Link building is more important now than ever.
Links from sites with low quality, “thin” content” are, by definition, “low quality links”. For a discussion of high quality content and high quality links, see this post, which details how to judge the quality of links and content.
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In the wake of Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, Michael Martinez and I have worked with clients who made mistakes in their linking strategy in the past. Some of them just gave up on SEO, deciding to focus their efforts on other promotional efforts like pay-per-click or traditional print advertising. Others tried increasing their volume of links, thinking that would be just the panacea that they needed. And others gave up on old sites and launched new ones.
Regardless of which strategy they were using in the past, most of our clients have to be reminded of one of the most important facts about link building:
Good quality links will send your site qualified traffic. More qualified traffic means more leads, more sales, and more money. And this is true regardless of what the next creature in Google’s zoo turns out to be.
None of our clients needed to be reminded of this though:
Good quality links will help you rank better in the search engines.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t need help and advice. A certain percentage of those folks were confused about the difference between a high quality link and a low quality link. A lot of them had drunk the Kool-Aid, which was a punch made up of equal parts volume, scalability, and anchor text.Michael is fond of pointing out that it’s hard to define what is a “good quality link”. I’ll defer to his opinion on that, but I’ll go further than that and point out that it’s not too hard to list some qualities that “low quality links” have in common:
- They’re easy to build in high volume.
- It’s easy to scale a link building strategy using “low quality links”.
- Low quality links leave footprints.
- Low quality links often have super-targeted keyword-rich anchor text.
Suppose you hire a full-time, professional link builder to do link outreach on your behalf. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that this pro believes strongly in following Google’s specific advice about building links: “Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.”
What’s the first task that this pro is going to work on?It should be obvious, but he’s going to spend some time determining which sites should know about your pages. This is called link target identification (or prospecting), and it’s time-consuming. Some folks think it’s fast, because you can just run a backlink profile for your main competitor and just start asking all the same sites for links.
But that’s just a starting point. Once you get a list of sites which link to your competitor, a professional has to carefully look at each site. A close visual inspection of these target sites is necessary to weed out the low quality link targets.
Spotting those low quality link targets can be pretty easy. For example, if a link comes from a blog post with exactly 3 links in it (your competitor’s site, a .gov site, and a .edu site), there’s a good chance you don’t want or need a link from that site. Especially if you find that pattern in multiple posts on the site.Sites with thin content are usually lousy link acquisition targets, too. But you can’t recognize those sites without reading them first, which takes time, too.
Creating a good list of 100 link targets could easily take a whole week. Your professional link builder has put in a whole week and not gotten any links yet. The kind of link acquisition strategy that Google recommends takes time. It’s impossible to scale. It’s impossible to do high volumes. It requires too much expertise and too much effort.
Then next week, this pro is going to do two things:
- Plan content that will attract links from some of these targets.
- Reach out to targets when your site already has content that’s likely to be linked to.
Planning, researching, and writing content takes time. Writing a high quality page to be used as “link bait” can take considerable effort and research, especially if you’re hoping to create a page that’s more complete than your competitor’s page on that subject. You could easily spend a day or two days researching and writing the perfect page to capture the attention of one of your link targets.
Link building and link acquisition is a craft. Don’t make the all-too-common mistake of hiring a factory worker to work on a project that requires a craftsman.
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And outreach also takes time. You have to find the correct contact information for the person making the linking decisions at the site. Then you have to craft a compelling email to let that person know about your site and its content. That email absolutely must be tailored specifically to the person on the other end, or your chances of getting a link drop hard and fast.
At the end of two weeks, your pro link builder might have identified 100 targets and contacted all of them. A 5% success rate would be exceptional, which means you’d have 5 new links at the end of two weeks.In a year’s time, at that rate, your professional link builder might have generated between 100 and 150 new links to your site.
Most impatient webmasters can’t imagine making that kind of commitment and effort, but it’s worth it.
Because those links will not only send traffic to your site, they’ll also help you rank better. They’re a long-term investment.
Building and acquiring links is a craft. You can’t do it in a factory. Not the way it needs to be done in today’s search market.Even if your strategy includes building your own links via your own network of sites, you have to spend the time to create sites which are good sources of links. This means writing content that people want to read. And of course, those sites you’re creating as sources of links? They need links, too, or they’re worthless.
Even though Google has made dramatic changes to their algorithm over the last couple of years, one thing hasn’t changed:
Links matter.
And that’s not likely to change anytime in the near future. Matt Cutts mentioned recently that internally Google has a search engine algorithm that doesn’t use links. But no one likes the results from that search engine, so links are here to stay.
But low-quality links are history.
Playing by the rules has always been a great strategy, but it’s getting better all the time. It takes expertise and craftsmanship, though. And that’s discouraging, but it’s also an opportunity for growth.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
How Long Does It Take SEO To Work?
Guest Post Link Building: Why It Hurts the Web
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness for Non-expert Websites
On-Page Optimization SEO Checklist
SEO Metrics Online: Which Measurements Should You Use?
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