External linking is an essential part of an effective SEO strategy. It is also, arguably, one of the most challenging aspects. Take a look at five common mistakes SEOs make when developing a linking strategy.
#1- Judging a Site's Authority by PageRank Alone:
Good link building strategies aim at getting a links from a diverse array of websites and as with most things in life, all websites are not created equal. How do you judge a good website?
The answer is authority. PageRank is a popular metric used to judge a sites authority. However, pagerank can be misleading. It is unclear exactly how a sites pagerank affects a sites position in the SERP. PageRank is also only updated about once a quarter, if that. Don't completely ignore pagerank but be aware of its limitations and use additional factors to measure a sites authority. SEOmoz has two helpful metrics, mozRank and mozTrust. Also look at how humans view a site, start by looking over the comments, user ratings or anything else that will tell you how internet users judge the site.
Here are some additional questions to ask yourself:
- Does the site feel like a trusted site?
- Does the site have readers who take the content seriously?
- The site has authority, but is it a relevant site to my website/client/topic?
#2 Building Links with Only One Keyword or Keyword Phrase:
The goal of successful link building strategy is a natural link profile. If 1,000 people link to your site it's probably safe to assume that they won't all use the same keyword phrase.
While most SEOs may know this, if you aren't conscious of it with each link you will, like most SEOs, use your primary keyword as much as possible. Keep track of the anchor text that you are using, make sure that there is a mixture of anchor text containing: brand name, website address, secondary keyword phrases, click here etc. This also opens up the opportunity to link with secondary keywords to interior pages of your site.
#3 Aiming for a Billion Links!
How many links does a site need to be competitive? Your competitive research holds the key to determine this. If your top competitors average 1,000 links, aim for what you need to be competitive. Set your goal number of links 2-5 percent more than your competition.
This way you can maximize the efficiency of your SEO activities and properly scale your link building techniques. If you don't set a goal number based on competition you could be spending too much time on link building instead beefing up the on page optimization or focusing on social media.
#4 Only Link to Your Homepage:
Attract links to a variety of pages on your site. If you have a good internal linking structure linking to any page will increase the overall pagerank of the system; strengthening all the pages in your website. Additionally, it will help you rank for more keywords and drive more traffic to your site. It also forces you to think of the user; will linking to an internal page provide more value to the target audience for the content.
#5 Analyze Competitors Backlinks Who Don't Rank for your Target Keywords:
Often the top five competitors in an industry may not be the top five sites in the SERP. Conduct a search for your terms, analyze and review the linking activities of the sites that show up in the top five positions.
For the overall marketing direction it is good to review the on and offline marketing activities of the industry leaders. But only through focused, competitive research based on the most visible sites in the SERP, will you get a sense of what linking activities your site needs to be competitive.
External linking is constantly changing, but if you focus on building a balanced link profile that helps Internet users find the valuable content on your website then you will come out ahead in the long run. Kelvin Newman wrote a link building book called Clockwork Pirate that offers a complete list of linking techniques and the best way to approach them.
You make some basic, decent points. I agree with #1 don't look just at Page Rank, but I must say, MozRank has been one of the most helpful metrics I've been using lately. Mozrank seems to place more weight on the relevance of a site to its niche/domain name, and can generally be a great gauge to tell if a site is going to help boost your rankings.
Also, with point #3, I have to disagree. You don't need more links that your competitors. You need better links. Take some time to look at the backlink profile of your top 3 competitors. Do a weekly link analysis on link numbers using Yahoo site explorer and compare the numbers over 3 or 4 weeks. Are they linkbuilding heavily? Have link numbers gone up drastically? Check to see how many unique linking domains they have vs. site wide links. I would rather get 10 links from high moz authority, relevant sites than one site wide link from a 1,000 page site. You need to be getting better quality links rather than more links in general.
Good tips, thanks!
Cameron,
Thanks for those observations. I actually agree with you on point 1 & 3 very much. Using the Mozbar has been very helpful vs always looking at PageRank. When writing point #3 we had just done some testing that showed that more was better than less, but of course that was one niche and the competiton wasn't very strong there. Awesome point about the unique linking domains as well. Thanks Cameron for being the first comment on my first YouMoz post!
It's a really valid point you make about that one niche - while the conventional logic of quality over quantity shouldn't be forgotten, some markets are so competitive that quantity does still have an impact. Which I guess takes us to point 5: Make sure you're analysing backlinks for genuine competitors so you have a true understanding of the market!
Good post Josh, and I do agree with Cameron, who links is more improtant than how many. We see much sharper rises when we have got a range of good posts out there on relavent sites. You post give a good check list of what to ensure we keep in mind. #2 makes a lot of sense with Google looking for repetative patterns and the like.
Great Points!
"... look at how humans view a site, start by looking over the comments, user ratings or anything else that will tell you how internet users judge the site."
Ultimately - social signals are counting a lot more than they used to ! Lets face it - We can build OK PR'd sites - with little interaction from anyone else. I always look at comment thread lengths and general interaction levels.
These are some great tips Josh!
After reading a lot of the comments that disagree with your point #3, "Aiming for a Billion Links," I have to say I do see your point of setting a goal for your inbound links. I agree that you should always aim for quality over quantity, but this should be addressed on a case-by-case basis too. It really depends on your competitors back link analysis.
It they have 1,000 quality back links, you may be able to get fewer of a higher quality, but a lot of times that may not be the case. So, I agree, you should set an obtainable goal first, but still keep in mind the fact that you need quality links first.
Thumbs up mate!
Thanks for the thumbs up. Good advice to set reachable goals. It certainly can be a complicated task at times.
Not sure if page rank is really that important but a variety of deep links works well and I agree MozRank has been very helpful.
Nice article Josh, really appreciate your efforts to share this tips with us. But, I have one question about your tip No4. "Link only to Your HomePage" .Which is the optimum link ratio between the main page, and all other subpages by your opinion? In most cases this ratio is approximately 80-20 in favor to home page, sometimes even 90-10. But, if you think logically, main page is only one page, and on the other side you can have a hundredes, even tousands of quality subpages which can be linked for different sides. What do You think about that?
Perhaps someone more qualified than i could point to an exact ratio. I know when I am doing link building I try to look into Analytics and find the pages that do well (visits, time on page, low bounce rate) and find ways to build backlinks to those. It makes more sense to build a link to something that is already appearing to be valuable. The more diverse your backlink profile is, in both C class IP's linking to you and to various internal pages the better. It would also depend on what type a site is. If it is an ecommerce site you may want people to come through a certain funnel, and having many entry points that aren't in that conversion funnel might not help your bottom line. You raise a good question. Thanks for asking.
Nice post, sometimes we tend to be authomatic and sloppy in our intention to make everything bigger and faster a and forget to use our common sense and basic logic and knowledge.
Nice article Josh :-) I often run into sites with a whack of 1 or 2 anchor text back links, so it's good you pointed this out... trouble for sure.
I loved the comment about creating a variety of links to a places other than your home page. This is something I should practice more often. I spend too much time working on the links to the domain, and not within the domain.
Yeah I fall into the same pattern alot. We recently had a piece of valuable content that we built two good backlinks to that surfaced into a #1 spot for a decent keyword and we got quite a bit of traffic from it. Internal linking is da bomb :-) Thanks for your comment.
Nice post Josh -- While it is certainly valid to disagree with some of the points, I'm a bit baffled by the number of thumbs down for the article as a whole. As of now the thumbs ratio is 40:5, which is pretty good, but I not getting why 5 viewers have thumbs down-ed the entire article. Put me in with the thumbs up crowd
Randy,
Thanks for your kind words. I apreciate your thumbs up :-) A few thumbs down never hurt anyone. Everyone has their opininons (i know i do at times) and there are certainly plenty of methods of doing SEO/Link building. That is the joy of communities like SEOmoz, we are all refined by what we learn from others.
Nice post :)
I'm with you on all but number three... I don't think you need to get, or even aim for as many links as the competitors have, let alone a few percent more. I know the point is just a rough guideline but I think doing that causes a bit of an obsession with link quantity, rather than link quality. I've seen sites with a tiny fraction of what their competitors have, but beating them by miles with some great quality links from relevant places. I'm sure I'm just knitpicking here though as I suspect you meant it in a way that going for quality as well was a given.
I must confess I pretty much ignore PR completely as I don't trust it.
I like your point about anchor text, I watched a vid the other day saying that a site had some awesome links but too many of them were keyworded which looked un-natural. The suggestion was to look at how many keyworded links competitors have (as a percentage) and try to mimic that, mixing them with more natural looking links such as the URL and company name.
Hi Josh, good article. Some great points, especially for beginner SEOs.
If I may, and please don't take offence, but I'd be careful using "You Didn't Know"-type titles for articles. I'm personally not a big fan of these types of titles ("You Won't Believe" being another example), mainly because they make an assumption about the reader that the writer doesn't know is true or not. They're great for catching eyes and clickthrough rate (it got me to read it, after all!), but if people do know, then it can backfire.
Admittedly, SEOmoz has all levels of SEOs in its ranks, from basic/beginner to advanced, but going by the title, I was honestly expecting five tips that would've been news to the majority of SEOs, only to find that I was already aware of all of them (although #1, #4 & #5 were all things I picked up in my first year in practicing SEO, so it's true that beginners may not know these types of things). I guess what I'm trying to say is that a title stands for a lot - it delivers expectations and sets the tone, and I was expecting a very different kind of article. Like I say, please don't take my comments personally, just a suggestion for future articles (not just for you, but for all SEO Copywriters who read this - maybe a point to be included in a content creation blog post? Who knows...) :-)
Stevie,
That is a valid point that I hadn't thought of from that angle before. Thanks for taking the time to share that for everyones benifit. Being this is the first post I have done on SEOmoz, there is still plenty to learn. I am glad it got you to read it though, even if you knew the points since it lead you to leave this great suggestion. I will definatley keep that in mind moving forward. Thanks and take care. :-)
I've seen a lot of DIY SEO website owners that are guilty of point number 2. You have to switch up your anchor text to avoid being labeled as a spammer. Plus, do you really want your company to only show up in the SERP when once exact phrase is used? Doesn't help you build a strong online presence.
You make a point in this one. I'm new in this SEO thing and I made some of this mistakes.
How about follow / no-follow? Would love to have your opinion.
I don't make a huge effort to aquire a no-follow link. If it happens naturally then great.
Totally clear!
good post, link building takes most of the time
Item #3. I am assuming you meant exceeding the competition's number of quality links by 2-5%.
Yes, that is what was meant. As has already been commented on though the quality of the links are a more important factor to consider overall. It is nice if you can have 2-5 % more QUALITY links than your competitors though :-) Never hurts right.
Hi Josh,
Well written article Josh. It is astonishing how many websites have the basics of linking wrong! I strongly agree with most of your assesments. Not sure if we can go too far on time spent analyzing competitors backlinks. We have to take a stand and go for our target terms somewhere!
Thnaks for the great in depth article.
Regards
Catherine
Affiliate Marketers College.Com
Thanks Catherine. I am glad you enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
YES, I totally agree. It is very important to build backlinks naturally and gradually without any semblance of artificiality :-)
I think PageRank alone is why there is so much spam in the search results. For a long time people only cared about increasing that little number without actually branding or building a business.
Great post!
There are several important points to consider when working on offsite SEO here. As many have said above I agree that point 3 is not how I would say it. As numbers are important what is more important is if authoritive sites in Google's eyes are linking to your site. If you have more higher PageRank sites linking to your site you will also get a higher PageRank.
Here comes the Bandwagon on #3, I have to agree with Cameron Masters here, First your saying "you don't need a billion links" than the 2% to 5% more than competitors, We recently managed to achieve #1 position in a very competitive keyphrase, we don't have anywhere near the links of our competitors, however we do have relevancy and links from trusted source.
Surely this shows that "link volume" is not the key but the "value of your link" is more apprecaited by Google. Relevancy is the name of the game.
#5 Analyzing Competitors that don't rank for your Keywords..It's great you mention offline, A normal question to ask a client is "Who do your think your online competitors are?" 9/10 will say off line competitors regardless.
We have all wisded up that off-line and on-line competitors are mostly two different breeds.
Regardless thanks for putting this together =)
I'm guilty of #2 and #4, althrough I've been trying to get better. It's true that we should be trying to get deeplinks with different targeted keywords to get the most traffic we can. Almost all types of sites get more traffic to deep pages with actual content and not just the homepage, so why do we keep linking to our homepages? There's no sense to it yet nearly everyone does it.
Am I hurting myself in the long run when I use free backlinking sites such as SocialMonkee. My immediate results have been impressive. I appreciate your input.
[link removed]
Mavric, funny you should mention SocialMonkee since someone had just shown that to me the other day. Typically anytime you see something that says, "build backlinks at the push of a button" it is using technology that is automating link building. The downside of this is that if many people are automating something like this using a service like Social Monkee then Google will soon enough pick up on exactly what they are doing and lessen its value. It may not hurt you now and perhaps even shows gains, but remember that link building is a difficult task when done naturally and for real results that last taking a shortcut like SocialMonkee is just that, a shortcut and it's value won't be as awesome in a couple of months or years.
Good stuff.
I think point #3 is really informative, How many backlinks do i need, well, just a few more than your competitor.
Hadn't though of point 5 but of course it's right, that's why we sometimes outrank bigger and better funded sites because our on-page is up to scratch, their sucks, but they've got the links, our links, so we need to check them out too. Good point, I always had stuck to the SERPs for research but correctly it may not be the sole "competitor" for links. Obvious, but i'd missed it.
Nice post, thanks
Hi Josh, loved the post. As a SEO newbie I found it very informative. I was wondering if anyone can help me find an article on SEO planning. What should be ticked off for a successful SEO campaign and what percentage of time should be spent on each? I'm sure someone has written a great blog post about this somewhere :)
Really liked the tips in point 5! and point #2 was pretty obvious but i am totally guilty of making this mistake as well.
Thanks for the article! Breif, yet helpful :)
Hi Josh, thanks for those tips. Well I should be in the good path then... :) Agree those points. Just point #3 it's not about quantity but quality.. but you know that right.. I understand what you wanted to describe by saying so.
As for point number 4, I will put the home page as more as possible when it's a great quality links. As for the others I will be distributing the sitewide links all over if I could. Back several years ago I was sticking on the home page until I've seen the benefits of linking to all the pages of the sites.
Great tips. Especially agree with the point about not always linking to your homepage. If visitors find value in your content and you make it easy to navigate they will travel - and make purchases. We've seen this with our conversion rate increasing after we posted a particularly interesting blog article, for example.
TRUE - great post =)
I agree with all the mistakes that you have listed and especially no 4. Linking to the homepage ONLY is not a good idea, especially if we have many good deep pages (rich in content and keywords). We should try to attract links to a variety of pages on our websites.
Ideally we should conduct some keywords density check (for our website and some of our competitors websites) and looking at its results decide where to link.
Really getting my hands dirty for a change with linkbuilding. This helped a great heap! Thanks. Use to live by "Write good content and people will link to you". Today I know that it takes a little more effort than that!
Nice article. We have been affected by the last pagerank update, at 27/6, we lost pagerank from 4 to 3. I noticed that most of the sites that are linking to us, also lost pagerank. In some of them i paid for a textlink, in advance for a year..
You bring up some rally valid points. You made me think, and I thank you for it! Seems I learn something new everyday on the internet.
Hey Josh, thanks for the post. I'm just starting with this seo stuff. I think I have done OK with my keywords and content. My content on certain articles contains some good links out. I've received a few comments, trashed some spammy ones. What would you say is the best way to get links to me? nutribuff.com
Glad you enjoyed the post. I looked at your site briefly and you are certainly off to a good start. An example of how you may find success getting backlinks could be illustarted on your, "When to buy organic food" blog post. It is good unique content that has been written, so you could decide to find another related blog/site with more authority than yours and offer that content to them in exchange for a link in the content/context. Many site owners want useful fresh content and are willing to provide a backlink to your site to be able to use the information on their own site. You could even go as far as asking a site like Whole Foods who has a blog if they would be interested in a guest post. That may be harder to accomplish than a smaller site, but it never hurts to ask. Guest posting is often discussed, and it works well but is often overused. It is one place out of many to start learing the ins and outs of linkbuilding. Hope you do well with your site.
#2 I agree totally on that (but the other points i find to be true as well). Sometimes i struggle to punt #2 in practise though , specially when i have i site with 200 pages, but that's another story all the same.
Point 1 is something that really needs to be constantly mentioned to people you encounter across the internet. I say this because I've seen references to a site's Page Rank almost everywhere.
Nice post Josh. Have to say I pretty much ignore PR too. Great points but as discussed #3 needs quality over quantity everytime.
Agreed Trevor. Thanks for reading the article and sharing your thoughts.
Hey Josh, great article. :)
Re #3 - I think that quantity of linking domains is a better metric than total number of links so I certainly agree with Trevor about the quality of links and diversity regarding the type of links you go after.
If only a simple, they have 10, we need 12 metric worked it would make life so much easier. Concentrate on the total linking domains and try to get the same number of linking sites but better quality links and you will win the war.
Link building is the best, worst, hardest, easiest, most fun, most rewarding and most annoying part of SEO all rolled into one. It is the area where you can get really creative and get some great wins so I like to try and enjoy the challenge and any new tips are always welcome. :)
CheersMarcus
Marcus, I like that last paragraph in your comment. That encapsulates link building at its very core! Well said. Thanks for sharing.
I have to say though after watching today's Whiteboard Friday I have to think that link building has lost some of its allure. Still necessary but as a whole it doesn't seem to be weighted as heavily as before.
I would have to disagree with point #3, as other have as well. I don't think you need more links than you're competitors, you need higher quaility links than your competitors. I understand that your point was to make sure people do not aim too high numerically when it comes to attaining links, but 2-5% more than your competitors? Really? I think quality should have been a more objective measure.
The other 4 point I wholeheartedly agree with, this is a great article thank you for sharing.
Joel, as mentioned above I agree with your observations on point #3. I think some fairies got into my computer and wrote #3 but since I can't find them at the momment I will take the hit on that one :-) Bad advice, but thankfully it has been kindly corrected by all the good people on here. Thanks for adding to the discussion!
Great article Josh,
I find that if I acquire a high value link with a ton of relevant content to use my primary keyword as the anchor text. Is it always smart to use your primary keyword this way, or should it be varied?
Thanks
Definately varied, but if you wanted to be strategical in the variation, use the big keywords from the best links. Also, mix it up, a few exact match but a lot of 'keyword + brand' type anchors.
Play safe! :)
Hi, Some good points you have raised for people new to link building =)
Sure some guys who are old school still look at PR, Moz Rank is decent, also AC rank.
In regards to building a billion links, hell yeah I will have a billion links if they are quality =) I dont want a footer link on a spam network with a million pages lol.
Overall a rather nice rundown on SEO best practices...
We're relatively new but are learning quickly. We've had a few bad eggs before utilizing BlackHat SEO and were not too happy with the weird SERP's, so we decided to say SCREW IT and are doing it ourselves here at National Embroiders...
Keep posts like this coming!
That is awesome! As a practicing SEO I should say that you should hire someone, but I think it is great that you are venturing out on your own and learning lots by being on SEOMoz. I took a quick look at your site for fun. You may want to think about restructuring your URL's. They have lots of parameters, don't have keywords in them, and are pretty long (parameters are the stuff after the "?" in the URL). Also you have two different versions of the site one if you type your web address with the www. and one without. That means that these links we are talking about are getting split between two versions of your site in the Search Engines eyes. Lots of Flash too. I am sure if you stick around here you will learn alot, there are so many friendly SEO's willing to help. Hollar if you need anything. Do well!
What, we shouldn't aim for a Billion links. :)
Quality first, then quantity. But allows, allows, allows make sure they are quality links.
Great tips.
Trupanion, a billion awesome links would be great! Glad you enjoyed the tips. Hopefully they will get better over time :-)
YES! YES! Quality then quantity- couldn't have said it better. Thanks, Josh!
Steve,
Thanks for the response. It seems I am going to have to broaden my horizon on point #3. Thanks for sharing your experience. You are right that 100 lousy links will never beat a couple excellent links. So by going for quantity it is qualified by them being high caliber links. It seems to me that having more branded anchor text links raises the overalll domain authority as opposed to just keyword rich anchor texts. Really appreicate your feedback!
Sweet post Josh!... and I agree with Trupanion - quality over quantity! We should always be seeking new ways to find better, more relevant connections. Great summary :)
Thanks Blu42. I appreciate your kindness.
Although these are basic tips, i can't stress enough how important they are and how many times we will need to repeat them until people learn. Link building with one keyword, I can't say how many times I've seen that and yet it seems it wont go away, but it is easy to get ahead of yourself if you don't count the links and plan ahead and then keep to that plan...
Very True. A good foundation and a plan makes such a big difference.
Nice post. #2 is an all too common mistake.
I dont think google uses link volume as a signal. I feel quality and diversity are far more important, but I could be wrong.
Regarding point 3, usually when analysing number of links obtained for existing Top 10 - 20 ranked sites for target keyword and primary search engine, will find sites with significantly less links than the rest, which rank well.For those new to link building, use that as your initial target for better quality links and see where it takes site as opposed to average of all of them. Obviously if existing Top 7 sites for example have 1000's, then probably safe to assume going to need to get to that figure to compete.
Also worth looking at keyword usage in URL in tandem with number of links, as have seen may cases of sites also ranking well with a lot less links than others due to keyword URL usage as well. In that case worth looking at sites with least links without keywords in the URL as a better guide initially.
Not bad advice, just needed to be re worded, for those new to SEO + Link Building good guide to help them rank their clients sites in Top 20 results initially and keep clients on board.
Once you become more experienced, become much more adept at finding good quality in context blogs, forums, social networks and bookmarks to link from. However initially can seem quite daunting particularly for less popular topics, where quality sites to link from can be few and far between!
For example, if not optimising the sites content, regularly updating a blog, or using any social media, likelihood is that going to need to over compensate with volume of links to compete. However if site has an active blog, Twitter + Facebook account for example, going to be much easier to rank well as will appear a lot more natural to the search engines.Also going to be a lot more quality sites to link from, for example to a design related site, than a site which sells cleaning services! All part of the leaning curve...
Yeah, gotta say I'm not aiming for a billion links. You make a good point to measure your competition and to be relative to them.
..and better link to any optimization page rather than your website ...
Congratulations on your first MOZ post Josh and thank you for the reminder, sometimes I stray from the basics and focus simply on link building. I am a new student of SEO and have much to learn. Lately I have been posting articles on article directories such as Triond.com but I'm not certain if it is helping my PR given when google updated it the other day i went from NA to 0. I understand that PR should not be the focus however given I am working with a PR of zero I would like to see this go up to ensure my strategy is effective.
Do you use article directories? Should I be doing more than just posting them and linking to my site? FYI the directories i use apply "do-follows"
Do you ever use paid for press release sites?
Should you respond, thank you in advance.
Mike Bluestone
Mike,
Welcome to SEO, and SEOmoz. Great to hear from you on here. As far as the article directories and "do-follow" blogs, I would imagine that you are having limited suceess with them, since they aren't near as useful as they used to be. One quality way to get backlinks is to find out how you can put some really great information about whatever the topic your working on is, and promote that information via Social Media. Once people become aware of the value of the information (say a informative peice on mobile apps for SEO that is very high quality) they will link to that content and that will be more useful to your site in the long run. There is much to learn on the topic and we are all in this together and always learning new things. Keep it up and best to you!
Lots of good points. Nice post!
Good tip to say competitive, 300000 more links than everyone else is NOT a good thing!
is it good that i wasnt making any of these mistakes
I know many Googlers and I am amazed by how smart they are. Google is getting soooooo good at detecting artificial links I am all for "non link building" approch of SEO these days.
Don't get me wrong we need links. But I like to get involved in community and get some good natural links. press releases and social media help too....and by that I don't mean the links from them but the exposure you get in order to build natural traffic and links.
Trust me when I say I have sites with less links beating sites with lots of links...almost as is not even about links alone any more...it is...but it is not at the same time. Kinda hard to explain
"#2 Building Links with Only One Keyword or Keyword Phrase"
But in reality the websites that rank the best for a particular keyphrase are invariably ones that have huge numbers of keyword rich exact match anchor text. However this strategy will almost certainly be completely outdated in 1-2 years. So I would suggest that this point is more of a way of 'future proofing' against the algo.
These are all great tips but I agree with the guys above regarding #3. Pagerank can be green crack for the beginning SEO, so #1 a great tip. I think this is because SEO is so overwhelming at first and this little green bar simplifies things, but it's just not a reliable metric. I'm guilty of only linking to my homepage (80% of the time) so I will have to consciously diversify :)
Guillermo,
Green Crack! What a great analogy. May I have permission to steal that? :-) Just kidding, but it certainly is fitting.
PashaBaba - There are a number of great rsources for begining link builders her on SEOmoz. Keep reading and you will get the hang of it soon. Thanks for your comment.
Awesome little post, i agree with # 3 the most. Great strategy
Hi guys,
Im learning a lot from reading all you advice and blogs. I have started a detailed link building campaign for my site www.ithakaleadership.co.uk but one question I do have.....how long does it take before tools like seomoz, google webmaster, Alexa actually pick up on these links? I want to make sure the links I build are providing decent back links and I'm not wasting my time. I contirbuting to blogs, joining directories and submitting articles. I would really appreciate some feedback from the Pro's on this one!
I have found that it typically takes around 3-4 weeks for Google to index the bulk of your work if you are doing a lot of linkbuilding. That doesn't mean that on some sites that are crawled more frequently that you won't see some benifit from those links. As far as SEOmoz and OSE I think the information found here is still applicable and it states every 4 weeks they update their index.
https://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule.
Well, I guess, I was about to prematurely say that this artcile was too basic, but I guess there are alaways newscomers who will benefit from an article like this. (See comment above.)
I liked 3. though as time management is a key factor, and you should spend your time on all aspects of SEO, not just link building. Having said that, with the Panda updates in play, you simply won't have a choice but to spend more time on quality content and On-Page optimization.
I sometimes see link building like going to battle against my competition. We both have our swords out ready to face off, but who is going to win...I think it is always going to be the one with the most amount of time and funds.
Wouldn't it be great if we unlimited of both.
thanks for your points. :)
Hi all...
I am one of the new commers as CTGUK said and learn from all the comments and articles here on seomoz.
I read a lot about seo and sem but unfortunately dont know how to build link. Do I need to be a tech to get along with it? Any resources that I can get help?
thanks anyway...
Good post - good points.
Might work on your grammar though just a little bit. Some of the punctuation was poor, and more importantly, confusing.
Great content though. :)
Great myth busting, Josh! While all of these myths need to be smashed, #3 is a huge myth that needs to be squashed ASAP! Aiming for a billion random links is not ideal. However, if you have a billion quality links OVER TIME (key terms here: over time & quality), then you're actually helping your business instead of hurting it. Google can recognize when you're just trying to spam your site with backlinks in short period of time. It needs to be progressive and quality oriented.
Great post!