Building links is an incredibly common request of agencies and consultants, and some ways to go about it are far more advisable than others. Whether you're likely to be asked for this work or you're looking to hire someone for it, it's a good idea to have a few rules of thumb. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones breaks things down.
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Video Transcription
Hey, folks, welcome to another great Whiteboard Friday. I am Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist here at Moz. I get to do a lot of great research, but I'll tell you, my first love in SEO is link building. The 10 years I spent before joining Moz, I worked at an agency and we did a lot of it, and I'll tell you, there's nothing more exciting than getting that great link.
Now, today I'm going to focus a little bit more on the agency and consultant side. But one takeaway before we get started, for anybody out there who's using agencies or who's looking to use a consultant for link building, is kind of flip this whole presentation on its head. When I'm giving advice to agencies, you should use that as rules of thumb for judging whether or not you want to use an agency in the future. So let me jump right in and we'll get going.
What I'm going to talk about today is risk-averse link building. So the vast majority of agencies out there really want to provide good links for their customers, but they just don't know how. Let's admit it. The majority of SEO agencies and consultants don't do their own link building, or if they do, it's either guest posting or maybe known placements in popular magazines or online websites where you can get links. There's like a list that will go around of how much it costs to get an article on, well, Forbes doesn't even count anymore because they've no-followed their links, but that's about it. It's nothing special.
So today I want to talk through how you can actually build really good links for your customers and what really the framework is that you need to be looking into to make sure you're risk averse so that your customers can come out of this picture with a stronger link profile and without actually adopting much risk.
1. Never build a link you can't remove!
So we're going to touch on a couple of maxims or truisms. The first one is never build a link you can't remove. I didn't come upon this one until after Penguin, but it just occurred to me it is such a nightmare to get rid of links. Even with disavow, often it feels better that you can just get the link pulled from the web. Now, with negative SEO as being potentially an issue, admittedly Google is trying to devalue links as opposed to penalize, but still the rule holds strong. Never build a link that you can't remove.
But how do you do that? I mean you don't have necessarily control over it. Well, first off, there's a difference between earnings links and building links. So if you get a link out there that you didn't do anything for, you just got it because you wrote great content, don't worry about it. But if you're actually going to actively link build, you need to follow this rule, and there are actually some interesting ways that we can go about it.
Canonical "burn" pages
The first one is the methodology that I call canonical burn pages. I'm sure that sounds a little dark. But it actually is essentially just an insurance policy on your links. The idea is don't put all of your content value and link value into the same bucket. It works like this. Let's say this article or this Whiteboard Friday goes up at the URL risk-averse-links and Moz decided to do some outreach-based link building. Well, then I might make another version, risk-averse-linkbuilding, and then in my out linking actually request that people link to that version of the page. That page will be identical, and it will have a canonical tag so that all of the link value should pass back to the original.
Now, I'm not asking you to build a thousand doorway pages or anything of that sort, but here's the reason for the separation. Let's say you reach out to one of these webmasters and they're like, "This is great," and they throw it up on a blog post, and what they don't tell you is, "Oh yeah, I've got 100 other blogs in my link farm, and I'm just going to syndicate this out." Now you've got a ton of link spam pointing to the page. Well, you don't want that pointing to your site. The chances this guy is going to go remove his link from those hundreds if not thousands of pages are very low. Well, the worst case scenario here is that you've lost this page, the link page, and you drop it and you create a new one of these burn pages and keep going.
Or what if the opposite happens? When you actually start ranking because of this great content that you've produced and you've done great link building and somebody gets upset and decides to spam the page that's ranking with a ton of links, we saw this all the time in the legal sector, which was shocking to me. You would think you would never spam a lawyer, but apparently lawyers aren't afraid of another lawyer.
But regardless, what we could do in those situations is simply get rid of the original page and leave the canonical page that has all the links. So what you've done is sort of divided your eggs into different baskets without actually losing the ranking potential. So we call these canonical burn pages. If you have questions about this, I can talk more about it in the comments.
Know thy link provider
The other thing that's just stupidly obvious is you should know thy link provider. If you are getting your links from a website that says pay $50 for so and so package and you'll get x-links from these sources on Tier 2, you're never going to be able to remove those links once you get them unless you're using something like a canonical burn page. But in those cases where you're trying to get good links, actually build a relationship where the person understands that you might need to remove this link in the future. It's going to mean you lose some links, but in the long run, it's going to protect you and your customers.
That's where the selling point becomes really strong. Imagine you're on a client call, sales call and someone comes to you and they say they want link building. They've been burned before. They know what it's like to get a penalty. They know what it's like to have somebody tell them, "I just don't know how to do it."
Well, what if you can tell them, hey, we can link build for you and we are so confident in the quality of our offering that we can promise you, guarantee that we can remove the links we build for you within 7 days, 14 days, whatever number it ends up taking your team to actually do? That kind of insurance policy that you just put on top of your product is priceless to a customer who's worried about the potential harm that links might bring.
2. You can't trade anything for a link (except user value)!
Now this leads me to number two. This is the simplest way to describe following Google's guidelines, which is you can't trade anything for a link except user value. Now, I'm going to admit something here. A lot of folks who are watching this who know me know this, but my old company years and years and years ago did a lot of link buying. At the time, I justified it because I frankly thought that was the only way to do it. We had a fantastic link builder who worked for us, and he wanted to move up in the company. We just didn't have the space for him. We said to him, "Look, it's probably better for you to just go on your own."
Within a year of leaving, he had made over a million dollars selling a site that he ranked only using white hat link building tactics because he was a master of outreach. From that day on, just everything changed. You don't have to cheat to get good links. It's just true. You have to work, but you don't have to cheat. So just do it already. There are tons of ways to justify outreach to a website to say it's worth getting a link.
So, for example, you could
- Build some tools and reach out to websites that might want to link to those tools.
- You can offer data or images.
- Accessibility. Find great content out there that's inaccessible or isn't useful for individuals who might need screen readers. Just recreate the content and follow the guidelines for accessibility and reach out to everybody who links to that site. Now you've got a reason to say, "Look, it's a great web page, but unfortunately a certain percentage of the population can't use it. Why don't you offer, as well as the existing link, one to your accessible version?"
- Broken link replacement.
- Skyscraper content, which is where you just create fantastic content. Brian Dean over at Backlinko has a fantastic guide to that.
There are just so many ways to get good links.
Let me put it just a different way. You should be embarrassed if you cannot create content that is worth outreach. In fact, that word "embarrassment," if you are embarrassed to email someone about your content, then it means you haven't created good enough content. As an SEO, that's your responsibility. So just sit down and spend some more time thinking about this. You can do it. I've seen it happen thousands of times, and you can end up building much better links than you ever would otherwise.
3. Tool up!
The last thing I would say is tool up. Look, better metrics and better workflows come from tools. There are lots of different ways to do this.
First off, you need a good backlink tool. While, frankly, Moz wasn't doing a good job for many years, but our new Link Explorer is 29 trillion links strong and it's fantastic. There's also Fresh Web Explorer for doing mentions. So you can find websites that talk about you but don't link. You're also going to want some tools that might do more specific link prospecting, like LinkProspector.com or Ontolo or BrokenLinkBuilding.com, and then some outreach tools like Pitchbox and BuzzStream.
But once you figure out those stacks, your link building stack, you're going to be able to produce links reliably for customers. I'm going to tell you, there is nothing that will improve your street cred and your brand reputation than link building. Link building is street cred in our industry. There is nothing more powerful than saying, "Yeah, we built a couple thousand links last year for our customers," and you don't have to say, "Oh, we bought," or, "We outsourced." It's just, "We just do link building, and we're good at it."
So I guess my takeaway from all of this is that it's really not as terrible as you think it is. At the end of the day, if you can master this process of link building, your agency will be going from a dime a dozen, where there are 100 in an averaged-sized city in the United States, to being a leading provider in the country just by simply mastering link building. If you follow the first two rules and properly tool up, you're well on your way.
So I hope to talk more to you in the comments below. If you have any questions, I can refer you to some other guides out there, including some former Whiteboard Fridays that will give you some great link building tips. Hope to talk to you soon.
Would Google consider this burn page tactic as manipulative and against their guidelines?
It is a fair question and one I expected to receive. If the two pages are identical in every way except a separate URL and a canonical is in place from day 1, I'm not sure how it could be interpreted as a doorway page or as part of a link scheme. It is just a way of dealing with the reality of negative SEO and webmaster errors which is an unfortunate part of many competitive ecosystems. That being said, it is not my call to make - it is Googles.
Hi Russ!
Great WBF. Realy nailed it.
As far as Burn Pages go, why would you justify the usage of these pages for negative SEO? If someone would want to hurt that page rankings will not use the canonicalized page (that one to potentially be burned), they'd use the correc one.
I do Get the idea that you are covering your back with this, also believe that it could and certainly will be considered as a link tactic/scheme by Google bots. That said, you will end up burning all the "burn URLs"
Don't you agree?
You would then 410 the original version and change all internal linking to the burn page while removing the canonical tag, protecting the hundreds if not thousands of dollars with of manpower put into link building to the project.
The link scheme, in my humble opinion, would be if you...
1. changed the content by removing calls to action or other info that might hurt conversion rate on outreach
2. used link building tactics that are in violation of the guidelines.
But a webmaster who follows all the rules and simply wants to protect their investment seems well within their rights.
I had a wemaster reach out to me today on Reddit in a private message thanking me for this tactic. For the last 2 years, every piece of content marketing they produced which got any traction was attacked. This at least gives them a fighting chance. Maybe the burn page gets attacked too eventually, but it requires double the effort of the competitor.
Love the canonical burn pages idea!
Hello Russ,
I feel you could have simplify the "canonical burn" idea with this -
If you have two pages, use same canonical for both (kind of doorway page) and once you loose authority of any one of those due to low quality bulk links (or anything), then remove/leave it and stay with second page.
I am not sure how much practically it is possible or if it really does work, but it took me twice to read and understand the simple thing :D
Have a good day !
Thanks for the recommendations! I find it easier to start with the official location of the piece and just create one page for outreach that canonicals to the official location (and you may eventually just 301 to the official location).
Hi Russ,
Re "That page will be identical, and it will have a canonical tag so that all of the link value should pass back to the original."
Do you have any studies/resources that prove Google handles canonicals in this way?
For me, it doesn't make sense that they would do.
Using a fictional example:
If a brand new, one-man-band blog called nicefood.com published an article which got picked up and published by foodnetwork.com (which canonicalised back to the original). Then let's say the foodnetwork.com version of the article earned hundreds of links, with your theory, the 'internet giant' would get no value from those links, and the new, none-trusted one-man-band blog would now have hundreds of amazing links.
It doesn't make sense to me that it would be handled that way. The jury's out for me. :)
I've seen this opinion before, and also asked John Mueller for clarification back in February but he never replied.
Look forward to your/other peoples further thoughts.
Cheers,
Gill.
What I propose is different. Let's say Moz wanted link build to this Whiteboard Friday which is currently...
/blog/risk-averse-link-building-whiteboard-friday
We then go out and search Google for "link building resources" and find 50 good resource pages that are worth emailing about adding a link to this video.
I would then recommend creating a copy of this current page and putting it at, for example...
/blog/risk-averse-link-building
But still on Moz.com. I would add a canonical tag to that page pointing back to the original location.
Then, when I send out my emails asking the owners of the link building resource pages to take a look at the video and consider it for inclusion in their resource page, the URL I would give them is the new copy, not the original. When they add a link, it would be to this new version.
If something were to go wrong - either a negative SEO attack against my main page or the outreach page, or it turns out one of the sites I got a link from is actually selling links on their resources page which I didn't notice, etc., I can "burn" one of the two pages and only lose the link value that has built up in one of them.
Does that make sense?
Yeah I get that part, makes sense.
But I was more questioning the opinion of some SEOs on how Google actually handles canonicals with regards to the links pointing to the none-canonical version.
I wouldn't imagine it works differently for an internal canonical (two pages on the same domain as you're suggesting) than it does for an external canonical (two pages on two different domains).
E.g Medium's canonicals surely don't pass Medium's link value to the the canoncal versions (not on Medium)?
I love the "Never build a link you cannot remove!!" I have been down that road and the time spent trying to trace and get it removed was frustrating.
We all learn the hard way don't we! hehe
Hi Russ and thanks for the observations. I can see that the canonicalized burn page idea has sparked a lot of comments. I understand the concept (I think!): the idea is to be able to burn a page that has generated a lot of toxic links. That having been said, it seems to assume the page has ONLY generated toxic links, yet the page may have accumulated a bunch of high quality links as well. Although I also have reservations about relying exclusively on the disavow process (i.e., it's a black box, who knows what Google does with what's inside), and yet since the burn page idea also is a bit of an educated guess, wouldn't the disavow process be the better play for a page that has a mix of good and bad? (Btw, I don't know about you, but I'm see more negative SEO, and usually it's going after the home page of my clients)
Thanks for the response!
The disavow can be a great tool, but it can only get you so far. If you are hit with a significantly large enough negative SEO campaign, how are you going to find the tens of thousands of domains that were spammed?
My methodology is just an additional tool available to webmasters who want to protect their investment.
Brilliant Russ!! I am forever in discussions about people buying/trading for links. Being a blogger (on the lovely topic of wine) and an SEO means i am forever in discussions about businesses using influencer marketing to also buy/trade things for links. I LOVE that you push the message of "You can't trade anything for a link (except user value)!". It's something I strongly feel about and have been shot down by many SEOs here in Australia for advocating this message.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one. Thank you!
Thought i should let someone on your team know, https://linkprospector.com/ is a broken. That's all, thanks for a great blog!
Yes, linkprospector.com is still broken as of writing. Tried Googling, saw https://citationlabs.com/tools/link-prospector/. Is this different? I wanted to give this tool a try. Not sure if they're same. Can anyone verify?
Hey Russ Jones,
Nice article on Link-building! I love the idea of Canonical "burn" pages, but what will you suggest as other strategy that can help controlling such negative SEO?
I liked "Sky scraper Content" and "broken link replacement" this is something which really takes time in finding right place, but helps in long term, any tool that you know to identify broken links?
Cheers,
Ankit
I would ask the same question as Joy. Canonical tags are not intended for this purpose and I can tell you that I was after John Mueller as well as Gillion to answer this question so time ago without a response of course. Google does have a signal that would identify or flag the shift of authority attached to the canonical tag and although it may end up transfering weight it would not be a smooth transition by the lest. Can anyone tell me if they actually put this theory to test?
Great WBF explaining white Hat link building. And well said "you can't trade anything for a link except user value"
Matt Cutts has said "The objective is not to “make your links appear natural”, the objective is that your links are natural"
Which means that you have to have something of value on your website so that other sites will want to link to - something that their readers will also like.
So you have to have useful content, a nice infographic or a tool so that other websites will want to link to.
Without having anything of value on your website there is no way you can get a natural link.
Hi Russ!
Penguin did so much damage to the link builders, it was so easy to create a lot of links and go up in the rankings.
Since then, you're totally right, it's risky to build links that after that we can't remove, but after all the experiences we had, we can also try to don't build links in sites that we think that Google can penalyze in the future, seeing the evolution of Google's algorythm.
Great article! Greetings!
Super solid WBF Russ. Glad to hear Moz covering some applicable link building subjects. I defintely back you up in supporting the Brian Dean Skyscraper technique and also Moz's New Link Explorer. Thanks for sharing your insight!
I like your Canonical burn page method and want to know more about it..can you share more information on this topic.
This idea is somewhat similar to content flipping, by Matthew Barby. You can Google it, it's really ingenious
Content flipping is putting a canonical tag on relevant blog articles pointing to your product page. It seems like it would be fairly easy for Google to detect.. they can just ignore the canonical...
If you want to play with grabbing authority from canonicals. Look at performing content (by links) on major sites with topics/guides/etc. that would be a good fit for your audience. See if the creator will license it to you. Basically, you put the content on your site, and they canonical their page to your copy.
- JakeB
Content flipping seems a bit dangerous IMO. It's going against Google's intended use of that tag.
I agree. I don't feel like it's future proof.
Great video, Russ.
It's just regarding #1 and doorway pages, it's so hard in practice because if we make just one doorway page for all links we make, and in one point we need to remove it, we will loose all the links we made. So only way to use that fully if we make doorway page for every link provider we use, and I doubt that would be so practical to do. On the othe hand, if we don't build links often, but we do that once or twice for particular page, then it's great tactics.
I would simply use one canonical burn page for any outreach campaign. It already divides your risk between links earned through standard channels and those earned through outreach. That seems to me to be a big enough protection.
excellent explanation, many of us have been building links in the wrong way and that is why we have not had the expected results, Thanks for your help
Great article Russ, thanks! Canonical burn is an interesting idea, might try it out. To me, all of it always comes full circle, create great content. There's absolutely no substitute for it, and it should be at the core of all strategies, everything will fall in to place when you're creating stuff people want to interact with.
Hi Thanks for the post its very useful how to implement linking buliding without doing whathat techniques , the post is very useful for SEO guys to implement SEO strategy
I am learning about link building and found your write up very interesting especially the part that says you should never build a link you can't remove.
I suppose I'll avoid building links with the Russian Archive(dot)is tool.. Oh wait I can't! lol
Hi Russ,
Great advice! This will certainly come in handy for any organisation looking to master SEO, especially the information you provided on backlinking!
Thanks for the article but from your article i am not satisfied that if we will build links from blog commenting then how we will remove them and also blog commenting is a very good strategy to rank your event based blogs on competetive and low competition keywords so please clear my points
Great Video :) Russ,
I would like to know more about earning links..
Also, I have found this site is not opening linkprospector . com
Great contribution Russ.
Hi Russ,
Great WBF!
Would you say that guest posts (as in giving unique posts to other webmasters to be published - with the hope for a link back) is still a valid way for link building? Or would you always go for creating shareable content and do outreach to gain new links once that content was shared?
Hello, after seeing your post, it's an interesting idea, but I have a question. We want to have as many links as possible with the highest quality. This would make that, to realize your technique, there are many pages redirected with canonical to another page, How google reacts about a lot of duplicate content?
Sorry if i have a mistakes in my question but my english is very bad. THANKS :)
I got to say that I enjoy these Friday Whiteboards but as a small business owner that wears a number of hats sometimes these just go right over my head! I do try and put into practice all mentioned, but it seems to me link building alone is a full time job. Perhaps at some point you can address how to build links in different countries? I for example run a tour company in South Africa called "Country and Coastal Touring" but my clients reside in the USA or the UK. How would someone like myself build links in such far away countries without having that local knowledge? How would I even go about figuring trust worthy links for example?
The other thing that concerns me is that with so many content providers putting out great content, how do you make in impact writing good content these days? In some industries I would imagine the market is already saturated with content?
Thanks for all the effort, I do still learn a great deal.
Making WBF great again! For the first time in a long time I really enjoyed watching. Thank you:-) I hope to see more videos with great adivce & a positive vibe.
You could probably create multiple canonical burn pages, for example if you are familiar with one source, but feel unsure about another.
Seems like a great way to reduce liability, but also seems to be a lot of work as well, maybe I'm wrong. My only real concern is the loss of potentially really nice links that were earned. How do you weigh the benefit and costs of burn page vs just a normalized process (in terms of a strategic approach)? IE - how do you know when this might be a good approach in an organic strategy? It seems like this would be great for any competitive niches which try to exploit negative seo, like the legal niche.
Wow, canonical burn pages is a brilliant idea. I would never have thought of a solution like this! Thanks a lot! Would it be a good idea to only do link building on canonical pages, this seems like it would burn up crawl budget, for a very rare situation?
Hi Russ -
Canonical burn pages - a delightfully simple tactic hiding in plain sight - a couple of questions:
1. I'm curious if you've had to burn any burn pages over time, or if there are other real-world experiences with this worth sharing that helps to deepen our understanding of potential nuances of using this tactic?
2. When you started on the section about don't build links you can't control, and got to the canonical burn pages, you said "The first one is the methodology that I call canonical burn pages." - what are other link-control tactics you would advise and/or have used?
Thanks!
> Have i needed to burn pages
Yes, absolutely. Doing a typical outreach campaign, one of the link builders ended up getting links from sites we discovered were selling links (on the sidebar and on other pages of the site). Luckily, it was early in the process so we didn't suffer much by getting rid of the canonical page. We were actually able to reach out to the couple of webmasters who had linked to us in good faith and asked them to change the URL politely and they complied. I would rather ask for someone to fix a broken link than track down a bad link partner and tell them to remove it because their site sucks. They normally don't take too kindly to the implication that their site is toxic to yours :-)
> what are other link-control tactics you would advise and/or have used
A guy's gotta have his secrets. Maybe a future WBF?
About point 1, how if the negative backlinks are built by cheat competitors?
Thanks for sharing this information . Helped in building High quality backlinks to our sites
Hi Russ!
Great Content, you nailed it Man... You also mentioned Brain Dean Skyscraper Tech, i already watched that i really love that.
380/5000
is google in this sense a double-edged knife that on the one hand tries to help with the positioning and authority based on good links, but at the time can still penalize with certain links that we can not eliminate yet, I think they should take the decision just debug certain links and thus eliminate a little fear that many people who are dedicated to SEO.
This is exactly what Google wants.... Sites to only get links from trusted sites and not link where ever they can. Having a few links that Google dislike without having a proper link profile can get you in hot water yet having the proper profile is always a different story. Remember that Penguin is now a realtime update and will impact per page not crash a complete site. This is your work around....
Great WBF Russ!
Canonical burn pages : This was really something new and took me sometime to understand the concept.
Please tell me if I am correct in what I understood from the given explanation :
URL for this page is risk-averse-link-building-whiteboard-friday whose canonical is risk-averse-link-building-whiteboard-friday (same). Now we create another page with same content but different URL(canonical remains same as the previous page) for outreach purpose.
So in future if there is some problem from backlink site and we can't remove the link from backlink souce, we can simply remove the page with original url and this won't affect the page ranking?
You got it.
You can also think about it the same way that people use different URLs for tracking different advertising campaigns. In this case, you are using this additional page to handle your traditional link building outreach. As long as your tactics are white hat and you keep the content identical, you should be good to go!
That's a good idea too.
Further as we can't go for Canonical burn URLs for every page, sometimes it's good to track the campaign performance in analytics using UTM with URLs.
Thank You for the information :-)
That's a good idea too.
But as we can't go for Canonical burn URLs for every page, sometimes I think it's good to track all the campaigns using UTM with URLs.
Thank You for the information :-)
Informative Article.
but I notice One thing that You Did't link Backlinko!
Fixed! Sorry, the transcriptions are auto-generated and the blog management team makes the edits they know to make. My guess is they just weren't familiar with Backlinko. It is in there now!
Done nicely.
Brian Dean is smiling down! Hehe
Thank you for sharing information. This is a fresh information for me related to the back links. Now in future I will totally take care these things which explained related to the back links.
My website i quite slow and not user friendly what are the on page techniques i need to follow to make it a perfect website.
Anand k, search for Google Page Speed Insights and use the free tool provided by Google. It lists the items you can work on in point form and is a great starting point.