Link Building

When I first started doing seo, link building really was the bane of my existence. ‘You need to go out and aquire quality inbound links’ my boss would say. But there are a number of problems I faced:

1. Link building is hella boring
2. Link building is hella boring
3. Link building is hella boring

Maybe its the way I was doing it? I think it was. I had read a few articles about how to build links for a site, how to find possible link partners using search operators such as link:, allinanchor:. All I had to do now was approach these people and see if they would like to link to one of our clients sites.

Therein lies another problem, who wants to link to a site selling socks in New Zealand? Answer: Nobody did. Well, not quite correct there, but ‘Nobodies’ did. I was reciprocal link building left right and centre, but I could not find quality link partners to exchange with – building a mini directory of fairly useless links for both the visitors to the site and the site itself.

So I would spend all day visiting sites, finding email addresses on their site, writing them a letter, and waiting patiently by the inbox waiting for something to happen. It very rarely did. Building links for OScommerce based stores specialising in items such as socks and hair accessories was proving rather tough.

Will fancy software help? 

I researched a bunch of software programs and online tools to help automate the process, but everywhere I turned the testimonials of people in the know were pretty bad – and rightly so. My boss felt otherwise however, he was adamant there was a quick and nasty way of getting quality inbound links and in effect tricking the search engines into believing our clients site was a greater authority on socks than really was the case. We started using link metro for a couple of sites to see if we could benefit at all. Not really.

What is the answer? 

I was getting pretty stuck. I approached people on a few forums and it seemed that creating quality content and what has become known as ‘link bait’ were really some of the best ways to get links – in other words, naturally. Building links by building a site people would want to link to. Just what the search engines wanted. Turns out that wasn’t such a bad idea.

Not only that, but getting cheap, dirty reciprocal links came back to bite us in the ass with the Big Daddy Google algo update. For the most part I had removed spammy links, but a few of our sites were hit by the update and bombed. You could see the months where the update became live quite clearly in their stats.

What I learned and you can learn too… 

Thankfully I managed to convince my boss that reciprocal link building was dead. From my experiences in the link building trenches this is what I have taken with me:

• Reciprocal link building has little if no benefit and I consider it largely a waste of my time.
• Attributes I would like an inbound link to have:
• Exist clearly on a high traffic page whose content is relevant to the target of the link
• Exist on a page with increasingly less external links
• Exist on a page which has been indexed by Google for an increasingly long period and possibly has a good PageRank
• Exist on a page for a site which does not require a link in return
• Use link text that is relevant to the target of the link
• Exist (and be easily identifiable) within content relevant to the target of the link
• Inbound links have value, they have the potential to
1. increase the number of visitors to your site that are interested in the content of your site
2. decrease the impact of the ageing delay/sandbox effect which can limit high placements in SERPs for up to a year
3. increase your rankings in the SERPs
• Outbound links have value, further emphasized by the new MSN operator LinkFromDomain:

Trapazoidal Linking Matrifluxes: 

So there you have it. There are a number of strategies out there for link building, one of my favourites is the Trapazoidal Linking Matriflux method. If that method was a small rodent it would be a weasel, thats how cunning it is.

Hopefully this post will save me the time of reading another of those horrible link request emails. And for any of you out there that are still geting infected there is always the link condom which will help protect you.

Profile:  Frank has been programming for the web using PHP, Javascript and numerous libraries and frameworks for the past 5 years. More articles.