Linkbuilding Tips: Is Linkbuilding Dead?

Since Google emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the late 90s, marketers everywhere have done everything in their power to fall in line, lest be consumed by the notorious sandbox beast. Anyone who has a monetized website has tried to learn what they can about search engine optimization. What is the first conclusion most seem to draw when their endeavors fail? SEO AND LINKBUILDING MUST BE DEAD! Do these linkbuilding tips even matter?

When I started to learn SEO in 2009, there were a lot of inaccurate linkbuilding tips out there that supposedly ensured success with Google. One of the ideas came in the form of these things called “link farms.” Link farms were basically directories where so-called SEO experts could fool the search engines into thinking their sites had gained numerous relevant backlinks from various sources. These directories were targeted with the first Panda update and do not exist anymore because Google caught on to what the SEO experts were up to.

Subsequent updates to the Google algorithm in the form of furry creatures have berated and limited SEO gurus at every turn, wherever they tried to cheat the system. The loopholes that used to mean automatic page-one ranking are far fewer than ever before. So this brings us to the title of this post: Is linkbuilding really dead? Let me answer this question by posing a statement: linkbuilding will NEVER be dead!

SEO is dumb because linkbuilding is impossible…

SEO might be complicated, but there are patterns and best practices to be followed. When you are actively linkbuilding to increase the authority of your site, you are in effect, asking the other websites to vote for your content. Likes and shares on social media, links from other sites, comments from other experts are all ways other people/entities show their vote of confidence in your business/content.

Linkbuilding will always be of the utmost importance. Having linkbuilding skills is extremely valuable. Just ask this guy I found on Upwork (used to be Odesk).

He earns at least $250 every hour for linkbuilding! If this isn’t evidence that linkbuilding is NOT dead, I don’t know what is! He values his time, and his skills can be valuable to you. That is why you would hire him in the first place. People good a linkbuilding can do any or all of the following:

• Outsource your skills to other marketers for hundreds an hour.
• Rank multiple sites on Google and get paid on the sites you monetize.
• Get on leaderboards for affiliate products via Clickbank or JVZoo and gain recognition.
• Build up a fat Adsense account and generate a passive income.
• Get leads, build a list, and much, much more!

At Next Level Services, we have chosen to use our linkbuilding prowess to help other local businesses rank and beat their competition. We’ve got the tools and the experience to get the job done.

What is linkbuilding?

Some services might offer you hundreds or even thousands of links for dirt cheap. If you paying under $100 for hundreds or thousands of links, you are just asking for a Google slap! There are countless software programs on the market (some since 2010 that people still buy) that promise to automate the process of backlinks for you. Most of the time, this is what the Fiverr guys use for their gigs. They get you countless links, but most are never indexed, and the ones that do are of little to no value.

So, to put it simply, linkbuilding is merely the process of showing Google that your site is popular by getting people to talk about you. A lot of SEOs call the power of backlinks “link juice,” though it’s known as “link equity.” About 10 years ago, we chased an almighty ranking factor called, “Page Rank.” Websites incurred a rank on a scale from 0-10 depending on how much authority they had. Google has shifted its logic and now social signals are among the most important ranking factors.

What does linkbuilding mean to Google?

The aim of Google updates has always been to serve the user, not the webmaster. Highlight that statement and always remember it! Google is not there to make you money – it is there to bring relevant searches to its users – and make money for themselves. Popular content that is shared more than other content will get higher rankings than content that no one sees.

Google does not hate linkbuilding, but it does tend to penalize people who try to cheat their system by using black hat tactics. A wise man once told me, the harder a link is to get, the more value it will have. I have found this statement to be TRUE! Your goal with linkbuilding is not to get more [backlinks] than everyone else, but to get the best links possible that pass on the most link juice. If you want a glass of grape juice, you are gonna want to find the juiciest grapes… raisins don’t make very good grape juice.

Some Important Ranking Metrics For Linkbuilding Tips Context

Google has many metrics in its ranking algorithm. Linkbuilding is a mode of ranking your website, but to understand why it is still relevant, we need to look at a few of the metrics it helps contribute to.

Domain Authority

Authority is what all websites that rank well on Google have. Pagerank has become antiquated and domain authority has replaced it. Google places your website on a scale of 0-100 and this value (the higher, the better) will ultimately determine how quickly your posts rank without any linking to the individual pages themselves. This is powerful stuff!

Page Authority

Domain authority is the measure of the authority of your entire website, but page authority is the measure of each page separate from the domain. A page from a high domain authority site with little page authority will rank well, but other people can still outrank it easily if they know what they’re doing. If you practice linkbuilding on a regular basis, you will have high domain and page authority. This is how certain pages on your website can outrank some Amazon or Facebook pages.

Link Juice

The proper term for this is “link equity,” but I just prefer the term link juice. As a science/weather guy, I like to think of the internet as a fluid system. The important sites contain more fluid than the obscure little-traveled sites. When you are linked to by important sites, they send some of their fluids or juices to you, which will make your site more important! Link juice is actually a measured substance in Google and counts a great deal in ranking highly.

Social Signals

The amount of shares your site/pages get is a HUGE metric for ranking now. The Penguin update in 2011 made social sharing one of the most important ways to rank your content. If you have a site without a way for other sites to share/like your content, you are hurting your site’s SEO. There are countless social platforms now. Some of the most popular include Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Some Definite Link Building Tips

While Linkbuilding may be a very powerful way to get your site noticed by other sites across the web, the proverbial Google sandbox serves as a reminder that linkbuilding the wrong way will hurt your popularity and ultimately, your visibility in the search engine. On that note, let’s discuss a few powerful ways to do linkbuilding!

The image below depicts some popular strategies for linkbuilding ranked based on resources vs rewards. The strategies in the lower left corner take less time to implement and impact the page less, while the tactics in the upper right corner take longer (or cost more) but provide better benefits. Linkbuilding tip: this visualization will serve you well when crafting your linkbuilding strategy.

Three Powerful Linkbuilding Strategies

The graph above is powerful but is meant for a high-level, birdseye view. For all intents and purposes, we will start at the beginning. If you focus on these three linkbuilding strategies with your site, you will see a huge rise in your ranking potential!

Internal Linking

Building authority sites is the best way to rank in today’s search engine world. The sites with real authority have hundreds to thousands of pages filled with content. Though, having oodles of content will not suffice to rank your site alone. You want people to peruse your site from one piece of content to another for as long as possible. In order to achieve this, internal linking is essential!

Internal linking spread the link juice across your site, much like veins spread blood from the heart throughout the body. It makes your site much more user-friendly in Google’s eyes and helps leave a trail of breadcrumbs for your visitors. There is a lot of Hansel and Gretel in SEO, didn’t you know?!

Some Internal Linkbuilding Tips:

• A fast, easy way to utilize internal linking, is to install a recommended content plugin onto your site. This will display three or more articles you’ve written under each post and pose them as a recommendation. You see all the popular blogs doing this via recommended/sponsored content at the bottom of the page. Very nifty – and very effective!
• Go through your site and post links to other articles in places you feel are relevant. Every single post should link to at least one or two other posts on your blog.
• Make use of your sidebar. It is recommended to have your most popular posts in your sidebar so your readers have easy access to the content other readers love the most.
• Make sure all your internal links are dofollow. This is a biggie! In a world where people argue over the correct recipe of nofollow/dofollow, internal links are a no-brainer. There is just no reason to keep the link juice from flowing across your site. That is unless you are protecting certain pages from Google robots.

Competitor Link-Mining

I know the link mining part makes it sound somewhat underhanded and fishy, but it is actually one of the methods most SEO agencies use to find their backlinks. You can access one of the three backlink checking resources to find who your competitors are linking to (Ahrefs, MajesticSEO, MOZ Opensite Explorer), or you can use an awesome tool I now use for all projects, Traffic Travis.

Traffic Travis is a free or paid tool that can list all the places your competitors put one of their links and much more! The free version does everything the paid version does, you are just limited in terms of the quantity you can do at any one point in time.

We can sort through the relevancy of all the pages our competitors used and sort them from highest to lowest page authority (which is what I do). Once we have figured out what links have the most power, we can check them out and use them for links ourselves. We can also get a better look at our competitors and see how our keywords are ranking in all the search engines.

Relationship Building

Do you remember how I said the harder a link is to get, the more value it has? This definitely applies here. An effective linkbuilding campaign needs to have some element of active outreach. This doesn’t mean you have to call and fraternize with your competitors, but it does mean you need to be out there making a name for yourself!

I plan to unveil this linkbuilding strategy further in future posts. For now, I want you to think about outreach and what it would mean for you if other blog owners/businesses on page one for your target keywords enthusiastically endorsed your site! You can easily outsource this task to a VA, use a service I love called Ninja Outreach, or use Next Level Services to find blogs for you.

Basically, the idea is to find businesses or blog owners in your niche who have authority. You establish a relationship with them of mutual respect. You link to each other and voila – you’ve got yourself a backlink! The real key here is finesse and tact. Other bloggers know their competition wants their link juice. How are you going to persuade them you are worthy?

Linkbuilding Tips Summary

Every single day, the landscape of SEO is changing. Google is the pioneer and we are the settlers that follow in its wake. Linkbuilding will always be of the utmost importance for anyone that wants to be showcased on Google for any relevant keywords people may be interested in searching for.

Google sees links as a reward for those sites that have high-quality content. The absence of links (or the presence of low-quality spammy links) is viewed as the opposite. You may think your links are good, or maybe you have the best content on the interwebs – if you have no proof, it really doesn’t matter. By using internal linking, competitor link research (link-mining), and relationship building, you can build trust and control the outcome through your own effort. If you focus on this, the links will come, much like the people who come to see Kevin Costner’s field of dreams. If you never saw that movie, I am sorry I gave away the ending.

Hopefully, you learned something today. If you loved this article and want more, please like and share this piece of content everywhere you can! If you’re looking for more than linkbuilding tips and would like us to do your linkbuilding for you, either contact us here or fill out our quote form here.