host site.
- Utilize Internal Linking – So long as you have plenty of great content sitting on your site, why not utilize it as much as possible? Linking to your own content is a very effective means of building up link juice.
- Blog Partnering – Look around and see if you can’t find complimentary sites to share, related, content with. We’ve talked about how a sports betting affiliate can promote the Tour de France on a traditional bicycling blog and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A partnership is going to extend beyond basic guest blogging and engage in more complex cross-promotion.
- Post up comments on Do-Follow Blogs. These blogs won’t mark your links with the no follow tag. Some sites clearly label themselves as no follow while others are listed on Do Follow directories. Just be certain you’ve researched a site a little before stepping in whit some linked comments. Let’s just say that some Do Follow blogs are better than others.
Looking for more link building strategies? Check out Link Building Post Penguin in 10 Easy Steps.
Social Media Link Building
Social media sites like Twitter and Google + are tailor made for organic link building based. Given that the average lifespan of a Tweet is just a few minutes, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be promoting links on the service several times a day.
If you’ve mentioned a website or product in your original content, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be direct messaging that link to the product’s Twitter account. Most companies are more than happy to re-Tweet positive articles.
Don’t forget to post links up on Google Plus as well. Most people don’t pay much attention to the fledgling social network, but Google sure does.
Finally
Content based link building isn’t as easy as paid networks or directories, but it is Google-approved. Once you start getting those organic link and shares built, you’ll never worry about the Penguin again.
What content-based link building strategies have worked for you? Let us know about them on our SEO forum.
Tags: Affiliates, Sports Betting, Twitter
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This is definitely something that works. What’s always held me back is the relative value of this compared to the value of getting paid money for this content. It’s a lot of work for a few links and therefore I would want to make sure that the value of the links are high enough to make this worth your time.
Sorry I forgot to mention in the above comment that I am talking about writing content for links. The strategies that require a lot less effort to get a link are very often worthwhile although I would still want to ensure I was getting value.
Thanks for the mention Brian!
The best ideas I’ve been coming up with recently have all centered around using content. I’m not saying it’s the “if you build it, they will come” mentality, but more so targeting people who have shared/linked to similar content, then going after them.
i love playying with good frends
Google has told us that links no longer count for SEO, and we all know after Panda/Penguin that non-organic linking can draw penalties, but the SEO trade keeps pushing links.
Why?
Natural links will be the future. Link builders have so much abused google that no wonder it is trying to fight link spam and unnatural link building.
Reg – NBS – SEO. Show me one statement where Google Categorically state that they don’t value links…….
On the contrary. For small operators, it appears to me that once you have good content that you are better off spending 95% of your time building good links.
Could you supply us with a Quote from Google about: ”
Google has told us that links no longer count for SEO”
Thanks
@mikelitson & O-C-G
If you are at all versed in SEO then you should know that Google does not issue definitive statements about their algos.
They give you tips, hints, clues, and leave it to you to interpret
So let’s look at what they have said and done.
They have taken their link judging system, PageRank and told us that it does not count.
They published an article “Beyond PageRank” in which they told us that PR was “not an actionable metric” in relation to SERPs.
If it is not an actionable metric, then building links or building up your PageRank will not affect SERPs.
Then they announced that they were shutting off a long standing function of a link, anchor text.
An announcement in Feb’s list of changes:
Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
In March they told us.
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.
Besides this, what more do you need?
Again, if you follow Google, you would have noticed the gradual shift from a highly influential, link based PageRank to one based on Relevance.
(They told us this in the explanation of the Mayday update.)
You would have read how Google has downgraded their using link influences which started about 4 years ago.
If Panda and Penguin have not shown the folly of link building to influence SERPs, if it has not shown how SEO has switched from off page to onpage, then you need to get reading.
@ Richard.
What is a “good link”?
And your telling me that when you inherit a site as a client and the previous SEO pulls all the links they built (crappy move, but it happens – happened to a colleague of mine this week) and the rankings drop. That was because those links were having no positive affect right?
Links still count, just how they’re evaluated has changed. I don’t think there is an SEO out there worth his salt who will say links count for nothing.
And in relation to that quote we turned off A (thats one) classifier, that means that they turned off one of the 100s of factors they take into account when analysing links. Not they turned off links.
And what about brand based links in relevant contextual content, I assume you’re saying that is pointless too?
I am not saying that links count for nothing.
They drive traffic and increase PR.
When your client’s links disappeared did the site’s PR tank?
As for turning off a link function, go and read the original paper on Google.
There are only 2 factors for a link.
Hey Mike. Go and read the original document, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, which explains the workings of Google.
Also read http://seo-mentoring.ca/google-turns-link-analysis-function-a-10.html
It might give you a better insight into what Google is doing.
With the changes brought about by Google, you (or your colleague), can only assume that the old SEO pulled the links when it was more likely that Google did a link reassessment and recalculated based on relevance only. This is what Penguin did.
I have been tracking the effects of links for years and a test I did a couple of years ago showed me that the placing of about 70 links had absolutely no effect on the search term that I was targeting.
This was “History of SEO” (http://nbs-seo.com/seo/article_info.php?articles_id=14)
My methodology and results are in my article “The history of a SEO linking test. ” (http://nbs-seo.com/seo/article_info.php?articles_id=21)
The latest position for the page is #8. I would attribute this to the G+1 votes.
Mike, how do you account for Google telling us that “PageRank is not an actionable metric”?
Do you understand what this means?
PageRank is Google’s formula to determine the worth of a page by evaluating the links, both on and off page.
If they first tell us that links have been reduced in influence from having a significant weight to “one of over 200 factors”, if they remove the PR tool from their WebMaster Tools, if they then tell us PageRank is not an actionable metric in reference to search position, how much value can you place on a link?
Also, when a ONE link, brand new site, can get a #1 and beat the #2 site which has PR8 and over a million links, it drives home the fact that links have virtually NO INFLUENCE.
Building brand based links in relevant content will be excellent for your PR. I did this for my nbs-seo site.
I built 115 links before the public PR was displayed.
I had ONE PR5, ONE PR3, and 113 PR0 links and Google gave me a PR4.
Two months later my favorite forum updated it’s software and change all links from nofollow to dofollow.
This added over 10,000 links to my site and Google dropped me to PR3.
In both of these instances, none of my SERPs changed.
RELEVANT linking builds PageRank.
PageRank is now a stand alone metric.
Best,
Reg
I am inclined to massively disagree with the links don’t count theory, it’s just about quality not quantity, Page Rank at least in the form of what most people view it (the stupid green bar) has been dead for a long time as a way to value links, at least as far as everyone I’ve worked with is concerned, and SEO’s who were still using that to attribute value were behind the times. That is how I would respond to page rank not being an actionable metric. I would suggest that Google has moved past that. Not that it means Google is ignoring links.
A link – in the literal sense I agree doesn’t have much value, however it gets it’s value from surrounding context etc. Numbers aren’t what’s important, it’s the quality of a link and the site which gives it value. The PR a site itself has doesn’t necessarily mean I’d much rather place a link on a low PR site with relevant traffic in fresh relevant brand citations.
Generally I don’t spend too much time building traditional links these days anyway due to the risk involved, with social metrics seeming to have a greater value for money. And I definately agree that working on social is the way forwards, currently working on some cross testing myself on what works best in terms of social votes (tweets, FB/G+ shares/+1s etc) However links can still work. My suggestion would be that you were simply not building good links. And in regards to Forum links these clearly aren’t what I’d call “good” links.
Whilst not conclusive and I would not cite one or two incidences as a conclusive argument, it is taken from a massive data set http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2012/06/07/us-and-uk-seo-ranking-factors-2012/ . The one issue I would have with this as I think that the number of links is a slight problem area as one thing that I have noticed recently is large link profiles leave you in a position where you could have more damaging links. So numbers aren’t really something I’d evaluate.
And would it be possible to see the links that you built? (if they aren’t still there I’m assuming you could show me the domains) – if this is OK I will email you?
Mike
There was a time where quantity mattered, and I actually did an experiment a few years ago where I gradually added thousands of very low quality links to see what the saturation point was. It wasn’t until I got to about 10K that I started seeing no measurable effect.
Quality still mattered then, and mattered a lot, but there were all sorts of people back then telling you the low quality stuff didn’t help you and perhaps eve\n hurt you. So I set out to find out what was actually going on here, as I generally prefer to do
Things have definitely changed now and it’s not a guess. Ironically, it’s the stupid green bar that has reflected the migration to quality that we’ve seen over the last few years, although I’ve always used SERPs as a guide, as we need to. On the other hand, the green bar still plays a role and that’s something we still need to pay attention to, because it’s still the currency in trade for the most part with links.
However, I cannot agree with Mike more, low value quantity links are dead, or close to it. I have seen it die with my own eyes as many of us have. SEO is still an inexact science overall, meaning that we often make our best educated guesses, but there are still a lot of things we aren’t really guessing at, and this is one of them.
Hi Mike,
While the PR indicator in the browser means little, it is what is behind the scenes that counts.
PageRank USED to be one of the major influences in SERPs.
This was initially changed in 2010 and has steadily decreased in influence as the text based algos increased in accuracy.
Ideally, all ranking factors should be text based as there would be no way to cheat and I would say this is where they are at now.
Links still serve a purpose, which is PageRank.
However, PR, we are told is not an actionable metric.
It is a stand alone metric which indicates, through link analysis, the authority of a page.
Google is building on relevance. They have told us this MANY times.
With the old PR, Authority is NOT Relevance.
A link on a non-relevant high PR site, all other things being equal, was worth more than a link on a low PR, relevant site.
A link on a non-relevant high PR site is now their definition of “spammy” as it does nothing to increase the value of the information silo, and it skews the relevance results.
->”much rather place a link on a low PR site with relevant traffic in fresh relevant brand citations”
I agree totally.
I had my PR go from PR0 to PR4 in one step with 113 out of 115 links on PR0 pages.
When this happened i immediately checked all my SERPs and not one had moved.
I have also had the PR of a site lowered, and again, the SERPs did not move.
I can find no relationship between links and SERPs, other than Google’s penalties for bad link building.
Actually I find forum links EXCELLENT, IF they are relevant.
ALL my PR0 links were on relevant forums and group posts.
So did Google, apparently as it increased my PR 4 points based on a total of 115 links.
The problem with that ranking factor chart is it is outdated and I would think it is more based on opinion than actual fact.
Let me ask you Mike, have you ever done a linking study?
This would be where you watched one new page’s SERPs for it’s primary phrase to be certain it was steady, then placed your links and checked it’s SERPs every day?
I doubt that many have done this.
The usual process is to make page/code changes while building links.
I have asked every SEO I have talked to if they could show me definite proof of the positive effects of link building, and nobody could. Not even the guys that were trying to SELL me on their services.
I have even offered a licensed version of CRELoaded software hosted for a year as a prize. (No takers.)
Conclusive arguments are supported by cause and effect.
If I can duplicate an effect across more than one domain and instance, then I can be reasonably certain of my accuracy.
This is different from evaluations like the SEOMoz and Spearman correlation which show correlations which are not necessarily causation.
If my new site achieved a PR 4 with 115 links and some of my old sites have 5 to 10 times that amount and are still PR3, then I know it means PageRank has changed.
If a site’s PR is reduced and this corresponds with the addition of over 10k do follow links in one day, then we know there is a filter or Google trap for link patterns. This happened to my nbs site when a forum I commented in a lot changed their software to allow posts to be dofollow instead of nofollow.
I have also had a new client reveal that his SERPs drop happened just after he placed a bunch of automated links.
The site had previously been steady in the SERPs and this poor guy was a newly hired SEO for the small hotel chain.
He started building links and was gone overnight.
No Google updates were done around this time.
Mike, if you want to chat, I am on IM all the time. Skype is the best and my ID is vre-crash, (my old IRC handle), but my contact us pages list all my IM IDs.
Reg
Reg-NBS-SEO “PR is not an actionable metric” – True, but only as a standalone measure. Google lies misleads and tells half truths. Even if they stopped issuing PR you know that they are still using some type of scoring system for websites and pages. They can call it ‘GoogleWay’ or whatever they want.
The value of PR alone has surely dropped. Links and PR are very different, but they are intertwined.
Google also says they expect to see natural link growth for websites – 10,000 links in one day is not natural. That alone killed your site ranking. If those links can be removed or disavowed it could fix the problem.
Ken “PR is the currency of link trading” – Absolutely a great summation of the whole link building and buying situation.
But any test done more than 4 months ago has to be re-evaluated or redone for today’s environment.
Google is apparently ‘into’ steep pyramids these days. They expact the link pyramid to show a lot of PR0 blocks on the bottom and higher PR blocks as you go to the top. The growth of the number of links to a site would look an upside down pyramid with small numbers of links in the begining and more as time goes on and the pyramid grows.
Putting a number to ‘relevance’ could be a little tricky. Imagine trying to classify and catalog every single idea, thought, action and event. So it must start out with main categories and then get filled in with more specifics. But a single website could easily fit into many different categories.
The Relevance pyramid would have a smaller number of main keywords on the top and all those combinations of long tail keyword and non-money phrases on the bottom.
So 10,000 keywords of a main term like ‘casino’ won’t get you into the #1 position either.
Well I very often see a corrolation between the creation of good links and an upturn in rankings.
There are also what appear to be some notable exceptions to relevance, ie a link from the BBC whilst most of the content is irrelevant is not going to harm you. So there is a slight specification that we should make for well known news sites etc.
But, the issue I have with results is that we need larger samples to make an argument conclusive, really needs to be a min of a few 100 sites.
Furthering this let’s say hypothetically that links had no value what so ever to rankings excluding the penalty, building good ones to and sculpting a natural profile would still be important to prevent negative SEO, which despite what Google have said I have seen in a very high profile way a few times already.
Hmm if we’re talking about positive proof of it working, then I’m sure I can dig up a client who has seen positive growth in both rankings and traffic based on very minimal onsite changes by comparison to link building. Of course I’ll have to make sure that they don’t mind, NDA’s etc. Something that may be part of the reason some SEOs can’t prove the results. Again this is something for skype not the comment thread XD.
I am vre-crash in Skype.
Would love to chat.
A problem with judging linking as a factor in search results is that link building is usually undertaken as a combined project with on-page changes.
It cannot be even “minimal” on page changes.
To test a concept like linking, it has to be a strictly solo event.
@ Richard
Google does not lie and mislead.
They do not tell us their exact methodology, but they do not mislead.
Their “PR is not an actionable metric” refers to search results.
Their methods of scoring using only text are so accurate now that they do not have to use a classifier based on links.
“Links and PR are very different, but they are intertwined.”
Links and PR are the SAME.
PageRank is Google’s metric to judge links.
There is a separate factor to links outside the bounds of PR which is anchor text, but this too has been turned off.
The addition of 10k dofollow links for my site did NOT affect my SERPs, only the PR changed from 4 to 3.
Ken’s saying “PR is the currency of link trading” – IS absolutely a great summation of the whole link building and buying situation.
However it is this that Google wants to stomp out.
Google wants links to be built for ONLY organic reasons.
Putting relevance to task as a judge of links would not be that difficult if the algo took into consideration the keywords on each page as they were used in the url, title, h tags, position on the page and formatting.
If the linking and linked pages score well in all factors, a high PR is given.
@ mike
A link from the BBC would fall into a couple of categories.
It is from an authoritative NEWS site, so it would impact the news and freshness categories.
This would probably trigger a temporary SERPs increase the way a ReTweet and a G+1 vote does.
As for the amount of samples, I have been tracking over 40 sites for a long time and I am constantly doing SEO.
If one did not know what they were doing, then a very large sampling is needed.
However if one has refined their SEO process then all one has to do is to follow what minor changes happen.
I am not against link building as I think it is the way to get traffic, but I do not see any effect it has on SERPs.
However, a small change to onpage text can yield immediate results.
I think that you will find that the process of producing negative SEO has been eliminated with Google’s latest changes.
The ONLY way to judge if it is links bettering the SERPs is to not make onpage changes during the life of the test.
The test has to be run during a period where no Google updates are done also.
You would need to do a dated screen shot of the target page and it’s source code before the test and after.
These would be accompanied by a screen shot of results, preferably using a proxy server to remove any personal influences.
A list of links placed could be included but would not be necessary as it is results that count.
A new page with 0 links would be a starting point.
Reg
It’s been my view for years that Google has worked so well mainly due to looking to mislead the general population, and leaving those who truly know what they are doing to emerge on top. There probably has always been a high correlation with good SEO and good content.
So lately, Google has decided to change things up, but I don’t really think that the game that they play with people has changed all that much. It’s still all about staying ahead of the curve and they have raised the level of difficulty and taken away some of the tools that people have used to manipulate them.
So it always will be a matter of manipulating them, especially in the field of online gambling. Links still matter, although quality matters more over quantity. This makes sense in the grand scheme of things as the best sites will have the means to make this happen better than the common sites, who will once again be shunted to the side.
We’re not sure where the bar is now or how exactly the rules have changed, and as always, those truly in the know aren’t going to be doing that much sharing. If SEO was easy though, it wouldn’t be worth much.
I think there is a lot of common ground here. It seems to be mostly semantics that is creating an apparent difference in viewpoint when there really is not.
Whether links and PR are called the same, intertwined or different is immaterial, to me at least. I totally agree however that relevant high PR links (to a decent content site) gets you high PR. But a high PR in and of itself does not drive a lot of traffic to your site (from google serps).
Before penguin I had a PR4 site with little traffic. After penquin it went down to PR0. In that case the issue was lack of relevancy to the two higher PR sites that are linking to it. I cannot change the other sites, so I am changing my site (different niche altogether).
However, since you agree that high Pr (derived from links) does not drive traffic (not an actionable metric) (I knew that, just my misunderstanding of terminology) what then in your opinion gets you a high google search position (which will drive traffic to a site)?
It surely is not merely content?
A high SERPs position is gained by on-page work.
The presentation of your keyword phrases, their location in the document, text size, decoration, and choice.
The keyword hierarchy, (semantics), in both the code and the visual presentation is a major factor.
How people read from a monitor, where they look on a page, what they expect in regards to relevance and what they do are all factors.
The PageRank algos were extensively redone May 2010.
They were changed from a strictly mathematical basis to one biased on relevance.
You can get more PR from a relative PR0 page than you can get from a non-relative PR8 page.
I would suspect that your change from PR4 to PR0 was due to more than 2 non-relevant links.
Penguin was a recalculation of a site’s linking profile with the effects of linking turned on again.
Penalties were based on the use of anchor text on non-relevant pages.
This post is dead on Brian!
After a lot of research and expermenting with my own sites, the recent algo updates don’t credit low quality spammy links that have been blasted out by auto software. What can really help your website rank is great content and links from outside sources such as Blogs, related websites, and social media.
Thanks for fortifying my thoughts on this subject
I think that link building isn’t a good idea. It’s better invest some time (or money) in “social building” i.e. share and like on Facebook and Twitter. I have done some interesting experiments.
Thanks for this article is a really great read and has some helpful information for newbies at link building like myself.
Thanks
This has been a great help, shows that link building is still very important even post penguin, is a long slog to do it though but worth it in the end
Thanks Claire – Google will, hopefully, be rewarding SEOs who stick with white techniques.
very helpful for a newbie. Strange whats happening with the big G at the minute
Glad you found it useful. Keeping up with Google is practically a full-time job.