The SEO’s Guide to Effective Link Building
As a blackhat, I was put on an especially fast crash course in what Google likes to see, and what they do NOT like to see. This is a brief summary of what I have learned. Some blackhat tips will be at the bottom. These are tricks garnered via my own experience, feel free to disagree if you like, but I believe in them whole-heartedly.
The Rules of Effective Link Building
- Do vary your anchor text. Especially if you’re getting links very very quickly. “Organic” link growth will never have the same anchor text over and over again. Google knows this.
- Do maintain link velocity. That is to say, you should never use up every link you have available in one day. This is a massive indicator of a blackhat site in the making(even if you’re whitehat!). Instead, come in with a bang, and after that try and maintain something of an upside-down parabola of links. By the end of your run, with any luck you’ll have some truly organic links coming in.
- Do embrace deep links they are your ticket to links. They are your content, and have the ability to funnel massive amounts of linkjuice wherever you so choose via selective internal no-following.
- Do get both quality, and shiite quality links. No one is going to believe that out of your 5000 inbound links, not one comes from a source with a pagerank of less than 5. Not to mention, shiite quality links are still links, so long as they haven’t been spammed to death. A lot of them can easily overpower a few powerful links to a competitors site.
- Do worry about how long a link will be in it’s location. As a step against blackhat, I think it’s fairly obvious by now that Google puts the smackdown on sites whose links disappear (aka are removed by mods) in under 48 hours.
- Do vary your username when promoting your site. If you can’t go viral, you can at least fake it.
- Do check on any link you might get that you consider shady(free directories for example)…make sure they’re not all on the same IP, or, if possible, not on the same C-Class IP
- Do not be afraid to link to your new site via other sites you own within the same niche. Just try and work it into the content, not a spammy footer link.
- Do use every resource(white or blackhat) you have at your disposal when creating links. Do not use ones that will get your arse put in jail.
- Do comment on do-follow blogs. If it gets approved, you have a very powerful link in many cases. Remember that you will probably not get a link if the post is too old, or your comment has little worth.
- Do promote your promoters
- Do not be afraid to ask people for links in resources sections. Do not however, use this as your primary method of getting links. Google dislikes link exchanges.
- Do create something worthy of a social bookmark for every [whitehat] site. A dumb flash game, a catchy video, something that has a chance at going moderately viral. Social bookmarks don’t have much traffic, but are generally held by web-saavy people, many times with their own domains they can post links to you on
- Do use multiple approaches for link gathering. The sites most likely to get smacked down are the ones that use a sing spammy method of link garnering. By spreading out your approaches, you can dodge the algorithms that are used to detect the different types of link gathering. Beyond that, if one particular method falls out of favor and gets beat down on by Google, you’re not dead in the water. With any luck, no trick should be responsible for more than 25% of your inbound links.
- Do cover your tracks. The more obfuscated you can make your link building, the less chance that other SEOs can replicate your technique, or that Google will detect a pattern. This includes changing usernames(on sites that won’t detect such a move) when promoting, changing IPs, contact e-mails, etc. I personally love when someone is on an article submission site or such, and uses the same username to cover 20 different sites in 10 or so niches. I’ll mine those backlinks all day long.
- Do pay special attention to your pages that get an especially large number of links. No-Follow all internal links except those that need an extra boost in the rankings. No sense in letting your link juice splatter all over your privacy policy and such.
- Do NOT stumble exchange. The only people likely to see your page are OTHER people that stumble exchange. Stumbleupon can be powerful, so make sure your account edges towards the real powerplayers in your niche. Once again, this is included as many stumblers have their own domains they can potentially link to you from.
Blackhat Extensions
As tends to be the case with BH, more is at stake here than for whitehats. For example, in a whitehat setup, link velocity rarely comes into play. For us, it’s a way of life. By varying our anchor text, and promoting different link types on a daily basis, we can help to sustain our link velocity. In addition, first spamming out links that we KNOW will stick can help solidify a decent base within the search engines. So messageboards? Let em wait.
In addition, link quality comes into play. This is hard to beat. Filtering by pagerank isn’t perfect. By finding some spammable forms that are not as common, we can help boost our quality. Also, try to switch out which board/topic your link dropper is using for each forum. Each one can discredit the link if overused. Mine a fresh set of links every week, and combine with old lists.
Also, the variance of anchor text is VERY important to us. More permutations are needed, as the link velocity factor is brought to a whole different level with the thousands of links we’re putting out there.
Build build build!
-XMCP
PS: If you likes this post, give it a sphinn! I’ve been out of my sphinn groove for a bit.
January 6th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Dude, I actually built links for my last project kinda like that. However, out of a sudden I seem to be sandboxed now (for 7 days already) – it’s a whitehat project I should add, didn’t use any shady stuff, the site is about 3000 pages big and covers the gaming sector – quality content.
I indexed the site in july 2007, continued to develop it and launched it on december 28 2007 – it already had some decent rankings by them because it had 2 links from well trusted sites in that genre.
I kicked off more links every day then, also got myself some links out of forums ‘n stuff. After 2 days the site hit the sandbox.
The site: and info: command still works and displays the site. The Google Bot is on it every day, new pages are still being indexed, actually I even gained +1000 indexed sites in the last 7 days.
The only problem is.. I rank for _nothing_, not even the site name which is not competetive.
Am I right that this is the beloved sandbox? Am I in 6 months of shit now?
I’d appreciate your thoughts on this as I think it fits perfectly on the topic of your post.
Thanks and cheers,
Andreas
January 6th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Probably. It might be a smackdown for a variety of reasons. Even the sandbox can rank for it’s site name most of the time…unless it’s a super competitive phrase/word
January 6th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Andreas, Ive always found the SeoMoz page strength analysis to be really useful for getting a quick SEO diagnosis
http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength
It was through using this tool I confirmed how valuable .edu back links are.
I had been puzzled for a while by a specific page that consistently ranked higher than my site
that was really crappy in every way.
It hadnt been updated in almost a decade. My site had roughly 100x greater number of backlinks
and beat it by a large margin in almost every measured category.
It turns out the site in question had 50+ .edu back links and almost nothing else.
That alone was enough to put in on the front page of google SERPS.
January 6th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
It would be great to see specific case studies after posts like these. Case studies are always lacking in the blackhat arena… maybe try focusing on that some more this year.
January 7th, 2008 at 1:39 am
I think people forget the fact that creating valuable content (like this post) is what attracts links. Another thing I have found that is very important in getting links, is knowing other bloggers. A simple AIM and u have yourself a new link.
January 7th, 2008 at 4:33 am
I dont agree with point 9. Just use different methods of generating links through whitehat methods, blackhat methods could damage your brand.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:39 am
High five!
Another great post from SlightlyShady.
January 7th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Some excellent points there, I always find that I forget obvious things like varying anchor text etc. Its stuff you know but just forget.
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January 7th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
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January 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I found this an interesting post, and hope you won’t mind if I just mention your apostrophes. “It’s” with an apostrophe is always the contraction for “it is.” When you mean the possessive, like “its sitename,” you don’t need an apostrophe. It may be a little pedantic of me, but I think it would make you less shady if you followed that rule, and it wouldn’t affect your links or anything.
The temptation to go around gaining links by correcting everyone’s punctuation and grammar is enormous, but I have resisted it until now. Your fearless example and bold suggestions made me do it.
January 11th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Haha no, I appreciate this information. Back in the day I used to do school newspaper and the like. Apparently I’ve lost my grammatical touch.
Either way, don’t ever be afraid to post on an entry. The only thing I ever dislike is blatant self-promotion. And even then, asking first will normally lead to me okaying it.
Come again!
January 11th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
You know the funny thing about this post is that it has the exact formula to get a lot of sphinns. It’s the type of thing that people will just sphinn automatically based on the title, “The SEO’s guide to effective link Building.” Then you make it a list, and it’s a virtual lock to get a decent amount of sphinns. Nice job.
I wish I had a blog in this industry, so I could make a post titled, “Bribing your way to the top of Sphinn: the top 10 shady ways people do it.” I really wanna see that community’s reaction. That would be funny.
January 11th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
haha
what can I say.
Certain titles definitely have a higher chance of sphinning, and this one..yeah
January 14th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Another great post from SlightlyShady
February 1st, 2008 at 8:23 pm
[...] The SEO’s Guide to Effective Link Building [...]
January 26th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
[...] Are they disregarding some of these tips on being discrete? [...]
January 28th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
“I think people forget the fact that creating valuable content (like this post) is what attracts links.”
Spoken like a true newbie. Back to SEO101 for you pal.