SEO has much of its roots in the practice of targeted link building. And while it's no longer the only core component involved, it's still a hugely valuable factor when it comes to rank boosting. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over why targeted link building is still relevant today and how to develop a process you can strategically follow to success.
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about four questions that kind of all go together around targeted link building.
Targeted link building is the practice of reaching out and trying to individually bring links to specific URLs or specific domains — usually individual pages, though — and trying to use those links to boost the rankings of those pages in search engine results. And look, for a long time, this was the core of SEO. This was how SEO was done. It was almost the start and the end.
Obviously, a lot of other practices have come into play in the industry, and I think there's even been some skepticism from folks about whether targeted link building is still a valid practice. I think we can start with that question and then get on to some of these others.
When does it make sense?
In my opinion, targeted link building does make sense when you fulfill certain conditions. We know from our experimentation, from correlation data, from Google's own statements, from lots of industry data that links still move the needle when it comes to rankings. If you have a page that's ranking number 4, you point a bunch of new links to it from important pages and sites around the web, particularly if they contain the anchor text that you're trying to rank for, and you will move up in the rankings.
It's also okay if you say, "Hey, we're not yet ranking in the top 20, but our paid search page is ranking on page 1. We know that we have high conversions here. We want to move from page 3, page 4 up to page 1, and then hopefully up into the top two, top three results. Then it is worth this targeted link building effort, because when you build up that visibility, when you grow those rankings, you can be assured that you are going to gain more visits, more traffic that will convert and send you these key business metrics and push those things up. So I do think targeted link building still makes sense when those conditions are fulfilled.
Is this form of link building worthwhile?
Is this something that can actually do the job it's supposed to do? And the answer, yeah. Look, if rank boosting is your goal, links are one of the ways where if you already have a page that's performing well from a conversion standpoint — from a user experience standpoint, pages per visit, your browse rate, things like time onsite, if you're not seeing high bounce rate, if you have got a page that's clearly accessible and well targeted and well optimized on the page itself — then links are going to be the most powerful, if not one of the most powerful, elements to moving your rankings. But you've got to have a scalable, repeatable process to build links.
You need the same thing that we look for broadly in our marketing practices, which is that flywheel. Yes, it's going to be hard to get things started. But once we do, we can find a process that works for us again and again. Each successive link that we get and each successive page whose rankings we're trying to move gets easier and easier because we've been there before, we've done it, we know what works and what doesn't work, and we know the ins and outs of the practice. That's what we're searching for.
Buckets:
One: one-to-one outreach. This is you going out and sending usually an e-mail, but it could be a DM or a tweet, an at reply tweet. It could be a phone call. It could be — I literally got one of these today — a letter in the mail addressed to me, hand-addressed to me from someone who'd created a piece of content and wanted to know if I would be willing to cover it. It wasn't exactly up my alley, so I'm not going to. But I thought that was an interesting form of one-to-one outreach.
It could be broadcast. Broadcast is things like social sharing, where we're broadcasting out a message like, "Hey, we've produced this. It's finally live. We launched it. Come check it out." That could go through bulk e-mail. It could go through an e-mail subscription. It could go through a newsletter. It could go through press. It could go through a blog.
Then there's paid amplification. That's things like social ads, native ads, retargeting, display, all of these different formats. Typically, what you're going to find is that one-to-one outreach is most effective when you can build up those relationships and when you have something that is highly targeted at a single site, single individual, single brand, single person.
Broadcast works well if, in your niche, certain types of content or tools or data gets regular coverage and you already reach that audience through one of your broadcast mediums.
Paid amplification tends to work best when you have an audience that you know is likely to pick those things up and potentially link to them, but you don't already reach them through organic channels, or you need another shot at reaching them from organic and paid, both.
Building a good process for link acquisition
Let's end here with the process for link acquisition. I think this is kind of the most important element here because it helps us get to that flywheel. When I've seen successful link builders do their work, they almost all have a process that looks something like this. It doesn't have to be exactly this, but it almost always falls into this format. There's a good tool I can talk about for this too.
But the idea being the first step is opportunity discovery, where we figure out where the link opportunities that we have are. Step 2 is building an acquisition spreadsheet of some kind so that we can prioritize which links we're going to chase after and what tactics we're going to use. Step 3 is the execution, learn, and iterate process that we always find with any sort of flywheel or experimentation.
Step 1: Reach out to relevant communities
We might find that it turns out for the links that we're trying to get relevant communities are a great way to acquire those links. We reach out via forums or Slack chat rooms, or it could be something like a private chat, or it could be IRC. It could be a whole bunch of different things. It could be blog comments.
It could be press and publications. There are industry publications that cover certain types of data or launches or announcements or progress or what have you. Perhaps that's an opportunity.
Resource lists and linkers. So there's still a ton of places on the web where people link out to. Here's a good set of resources around customer on-boarding for software as a service companies. Oh, you know what? We have a great post about that. I'm going to reach out to the person who runs this list of resources, and I'm going to see if maybe they'll cover it. Or we put together a great meteorology map looking at the last 50 winters in the northeast of the United States and showing a visual graphic overlay of that charted against global warming trends, and maybe I should share that with the Royal Meteorological Society of England. I'm going to go pitch their person at whatever.ac.uk it is.
Blog and social influencers. These are folks who tend to run, obviously, popular blogs or popular social accounts on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn, or what have you, Pinterest. It could be Instagram. Potentially worth reaching out to those kinds of folks.
Feature, focus, or intersection sources. This one's a little more complex and convoluted, but the idea is to find something where you have an intersection of some element that you're providing through the content of your page that you seem to get a link from and there is intersection with things that other organizations or people have interest in.
So, for example, on my meteorology example, perhaps you might say, "Lots of universities that run meteorology courses would probably love an animation like this. Let me reach out to professors." "Or you know what? I know there's a data graphing startup that often features interesting data graphing stuff, and it turns out we used one of their frameworks. So let's go reach out to that startup, and we'll check out the GitHub project, see who the author is, ping that person and see if maybe they would want to cover it or link to it or share it on social." All those kinds of things. You found the intersections of overlapping interest.
The last one, biz devs and partnerships. This is certainly not a comprehensive list. There could be tons of other potential opportunity to discover mechanisms. This covers a lot of them and a lot of the ones that tend to work for link builders. But you can and should think of many other ways that you could potentially find new opportunities for links.
Step 2: Build a link acquisition spreadsheet
Gotta build that link acquisition spreadsheet. The spreadsheet almost always looks something like this. It's not that dissimilar to how we do keyword research, except we're prioritizing things based on: How important is this and how much do I feel like I could get that link? Do I have a process for it? Do I have someone to reach out to?
So what you want is either the URL or the domain from which you're trying to get the link. The opportunity type — maybe it's a partnership or a resource list or press. The approach you're going to take, the contact information that you've got. If you don't have it yet, that's probably the first thing on your list is to try and go get that. Then the link metrics around this.
There's a good startup called BuzzStream that does sort of a system, a mechanism like this where you can build those targeted link outreach lists. It can certainly be helpful. I know a lot of folks like using things like Open Site Explorer and Followerwonk, Ahrefs, Majestic to try and find and fill in a bunch of these data points.
Step 3: Execute, learn, and iterate
Once we've got our list and we're going through the process of actually using these approaches and these opportunity types and this contact information to reach out to people, get the links that we're hoping to get, now we want to execute, learn, and iterate. So we're going to do some forms of one-to-one outreach where we e-mail folks and we get nothing. It just doesn't work at all. What we want to do is try and figure out: Why was that? Why didn't that resonate with those folks?We'll do some paid amplification that just reaches tens of thousands of people, low cost per click, no links. Just nothing, we didn't get anything. Okay, why didn't we get a response? Why didn't we get people clicking on that? Why did the people who clicked on it seem to ignore it entirely? Why did we get no amplification from that?
We can have those ideas and hypotheses and use that to improve our processes. We want to learn from our mistakes. But to do that, just like investments in content and investments in social and other types of investments in SEO, we've got to give ourselves time. We have to talk to our bosses, our managers, our teams, our clients and say, "Hey, gang, this is an iterative learning process. We're going to figure out what forms of link building we're good at, and then we're going to be able to boost rankings once we do. But if we give up because we don't give ourselves time to learn, we're never going to get these results."
All right, look forward to your thoughts on tactical link building and targeted link building. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
This is such a great piece to follow Cyrus’ post from yesterday.
What’s even more perfect is that I’m wrapping up a content amplification (a sort of ‘before you hit publish’ & ‘after you hit publish’) checklist for my brands' internal teams to reference - aiming to create a “repeatable process” that can be adopted throughout the entire organization (not just marketing teams!).
Effective, valuable link building, in my opinion, can’t just be done by SEOs/marketers. Beyond the expected email blasts, social sharing, press, blogs, ads, etc. - my approach is to empower everyone, regardless of their role in the company, to understand SEO objectives (& how it benefits them/their department!) so they can begin to see opportunities everywhere. For example - biz dev & even field teams have incredible relationships with customers, but also partners who are already endorsing our brand. Social teams know who the top community influencers are & may already have a healthy relationship (supported by our brand's previous endorsement/sharing of them/their work) that could facilitate amplification/linking. Sponsorship/‘corporate responsibility’ teams likely have relationships with organizations/non-profits our brand has already contributed to & who would be very likely to help. Presidents/CEOs/business strategy teams have a wealth of relationships with highly influential people who could be open to this type of endorsement. But if none of these teams/people know how they can make a difference just by leveraging the great relationship building they’re already doing to help amplify brand content & build links - well then there’s a huge missed opportunity.
The key, here, is to help each team understand how this collaborative effort will benefit their specific department/team/employee growth goals - otherwise it's tough to get buy-in / adoption. One of my favorite ways is to share how we can track growth in links, rankings, traffic, etc that's driving site performance (conversions/revenue) - and how we can get really granular with the data to see what had the greatest impact. Praising those teams for their contributions creates an excitement that gets more team members onboard. So originally I said I don't think SEOs/marketing teams should be the only ones responsible for link building - but I think what I meant was everyone in the organization should be responsible for marketing (including link building), which starts with having a sense of ownership for the brand's success.
Also - I think your ABCs of link building for beginners (mentioned in the comments) is actually something experienced SEOs/link builders often forget… A) think of it like dating - YES! It’s about building a relationship, which B) should be mutually beneficial, not selfish/self-serving. And C) Don’t be weird; subtlety & being a genuine human being will lead to far greater things for you/your website/business.
Good morning Rand, Your post is so interesting, but for example in my case, it's exausting trying to get a good link... Because I don't know if I understood it well but, according to you, after focusing the community that we want to approach, we have to wait until they see our link and catch it, right? What if they never get our link eventhough there's good content and we're trying really hard? Because in my case I spend sooo many hours and barely get a few links... Is there any advice for begginers? Thank you :
I agree, it is exhausting, but there are so many ways to build links. It does take hours, and you'll have good days and bad days, but the results are rewarding, even if it takes years. Jon Cooper's list of link building ideas will give you more inspiration than you'll ever need. Check it out...https://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
This resource is an example of excellent content, its been linked to loads. It also goes to show that hours and hours of effort are required to make significant progress in link building. Hope this helps.
Thank you :)
You're right - link building is hard, it's frustrating, and it often doesn't meet with success. But... that is EXACTLY why it's so valuable and so powerful. If links were easy to come by, they wouldn't provide nearly the competitive advantage that they do.
One tip for beginners - if you're constantly struggling to get a "yes" of any kind on any types of your outreach, try A) thinking of it like dating - you need to make yourself (in this case, your website) attractive to potential linkers B) you need to give others something before you ask for anything in return C) an indirect approach is often better than a direct one (e.g. let's chat about how we could help one another's businesses rather than will you please link to me).
Thank you Rand :)
You got that Rand, Thanks for the tips and for this great post.
I think it´s every interesting Rand, that you even mention the emotional side: Frustrating.
And it's hard. Which implies in my opinion: Patience, discipline and the capability to push through. :-)
So these are the character traits someone needs at least to have or to earn.
And many because of lacking these will probably give up. That's what I read between your lines of this answer here. Am I right or mistaken? I am always willing to learn. :-) Thanks for providing so much value here anyway.
BUT: this also enables us - if we push through - to get to the top.
That's how I am seeing this.
About the struggling to get a yes, I'd say:
If one's able to use the power of connection it will be a lot easier.
Thinking about what moves people. I wrote more about this on my page (https://deep-trust.info), because one of my businesses deals exactly with that. Because I think it's something people don't really learn anymore.
So I agree, it's perfectly to see it like in dating. Thanks for that comparison.
Thanks anyway for your great advices.
Rand, keep up the good work, I know that's not so easy to do. :-)
And have a nice day.
~Holger
P.S.: Greets from a German Guy, right now being in Switzerland.
When reaching out, there has to be some kind of reciprocal exchange of value. I get lots of requests for links every week, but 99% of them are clearly one-sided; i.e. value for their site, no value for my site. If I've never heard from you before, you'll need a very clear value proposition to overcome my skepticism filter.
I totally agree on relevancy. When I work with linkbuilding, it is often very easy to find sites where a link could be a good idea, but establishing the relevancy is just not possible.
I often look at providing the best content possible, and that is of course extremely hard to do. No one wants to link to a person only contacting you, for their benefit. Most of the emails I get, are so transparent.
I think your best point in this was right at the end: giving yourself time. Each client, each market, each set of competitors, heck sometimes each key phrase takes time to learn about that. But it involves both the SEO and the client/employer being patient.
You should record your learning - what didn't work and why, and what did work and why. And we have found that open, honest communication with the person or organisation you're doing SEO for really helps with tempering expectations, but also leads to a longer-lasting relationship.
We are all learning but you can only effectively learn if you remember your 'mistakes' and plan not to repeat them, at least in that market for that client. What doesn't work for Project A may work for Project B - there is no 'one size fits all' in this industry, but that's what makes it interesting!
@randfish
I love outreach (1 to 1) and doing it from last 4 years. It works GREAT and its the best thing I can suggest to any SEO seeker, but NOT in case of TARGETED PAGES (which are mainly the service or product pages). To my personal experiments in outreaching big sites with various templates (Short, simple, clear, long) for "Targeted Link Building" the response rate depends on TWO things (Other than basic outreach structure of simplicity, short and clear):
1) Who you are? - NO one likes to share or link a site which seems NEW or has a very low AUTHORITY.
2) What you are offering? - If you are a newbie and has low authority then response rate will be ZERO unless you are offering MONEY (Sounds like PAID LINKS. Right?).
To conclude this link building is only useful (in terms of responses) when you have a good authority site and people know you that you are good at it.
I agree to your initial point of using it when you rank on top 20s or 30s, but in that case I found following to works great:
1) Quora or other niche forum comment in a meaningful way on forums which are ranking on exact, related and varied keywords (Not always necessary to be exact)
2) Blog comments in a meaningful way on sites which are ranking on exact, related and varied keywords (Not always necessary to be exact)
3) List articles like "Top SEO experts" (But make sure if you outreach them then you need to justify yourself that you are better then the sites in the list to get included).
CONCLUSION: IT'S INDEED A HARD PROCESS. ONLY USE WHEN YOU KNOW IN-N-OUT OF OUTREACH.
Thoughts?
-Gaurav
Rand, I love how you put this information into context, it provides much more clear insights on how to create processes that are sustainable, scalable and have the best opportunity for sucess.
As a local business when doing targeted link building, does it matter for Google if my links come from local news sites and blogs or is it more important to go for high DA and PA backlinks?
In my opinion if your link is coming from local news site it's already trusted sites and Google add more value to site having links pointing from news sites, but for blogs it depends on the site, a good rule of the thumb is better to have high DA and PA and be care to those low quality or spammy site that may hurting your sites from ranking.
Hello Rand!
As you said that link building is important but it is difficult yeah I agree with that because of link building we can get good ranking and if we have second page rank of our any keyword than it is easy to get first page rank but if we have first page rank for any keyword than it is very tough work to get first rank on the page. It is always annoying for me, and in this case which strategies should be applied?
Thank you, Rand, for addressing link-building strategy for SEO. It's almost become a taboo subject since Panda and many people are unsure whether it's still a valid tactic. Your Process for Link Acquisition is very nicely outlined.
I agree, it's hard work to get the flywheel going, but well worth the effort..."nothing worth having comes easy"...
Hi Rand Fishkin.
Thank you very much for sharing the link building ideas. But, I have a summarized report of link building of my competitors. I checked the back links of few sites and I also tried to create the link on those sites, but I didn't find any free option there. When I went in depth, then I found that those sites are providing the link for the money. In other words, our competitors sites are involved in link exchange and paid link building, but still they are in the top. I am not sure that Google is able to distinguish between paid link building and natural link building.
Thanks.
Great, I like that. I'm Newbie, still watched
I definitely agree that this type of link building is still not only relevant in 2016, but very important if you want to rank. The difficulty for many is finding the high quality backlinks. Anyone can go out and find links from weak directories and link farms. The problem with that is those types of links will not make any substantial difference in your ranking, as they are of low quality. So the challenge for everyone in doing this is obtaining those high quality, relevant backlinks that will really help add authority.
I'll be greatly surprised if targeted link building ever stops being effective. On one hand Google wants to control the results, but on the other hand webmaster & site owners who are overrun with spam are being tighter with how they hand out the links, so the spammers are actually helping the value of good links increase.
Once again very informative post Rand. Keep up the good work.
Great post, a correct link building strategy is still very important to achive good rankings. Thanks for sharing
Thanks, great read
Thank you Rand.
I appreciate you covering this topic. I've struggled with the best methods for link-building and how to do them consistently. Thank you for walking us through this and as always, helping to generate ideas and ways to improve as SEO's.
-Ray
Hey Rand,
Thanks for sharing this post with us. I want to know more about how to gain more social and referral traffic thrpugh targetted link building.
I agree with you that link building for any website is one of the main factors of increasing page rank, but I think the growth of the external links goes to a different era, which seemed to me more the effect I'm talking about crowd-marketing if promotion links gives good results, enclose the text external links to authoritative website will result in several times more, of course you may not agree with me, I in this direction has only just begun, but the what I see on the capacity vnesa reference weight with the help of crowd-marketing made me very happy thanks for the good article
Appreciate the information you share with the community on a regular basis. Enjoy your blogs :D
Another great piece of link building analytical assessment Rand! Seeing the results would really take time but worth it once you find what combination of tactics would work for the campaign.
Very good post. What is really difficult is to create quality content that it really differentiates from competition and it deserves an external link and the other Internet users really want to share it
Great video. I am new to SEO but I've been having little victiories from time to time. I've been doing some link building over the weekend and I've managed to boost one of my pages from the 5th to the 3rd page in google. I hope it's not just pure luck. The methods you've discussed is a complete guide in my opinion. People should really stick to that especially when they're new to the art.
Thank you.
This is great advice going forward with 2016 link-building Rand. The part of keeping your process well-organized in a minimum of a spreadsheet is absolutely necessary to reduce confusion. You may reach out to a handful of potentials each day throughout the first week without keeping notes. By the second or third week things will start to get very confusing without detailed and organized notes. I have used Smartsheet for this for years and it really helps me on all levels of link-building and has reduced embarrassment from duplicate reach-outs many times.
I greatly appreciate your talent on the video explainations.
I'm so glad you did this presentation. It's so helpful to know that link building isn't easy. And not a technical exercise.
Sometimes I think there are so many things to remember in digital marketing, it makes my head explode. And then at other times, I watch a great presentation (like this one) which puts it into perspective: it all boils down to relationship building.
Great article
Blogging as a guest think it can be successful if you're careful not to spam. Should not put many links in one post. The downside is that it is slow and you have to work much content. The effort to win a single link is important but why the link building is as effective and valued by google
If you're contributing massive numbers of random blog posts to various websites first and foremost to get links, you are a spammer because you are filling the Internet with crap.
The purposes of contributing articles to websites are to communicate ideas and build thought-leadership. Links are the least-important part.
You are one of my favorite authors here at MOZ. I love the way you present your ideas here.
Hi Rand,
It's so nice when I see on the internet the most natural links build on trust and reciprocity. The spamming part has become so annoying at some point that when I see someone talking in an article and adding a link to the themed website it feels like normal. So basically building a link trust by approaching the right people who want to write, share or even tweet about one's website is more convincing for the visitor to take a chance and get a click on that specified site. And linking goes further if the visitors are satisfied about what they find on the site and share further the information and of course with the specified link.
So natural and obvious is the best way, the best strategy to survive and have success in online business.
Best,
M.
Hello Rand,
Thanks for sharing this post, I am sure many SEOs were waiting for something like this just to confirm and be on a safer side that targetted link building will work in 2016 :).
You have shared many link building activities that will work in 2016 but I would like to add some more that I believe are also a good way to acquire links like Brand Mentions and Wiki pages.
So excited for a linkbuilding WBF!
I think that there are a lot of factors to look at when determining the success of a linkbuilding campaign. If you don't have the content, you will definitely have to work hard to potentially get less links. I like to look at my LB attempts as relationship building.
The Flywheel concept, so hard to develop when you're a small brand and so easy when you're a big brand. But it's work. My advice, win one battle by one battle, don't see too big if you're a small brand. You'll have to work, smartly, five of ten times more than a big brand. Every link count so work smartly.
Great post Rand. Link building is and always will be a long and arduous process but it is the core of SEO. However I think it's important to remember that it's all about quality rather than quantity and that will help focus your link building efforts. There are also some great tools out there to help you along the way too, such as Buzzstream to help you plan, Ahrefs to identify where competitors are getting links from and Buzzsumo to help you generate awesome content for your site.
Hey Rand, Thanks for the interesting post. I wanna ask you something. I have a Project for SEO. I have been working in it since 10 days. after one week i were checked all keywords they are in ranked well. after 2 days when i again try to check all keywords i didn't find any keyword in Search engine. I thought that ma project have plenty of google so i reconsider request but i didn't find anything spam over there. But one thing is very strange happen i got massive traffic in ma project Fb Page. I didn't post any kinda Facebook post so why i got massive traffic??? did ma site got google plenty or what??? I am so confused about it. Help Required.
Hi Beenish - you should be able to check your analytics package (Google Analytics or whatever other tool you're using) to see the source of your traffic and whether it's coming from Facebook or Google. Facebook traffic is hard to look into because most of the shares will come from private pages that you won't be able to see, but you can use Open Site Explorer or a tool like SharedCount to see if a page was shared heavily on Facebook or other social networks.
A already checked but nothing founf in analytics. What do you think what is that??? any kinda plenty?
I would like to have a look on that website that you are talking about, before seeing the website, it would be hard for anyone here to explain what happened to it.
Basically there is penalty in ma client's website. Actually First he hire a seo, he created so bad backlinks also irrelevant. When i got this website. i asked him to give me the access of previous seo work so i can remove all links manually. but he said there is no work report provided by that seo. so any other or alternate way to remove that links except Disaw ??????
Before checking the ranking you must be logout the gmail.
I think infographies for sites already well established and with fewer events are a simple and inexpensive way to share data, to assert its position in the market and communicate its brand.
Journalists are fond of numbers and graphics allow you to share them more playful and graphic than just boring tables.
Nice - i see you talk about anchor text... dont forget about proximity text too tho - h1, h2s and all those on page seo elements can unfold into your off page content as such structuring your off page content with similar keyword orientation and as such this will improve the long and medium tail ranks associated with your website.
I once read on average users type between 3-5 words into google. hence be careful that your anchor text links dont "limit" your websites outreach.
Nice post - I like to see MOZ encouraging the idea of link building again - things have been slow on this side of the pond post panda, but links are certainly waking up again - as part of a content outreach strategy at least here.
BO
Totally agree with this one. Link building is one of the hardest and least liked parts of being an SEO. It takes time, it takes a lot of research and a lot of patience. Plus, you have to write a lot of emails to people you don't know!
This is why we built Reach SEO. Outreach is a huge part of SEO that is not accessible to the masses. I mean, it takes so much process and workflow to know what you're supposed to do.
Hi Rand!
That's an incredibly explanation about what targeted linkbuilding is.
Even more, this is great for us, the SEOs that are out there explaning people and potential customers that linkbuilding and how serious is this phrase: "It isn't th matter of how many links you create, What matter is the strategy behind the links"
Thanks again for this content!
GR
Hello Rand,
you've mentioned forums and blogs. In the light of many people saying that forum and blogs dofollow links are useless, do you think its still a technique worth investing?
I mean xontextual links not pure spam (however my comperition does that with success)
Would love you input in this one :)
Have a good weekend!
Hi Szymon,
I like the topic you opened here.
Do follow links from a blog is as valuable as the domain and page authority of the blog page itself and the number of backlinks mentioned in the blog page. At least that's from my point of view and experience.
About the forums, I believe Google think of them differently, I hope to hear more views.
Have a good weekend!
Hi Guys,
In my opinion If the Blog has other great content, and it is not just a 5 page blog without any readers or authority a link could do wonders.
I specially like blogs, because on like Targeted Websites, blogs can write about almost any topic they think their readers will like. Let me make an example about this... If I have a business that is selling shoes and I get a link from a website which sells Pasta that link could actually harm my site despite the fact that the site has high authority... This however is not the case with blogs.
If my site gets a link from a blog post which is about "how to keep your shoes clean" from this sentence "you could by quality shoe cleaner from SYZ Company", and links my brand from this post, it will actually help my site a lot, even if the next blog post is about "The best Mac and cheese I'v ever eaten.".
At least this is what my experience tells me... Let me know if you don't agree :)
Cheers.
Rand - so great to see continued support and clarification on link building from you - although I don't think the debate will ever be over.
A recent theme in the comments sections on Moz, especially by one particular gentleman, is that PR is all you need and link building is just another word for less-than wanna-be marketers who are slapping a new name on an old practice of outreach and publicity.
I think many respected people would echo that PR works really well for some companies and industries, but it's just a futile effort and uphill battle for others. There are some industries where link building is just going to be faster and more effective and move the needle more.
I know you've touched on this in the past but would be great to hear a direct showdown between the "PR Only" perspective and the "Link building and PR" perspective, especially with the consideration of different industries and maturity level of different companies.
Voted up. :)
I just have to make one minor correction to your restating of my argument:
The issue, in my opinion, is not "PR only" versus "linkbuilding and PR." The issue, to me, is that almost all (good) linkbuilding strategies are just publicity strategies by other names when one looks at the definition of publicity within the marketing promotion mix.
And those practices existed long before the Internet, so I'd hire a good publicist over a linkbuilder any day of the week because they have known for years, if not decades, those best practices in getting the media and the general public to talk about you -- and all of those discussions will generate links naturally.
I always love seeing a WBF on link building! Great video Rand, informative and practical.
I have heard you mention a few times, leveraging Biz Dev for link/SEO value. My concern is that Biz Dev deals frequently involve contracts and compensation of some sort, which might be construed as 'paying for links'. Not to mention the addition of tracking parameters on those links for obvious reasons, which might be sending the wrong message if they're followed.
Have you seen any examples of groups getting into hot water with this? Or, best practices to marry BD and SEO while staying in white hat land?
Today is a happy day for me, my DA has increased 3 points !!!, I do a lot of things I have learned in this blog, thank you! :)
I was looking for some useful info on this, thanks for sharing.
What a balonies.... You people live in your "perfect" world that's far from reality. What a**hole will ever give you "relevant" link for free??? At the end of the day, you are asking someone who's competing with you essentially to give you a link... Please... What freaking strategies are you even talking about??? "Benjamins" is your strategy... LOL...
I would like to read a post where target backlink strategies are classified based on website status ( Like New and low authority sites , Mid- Authority sites ) .
Because most of times , most of backlinking strategies failed when it comes to brand new site ( People do not want to link back to new and low authority sites so it will help beginners also .
Hey Rand. I work for a travel PR agency and for the past few years we have been focusing on gaining quality links for our clients to infer SEO juice. However, this is getting harder to do with pay-walls and the number of publications now using no-follow links as a matter of course. The latest blow is Google's manual penalties against bloggers promoting free services etc and telling them they also need to only include no-follow links. Our SEO-savvy clients want juice and no-follow links don't provide that (or do they?). The travel PR industry has been built on sending journalists on trips and letting them write their reviews up in their media channels - and with offline circulations falling, online has been a useful addition.
My question is what is your view on no-follow links? There has been talk that perhaps they can still deliver some juice, but Google's latest move seems to refute that once and for all. If Google penalises traditional ways of working like this - and journalists are simply not going to start paying for their own trips away - what becomes of the genuine travel review or well-written travel article online? I know there are still branding and social sharing benefits, but gaining SEO-beneficial links is going to become near impossible in the world of travel. Clients will be unwilling to spend money on sending writers/journos on trips if they are getting less value in return.
I'd really value your opinion as I'm going round in circles trying to figure out the next move for agencies like us.
This is great advice for SEOs and non-SEOs alike! Moz is like going to SEO university. I have a quick(ish) question.
I want to build some links towards the 'Gifts For Men' section of our e-commerce website. We're currently top 5 but want to crack top 3.
However, nobody is going to want to link to a page of that nature just off the bat. Like someone mentioned above, there has to be reciprocal value for the linker. The page is clearly commercially driven, and there's no real space or need to have any other content on the page other than products and on page text. I don't want to be 'that guy' who just wants links for nothing.
Do you think a good strategy would be to create a content resource on our blog and then use the internal linking structure to point back to our 'gifts for men' page to get a flow through SEO effect?
Also, I'm not really sure what would be an interesting enough topic that relates to 'gifts for men'. Any ideas?
I liked what you said in the last bit about execute, learn, and iterate. We must learn to go back and analyze how our seo approaches are doing, or we are going to be blind with our work. When is your next event in Seattle Rand? I just moved to the area, and im looking to learn more seo. Cheers, Nathan
As I own an e-commerce and its related blog, sometimes is difficult for me getting links. Many bloggers think that my content is too related to my commercial site. So what do I do? I try to cooperate with non profits sites linking to my e-commerce, and then it's easier for me to get links to that sites (which are linking to my site). Is it that strategy useful?
I love this post, Rand! Yes with the proper strategies and understand Google’s quality criteria we can target proper link building. And do not follow your competitor link building strategy always.
No matter whatever we do, the linking has always (if not always, at least for the past few years) been revolving around the good content. Links lost their sheen, but the good thing is that their importance is surrounded greatly by quality content.
Hi
thanks to this blog
this is more informative blog
regards
vastav
Is there any website or seller who is providing targeted backlinks? I will give some website list and he will create backlink..
my site: smmpanel
[Link removed by editor.]
Hi there! We recommend a number of excellent consultants here.
Thanks for sharing Rand! link building has changed alot since the beginning. I see corporations failing on commerce if they either don't have the right strategy as they do not allow their in-house team to grow/build required techniques which obvioulsy comes with time and experiance.
Hey Rand,
As you know, we have been doing targeted link building for clients for 10 years now. One thing we tell our prospective link builders in the interview process and even our clients when we explain our service is that this is a lot like a sales position. Lots of outreach and lots of rejection.
In fact, I wrote a post years ago explain why we viewed the people who do targeted link building really well, did not always mean they were going to be good SEOs. SEOs tend to be more technical in nature, where those that are excellent at obtaining links tend to have sales oriented personalities.
Just that I would add that tip/tidbit/experience to this post.
Arnie
Thanks Rand for sharing such beautiful insights of targeted link building trend of 2016. Sometimes we get frustrated with getting same response of “No” to our outreach effort, although I do agree that approaching with Quality content to right audience gets more success.
Apart from the quality content, presentation also plays an important part in getting quality links. Unique presentation of quality content always do trick as it engages more users views.
Primero: gracias por el post. Segundo: voy a comenzar a patrocinar mi sitio con facebook ads, pero para hacer el boost que mencionas debo enfocarme en que los clics se vayan al sitio web o a conseguir likes?
A solid process for link acquisition is essential. A well thought out process accompanied by a spreadsheet is the bare minimum if you plan to target lots of sites. A few years back I have to admit starting outreach campaigns for SEO clients and gotten lost without these two steps in place before hand. Thanks
Rand,
What are your thoughts on the power of internal linking within a site? So, for example, I have Piece of Content A, which has a lot of ability to attract links - it has social value, maybe has a useful tool that folks might want to link to, or has a gallery of interesting photos of piano-playing cats. And I have Piece of Content B, which has less ability to attract links, but more ability to move the needle on business goals.
Is there value in promoting or link building Piece of Content A, and having an internal link from it to Piece of Content B? How smoothly does the linking power flow? Or am I better off adapting Piece of Content B to be more linkable and concentrating my efforts there?
And, along the same logic, if the homepage gets the most links, what's the power of linking to Piece of Content B directly from the homepage? Have you seen any convincing metrics on that?
There's certainly some value in linking between the two, but chances are that a link from A to B won't help B rise much in the rankings (perhaps a little, but internal links just don't carry the weight that external links do). It's also the case that, generally speaking, if A and B are on the same site, B is already benefitting from some of the domain authority and domain-related metrics that A is helping all the pages on the site build. More content like A on the domain may help B more than just internal links alone.
As far as linking from the homepage - pretty much the same story. Once upon a time, the transfer of PageRank was of great importance to Google and these types of internal linking structures could impact rankings substantially. These days, the effect in general is much smaller.
Wow, thanks for the super quick reply. So you're saying I should buy a piano and a bag of cats?
Thanks for another awesome WBF!
Hi Rand,
I really like the way you discussed targeted link building here.
I see that you didn't mention directories, and that made me curious what do you think about relevant directory submission and forum backlinks. Do you think they still have some weight or Google and other search engines started neglecting their backlinks?
Have a good weekend :)
Thank you for this link building lesson, I am new to digital marketing, learning something new today with yr teaching, moz rocks :-)
From 2011, when I started following Moz community (SEOMoz), until now, there are only 3 things l continuously follow during IM campaigns. And, those 3 things are: 1. Creation of genuine content 2. Building niche relevant backlinks, and 3. Following Rand's education and motivation tips. Without any of these 3 core factors I wouldn't dare to promise any progress to my clients.
This is cool, i am working on my blog to create high quality backlinks and this strategy would be work for 2016. Superb writeup. Thanks to share.
Thanks for the lesson. I try to learn SEO and this helps a lot. Do you think obtaining backlinks will be easier? In light of recent news from Google, that outbound links don't have any effect on ranking?
Hi Igor - I wouldn't agree that outbound links have no effect - the effect may be indirect, but it exists. Cyrus did a good video on this topic here: https://moz.com/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo...
But you can read this Blog Google outbound links are not a ranking factor. John Mueller said that external links, links on your web site that point to outside web sites (or outbound links) are not a ranking signal.
Yes, that's what I was referencing.
Hi Beenish,
From the article you linked too, "...links are a ranking factor – but you linking out to other sites doesn’t help you rank better."
So, if I put a link on my site to a site that ranks well, that will do nothing for my site(?). However, if a page that ranks well puts a link to my site, that will help me.
Putting links on your site to other sites does help build better content.
No one is saying that linking to some website doesn't have any effect on your website. But, that's more of a marketing thing. In terms of SEO it does absolutely nothing.
Indirect effect is still there, sure, but I personally know an editor of a big blog, who said he used rel=nofollow on mot of the links out of fear, even if links led to a valid place and were necessary for the content. We were discussing this change just a few hours ago, and it seemed like he felt a little guilty about it :)
I agree with rand. Outbound links helps indirectly in SEO, for example you link someone site, and he/she notice you have mention good things about them, then he/she also might point to you naturally. So it helps, to grab someone attention to you. I also agree with john, outbound links is not ranking factor, otherwise all people just mention brand name on every keywords, for example, in every Google keyword, people will link to Google. So they surely never consider that as Ranking factor.
Awesome man - really appreciate the good quality content you produce on the moz community!
Love this WBF!! Great piece to help kick-start the year. Thanks so much for this Rand and Moz. Just wondering - at what point do you give up on a link building tactic and decide that it is not working? I've found that some bloggers and influencers will respond well to an approach while others just won't respond at all, even within the same field of interest. So, I've recently been struggling with when exactly to decide that an approach doesn't work for my company - is it 15 attempts? 30? More? Or should I be basing this decision on something other than number of times I reach out and get no response? I'm still rather new to link building so I'd love to know what helps everyone here determine whether a direct link building approach is working or not.
Links are still an important key ingredient of Seo. Search Engine Optimization started with Link Building activities which have not reached a whole new advance level. Several new elements have integrated with search engine algorithm such as Social Media Signals, but Powerful Link-Building is still the most powerful ranking signal.
Hello Rand,
There are so many talks about tactical link building and targeted link building since last year. Process for link acquisition could be helpful. Thank you for sharing it . Accidentally, I landed to eight years-old post of yours here , for the link building approaches. I really enjoyed reading it.
I definitely think that tactical link building is key to any company's success. I prefer the 1:1 approach versus a simple email.
Well prepared article. Today it is important to acquire good links, good strategy gives great results. Thanks for the article.
Hi Rand Fishkin. Link building helps to increase the ranking to the website. This article helps a lot to generate the link building.