Death of “Link Building” and birth of “Link Earning”
21st November, 2013
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This is a Guest Blog from Charles Hoogewerf – who does SEO work for us here at NCompass and is currently working for http://www.creationmediauk.com/#! in Bristol.
I thought that you might find this interesting as I have been doing a lot of reading recently regarding Link Building and I have found that the general view is the following.
The term “Link Building” is now considered dead from many people across the SEO industry, but not its value. It should now be called “Link Earning”.
The reasons for the death of “Link Building” are as follows:
- Google Penguin update changed the way links were built by punishing these practices
- Email Blasts – Sending emails out to link to people used to work but now people will just add them to spam and it no longer has the impact that it used to have and therefore are considered extremely low valued links
- Buying Links – This was never a good idea from the start and now Google actively punishes these kinds of links
- Submitting links to directories – Penguin has made these links much much lower valued than ever before. The view is that these are spammed far too much and do nothing to engage potential clients or visitors – not real enough
- Article Directories & Article Marketing – It’s actively hurting everyone and is very dangerous
- Leaving links on guest books, forums, open comments, do follow blogs, do follow links – Penguin now punishes sites for these type of links because the practice was simply linking your site to anything – even if its not relevant to the site (a very common and very popular practice)
- Mining competitors – This was probably the best practice – but you now have to be smarter with how you use this information
- Link Farms – building a web page and then adding links to everything and anything on there – The worst possible practice
- Links can no longer be “built” because there are too many unknowns, too many variables
- 100 sources do not build 100 links (i.e. 100 link requests can not build 100 links. On a bad day, 100 sources could build 0 links)
The new way of gaining links is by “Link Earning”
Link Earning is basically building far superior quality links to the most relevant sites with the most relevant content within the client’s industry.
The following practices helps this process:
- Change the way you look at links – Where does it make sense to link to – How can we drive traffic back and forth in the right kind of way?
- Earn links directly with content by creating the kind of content that you know will want to be shared, that someone will want to link to, would embed or would write about or blog about on their blogs or press releases.
- Source the better, the more real databases – i.e. linking “Batman” to a list “the top 100 films” by asking them to do it – engaging with them – building a rapport with them.
- One link from a great blog / guest comment in the site’s industry or a news site or relevant site is worth a hundred, maybe a thousand of the standard guest blogging link spam. You have to make sure you interact with whoever left that link, to comment, to thank or search engines will think it spam.
- Competitors links – You now have to search through a competitor’s site to see what is the content that’s got the most links or from people who are competitive in the site’s field – what’s getting hot press from this site, this blog, this research. Then you do the same but better.
- Build a social network that is actually made up of influencers, of people who can link to the site, those who have presence on Google+, Facebook and Twitter that can influence other people.
Basically, every site has to:
- Develop AMAZING content
- Get to know the Influencers in the site’s industry across the Internet.
- Contribute to relevant online Communities
- When appropriate, ask friends, colleagues, to consider sharing your valuable content.
- Bank on earning the large majority of your links passively (i.e. naturally)
The result of this is that “Link Earning” is a much more effective way of gaining the valuable links to improve the rankings on search engines. This also means that this process is longer and doesn’t offer as direct result as it once used to, is not a quick fix like it used to be.
SEO now has to:
- Focuses on Content and Content Keywords – improves the likelihood of getting the site noticed and shared.
- Research – Research the value of the sites that you want to build links on – research what guest blogs are relevant to the site – research what content from your competitors are getting the most attention.
- Build Rapports – Contribute towards relevant online communities – build a strong presence online, ask permission to link first, then wait and then interact with them afterwards.
- Links are not such a direct practice – you have to improve the rest of the site with the other SEO practices – merge them together with “Link Earning”. Therefore, many have argued that links are just as valuable as before, but other aspects of SEO has increased in importance as well so we can no longer just focus on “Link Building”, its all much much more part of the whole SEO process.
Thank you Charles, you input is very appreciated.