Now that Matt Cutts has lowered the boom on using guest bloggery for linkery all the SEO bloggers are pouncing on LINK BUILDING and proclaiming its imminent death and departure from “white hat”, “good” search engine optimization. These people never learn from their mistakes.
Link building is not going away and it doesn’t need to adopt another new name (like “content marketing”). People need to stop being ashamed of link building. It’s not that link building is bad for your Website, it is that you have been doing bad link building for your Website.
You Will Always Be Allowed to “Build” Links by Search Engines
Search engines don’t care if you build a few links to your Website. Submit it to a handful of good directories, interlink a small number of Websites, swap links with a couple of your friends and business partners. It’s all good.
Search engines care when you go out and place links to your site on hundreds or thousands of other Websites for no reason other than that you believe you need those links to improve your “rankings”. You got that idea from an SEO blog or forum.
Links help but they were never the full solution. The only people who cry over all these search engine pronouncements are the people who depended solely or mostly on links for their search marketing success.
It’s not about moderation. It’s about what makes sense. The Web exists only because Websites link to each other. You are allowed to link out to whatever sites you want to and so is every other Website out there.
But if you think in terms of “dofollow links”, “dofollow blogs”, “keyword in anchor text”, etc. then you have been practicing some pretty bad SEO.
Do not be afraid to continue building links. Just build links sensibly and responsibly.
You Will Always Be Allowed to Write and Publish “Guest Posts”
The stereotype for a spammy guest post begins with an unsolicited outreach email from someone you have never heard of, offering to write content for your site in exchange for a link. Maybe they’ll offer some money, maybe not. That’s the basic model that the search engines are targeting. You and I are tired of receiving these emails, too.
When Matt first announced his blog post a few people panicked and assumed he was also talking about large Websites with teams of writers, some of whom are “on staff” and some of whom are “contributors”. And that assumption was silly. Google is not going to take down the well-behaved sites that are publishing information for people.
If you get a gig writing a guest column for a high-visibility Website your deadlines will become more important to you than the link anchor text you can obsess over. Because if you write nothing but linky crap you won’t keep that guest column for very long. Sure, a few people may get away with it but most people want to write good content when they settle in to a regular guest column position.
Guest posting for links, guest posting for SEO — that is the basic “content marketing” service that has taken over the buzzword consortium in online marketing since Google started killing blog networks in 2012. If you can write a fluff piece and stick a link in it, you’re a content marketer. Of course, real content marketing creates demand. It’s not about getting links.
You can use guest posts to create demand. You just have to stop thinking about links.
All Your Guest Posts May Now Be “Suspicious Links”
After all the manual penalties Google has handed out for “suspicious links” you’d think people would have stopped guest posting in volume. And I have no doubt (having looked at some suspicious link profiles) that guest posting has contributed heavily to many manual actions. But going forward we may find that Google has developed or is developing automated ways to sniff out the guest posts that were placed for links. You might want to get on top of that issue NOW while you still can.
It’s still okay to ASK for a link. Blogger outreach should not die simply because guest posting for links is being targeted. But bloggers are growing weary of all the endless emails from SEOs. Clearly the majority of people sending out link emails have no clue as to what they are doing because so many of them keep targeting people who complain about all the emails they receive.
So if you get a few bloggers to place links for you, you may be creating a new problem for yourself. For example, in another year or so — as more people turn to finding dead links and asking that they be updated to point to their (clients’) sites, you can expect the noise-to-signal ratio in those link profiles to become really nasty.
And then your Reclaimed Links will be the next big thing that search engines restrict and forbid. Reclaimed Links are no different from guest posts — you’re not asking bloggers to do something helpful to their readers (hardly anyone will be reading the old content any more), you’re just out to get links to help with your rankings.
Guest Blogging will morph into Link Reclamation as people develop new tools to identify relevant old articles. Link reclamation specialists are already crawling the Web for broken links and I am sure some of them have created huge lists of articles to exploit in the future when the right clients come along.
Trust me when I say that is a strategy begging for a penalty. Don’t do it. It WILL look suspicious. It’s just guest bloggery wearing some paint.
Your Link Building Should Be About What You Are Legitimately Entitled to Do
You have the right to place your own links. You just don’t have a good reason to place so many.
Link legitimacy should have been an important concept in the search marketing industry all along but people are greedy, selfish, and/or lazy. They would rather chase links today and worry about penalties and downgrades tomorrow. That’s not an optimal philosophy, in my book.
When you build links for a client you should focus on creating real value on the ciient’s site as much as possible. Even if you create only a very small amount of value it will be that value that attracts the links most likely to survive the next search engine purge. You should work with the best possible part of the site and ignore the rest. In-site navigation will flow the PageRank to where it needs to be.
You don’t need to resort to trickery, like publishing orphaned articles deep inside a Website and then asking bloggers in unrelated niches to link to those articles.
You don’t need to use “content marketing”, whether it be sending out press releases and quickly-written articles, infographics, or link reclamation emails.
If your (client’s) site is a legitimate authority then the site is entitled to recognition. It’s your job as the SEO to help earn that recognition. That can be done through informative outreach. You don’t have to approach every blogger on the Web with your hand out asking for more value than you’ll give in return.
It’s a longer path, a harder path, but it’s a path less fraught with peril. The rewards of building legitimate links you have a right to earn are longer-lasting than the rewards of using short cuts.
If someone can say something valuable and worthwhile about your (cient’s) Website, encourage them to do so — even if they don’t get much traffic.
Link Acquisition Should Not Be Measured in Terms of Monthly Visitors
This is the other great fallacy of current linking strategies. People focus too much on finding sites with “real traffic”. What the heck is “real traffic” anyway? I can abandon a Website for six months and its traffic will drop to a very low level. Are you seriously suggesting that is “fake” traffic?
Any low-traffic Website can become a high-traffic Website. The question you should be asking is not how many visitors it gets but rather how much honest content it is publishing. Some high-traffic sites publish a lot of cheap, smarmy content. You know that is true because you have seen their failures when the search engines slapped them down.
Website traffic is one of the worst metrics you can use in link acquisition. It’s asking for trouble. Don’t do that.
If you’re going to ask someone to consider linking to your (client) site, do it because they have a legitimate interest in what your (client) site is doing; not because you have an SEO tool or spreadsheet that says “plant links HERE”.
It’s not the links that get your sites into trouble. It’s the lack of clear thinking that goes into these aggressive linking strategies. We’ll be going through another period of link profile resetting for the next few months; that is time to finally learn from your past mistakes and stop following the bad advice you have gotten from the SEO community.
Unless you have an endless supply of brandable Websites you can burn through, you really need to stop looking for “scalability” in SEO. That is a trap that only you spring upon yourself.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
How Long Does It Take SEO To Work?
Outbound Links: Why Use Forward Links for SEO?
On-Page Optimization SEO Checklist
White Hat Link Earning Techniques
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Good post.