Today I wanted to talk about some actionable link building techniques that you can go away and start using straight away. I appreciate how difficult it can be to implement some of the link building techniques we talk about here, so I wanted to cover some which many of you should be able to use straight away.
The first two techniques involve some software called Screaming Frog. We love this in the Distilled office, its a great tool and the guys who own it are very open to suggestions for improvements. At first glance, you wouldn’t think you could use it as a link building tool. But there are a couple of creative ways that I think you can use it for link building.
If you are not familiar with Screaming Frog yet, Dr Pete did a comparison to Xenu a few months ago which gives you some insight into the features it has.
Use it to help you get a hook in your outreach
We all know the importance of having the right hook when you email someone asking for a link. One of the hooks commonly talked about is finding something that is broken on the site you are contacting.
Run Screaming Frog over the site you'd like to get a link from and filter the results by 404 pages, then see where these pages are linked to internally. Then reference these in your outreach email. This will help distinguish your email from the other emails they get that look auto generated and spammy. The fact you mention something like a broken link shows you are a real person.
Use it to snipe competitors links
I love this one, its sneaky but meh, alls fair in love and link building.
Run Screaming Frog over your competitors and find 404 pages. Chances are that you’ll find a few. Now run these through a backlink checker such as Open Site Explorer and see if anyone is linking to these 404 pages. You have to hope for a bit of luck here, as there may be no one linking. But when you do find some, its not very difficult to drop an email to the site who are linking to the 404 page and let them know. At the same time you let them know about the amazing piece of similar content you have which isn’t broken.
If you are going to use this technique, I’d highly recommend you genuinely do have good content to replace the 404 page. Otherwise, you are going to look a bit silly asking the site owner to change the link to your unrelated, poor quality page.
Quick housekeeping note here.
If you are doing this, you should also be doing the same for your own site. You’ve got other ways of finding 404 errors, such as using Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics or your own server logs. Whichever way you choose, get into the habit of checking 404s and fixing them. Hopefully this means you’ll never get into the situation of having incoming links that go to 404 pages.
Revamp old content and data that got links
Sometimes content can be published that isn’t “evergreen”. Meaning that it is useful for a while but at some point goes out of date and isn’t relevant anymore. When this happens, its unlikely to be linked to very much. Ideally, you should always be pushing out evergreen content but in reality, this is very hard to do.
So our goal here is to find old content on other sites that was good a couple of years ago but not likely to get links now. We then need to decide whether we feel we can redo that content, update it and publish it again. This works particularly well on any content that references a time specific dataset. For example, a comparison of the average alcohol consumption in each US state vs the crime rate for 2008. If this content did well and got lots of links, then updating it with a 2011 dataset may be just as successful.
To find this content, you can use search tools in Google to specify a date range from a couple of years ago:
Its then a case of sifting through the results which admittedly can take time. But you will get better at this as time goes on.
I should also mention that you should take some time to make sure that the website haven’t already updated the dataset and posted it elsewhere on their site, or that they don’t have previous datasets demonstrating a propensity to update it every year. Good example here is the SEOmoz Search Ranking Factors that are updated every two years. If you didn’t do your homework, you could easily think that this was only run in 2009, whereas its actually updated every two years.
Start doing weekly roundups of industry news
This is a very simple one and can be very effective as a consistent way of getting good quality links as well as social shares. The great thing about this is that it can be applied to most industries too. If you work in an industry where there isn't lots going on all the time, you could do monthly roundups which can still work well.
The general idea is that you write a blog post that links out to a number of good quality news items or informational posts over the last week. You can then also tweet about them and get the attention of the site owner by including them in the tweet. This can work very well and isn't seen as spammy at all. Just look at the paper.li links that we all see on Twitter, when we get tagged in one of these, you can't help but go take a look at why you've been tagged.
You can also email key sites to let them know they've been featured in your weekly roundup, make it very informal and don't ask for a link in return. Just treat it as a way to get some conversation going with the site owner, then it can lead to getting links back further down the line.
Remember that good quality sites will not link to you for no reason, you need to get their attention somehow and give them something. If you do this roundup, you are getting their attention and giving them a link which is exactly what you need to do.
You can see some examples of people that do this such as Wiep and Ontolo.
Hopefully these quick link building techniques can help you with your own sites, I've tried to write about techniques that most people can use. Please let me know how you get on in the comments!
If there is not a post already, can you guys at SEOmoz talk about the best ways to contact sites? I imagine different tactics for different types of websites. Happy Memorial Day!!! :)
In my Opinion, out reaching and contacting site owner does not contain 1 basic formula that can be define in a blog post at least it will not be easy to describe how to contact but obviously there must be some key points that you have to consider while contacting the site owner…
I think while contacting the site owner you should be nice, professional, stick to the topic, direct and short (no one like to read 20 line email).
Being nice and humble might convenes the site owner and your professionalism in your email will tell him about your caliper and a reason to give you a link. No matter if he agreed to give you a link or not, short and direct talk will bring long term relationship.
Bonus Tip: Build relationship in your niche through continuous emails… asking for link in the 1st email will more likely bring a NO as an answer…
I would ask for a link in the first e-mail, assuming that I did have a relevant and interesting page to link to. Like you said, nobody likes to read a 20-line e-mail, but a lot of people also don't care to smalltalk through e-mail back and forth either. You want to get to the point and show the webmaster that there is a problem on his site while offering him a solution.
If you just leave the idea of linking to your pages as a suggestion, it could be enough to persuade the site's owner to update his links; pointing out that there are alternate pages that he could point his links to instead sounds completely reasonable and easy to do. There's a benefit for him there because his visitors won't hit any dead links.
However, if you request that he update his links to your site, that can sound a bit selfish and the focus can then move away from his problem to your gain.
What I'm trying to say is that, depending on the person you're contacting, requesting the link could backfire depending on the wording, especially since text online can be ambiguous and wrongfully interpreted by the other person. Just remember that when you're contacting the webmaster, even though you're the one trying to get the links, he's the one with the problem and you're there to offer him the solution.
I am agree with it. If some one will irritate with this bombarding of mail so may be spam us. So, why should we create fire wall which gives us negative impact for future aspects?
We use a three email approach.
1. Contact them and let them know they've been featured on the site.
2. Contact them on SM channels to remind them... and get message out to others
3. Remind them a second time and... ask a favor.
At some point you have to make the call. Be direct, polite and useful.
I like using the word "share"...it is less manipulative, plus many websites and organizations have paper materials too. And of course social media accounts. Get them thinking about the cool ways they can incorporate your resource into their own resources.
Some good tips, I disagree with some comments in this thread but about reaching out to site owners for links. If you can offer a website with value and you email off a authority site you can have sucess. If you email for links off a gmail account with a email like SEO101winning and annoy people for links you are never going to be sucessfull.
Hi Paddy,
as usual a very useful post about link building from you.
Personally I use these tatctics and can confirm their usefulness.
As a variation of the "Update old linked content", that is something I strongly suggest to do first with your own site's content. It is super easy to do: go check in your analytics what pages and/or blog posts are receiving a considerable amount of visits (or receive a constant dripping of retweets) and update it with fresher content. And remember to 301 the old url to the new one if you had to update the url too (e.g.: in the case the url had a date in it). As an alternative, mantain the old content as it was a sort of historical archive (e.g.: in case the content was about datas and similar stuff), but internally link it to the new one; this won't obviously make old links go to the new page, but surely will help discovering and - eventually - help the new page getting fresher links.
I hadn't heard of screaming frog before. Am off to go give it a try.
Use it to snipe competitors links? Ingenious! A lot of webmasters such as myself leave a lot of 404 pages that are not any use to use anymore that used to be. I would have never though anyone could capitalize on them wow thanks for this post! This open up a new white hat back linking process, kind of tedious but as he says all fair in love and backlinking? lol.
great post and just my thoughts on the comments - short email and ask for the link. if that doesn't work then build the relationship and then ask for the link again. No one likes to have someone not just tell them straight up what they want. Do be rude but no reason to beat around the bush.
Great post. Thanks for the Google date range tip. ;-)
I find Link Building to be the most difficult task there is in SEO (other than convincing some clients they need it). And this is a great way of accomplishing this task. Thanks for the insight.
Paddy thanks a lot. This is really informal post with interesting techniques.
nice stuff ..i found one more useful article on backlinking here https://www.themyarticle.com/?p=9613
Some of these tips were excellent strategies and with a little organic work will produce links or competitor link reclamation. Screaming Frog is an excellent spidering tool and recommended.
Have been using the 404 strategy for a long time for each new client. This is basically the very beginning of the campaign, and yes, we usually tend to get most links from the first moth, than it goes a bit slower and speeds up again after we are really familiar with the clients market.
I especially like the last tip with the roundups from time to time wih further mailings to persons who's content has been linked and / or featured. Without asking for a link back. This really makes it serious and not too "invasive". I think this is a great opportunity to build up relationships which can lead into getting some backlinks sooner or later.
Hey... did you change your Nick?
sorry to confuse you - I logged in with my "old" private account ...
Excellent summary Paddy. Always good to see actionable ideas that can be applied to any site.
Screaming Frog seems to be an interesting tool for all SEO experts. To be honest, this is my first contact with this tool, but I'll test it with pleasure. Another post with interesting ideas for building links from Pady. I learned a lot from Pady since I started with SEO. Thanks again!
i liked the old content links method. very smart . it's defintly something i'll do.
in general i find screaming frog as a very good tool that just saves me a lot of time analyzing sites.
An obvious but useful variation on the theme: find an old thread on a high authority site like Yelp and revive. Same goes for adding updates or references to Wikipedia. But the edits or updates have to make sense. Slightly more grey hat: links from suitably aged accounts (eg. blogs) with keyword anchor text such as "Detroit widgets" in a Detroit-oriented blog.
Screaming Frog is pretty limited in the free version, especially for big sites. If you want to run some basic link checks you can also use this free tool "XENU Sleuth"https://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. The site looks pretty weird but the tool works really well, is fast and 100% free. Been using it for years. Scans through 100,000+ URLs without any issues.
Thanks for amazing insights. I downloaded screaming Frog few days ago for onpage analysis. But didn't knew it could be used this way too ! I have one query - " If this content did well and got lots of links, then updating it with a 2011 dataset may be just as successful." How are we supposed to know that old content has got links ?
Trackback URL is the solution to your problem mate. It will list down all the web pages that link to your article.
More about trackback : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Paddy thinks alot
I like to deal with old content. I am working on link building campaign with my home page. But, on daily basis I have solve many mind bubbles regarding SEO, web development & web design.
I just resolve my irritation by Google to that problem & found such a good pages like blog, forums etc.... I always eager to create my presence on that website with specific method. (If possible)
I love OSE & can not spend my single day without using it. Tool provides me such a great link data of my competitors' as well as allow me to get such a great links.
I realize that: If we will active or develop links with such a website after Google search so It gives us more value rather than bond our self in stick excel sheet. What you think about it?