Few SEOs would disagree that link building is still a fundamental part of getting a site ranked well in Google and other search engines. Google’s own webmaster guidelines confirm that you should ‘make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online’. Here’s a whole list of places you can get links from, of varying value.
Are the lower value links worthless? In my view, if you have a site with no links vs. a site with some low-value links (and the sites are on a par, content-wise), the one with some links will likely do better – but that’s often not the reality (you’ll rarely be up against a site with no links!) and you can’t rely purely on low value links to get you better rankings. I think it’s important to build a diverse, natural-looking link profile, which means having a mix of links from different sources and of different qualities. Even links often considered low value (like forum links) can sometimes be powerful, as I’ve explained below. What about really spammy links? Here’s a great article from Rand Fishkin on that topic (opens in a new window). In short, don’t go after spammy links but if you get some to your site, it’s unlikely to do you any harm as long as you’re doing everything else right.
Competitors
The very first thing to do is to look at your competitors’ link profiles using a tool like Open Site Explorer, or Yahoo Site Explorer if you don’t have an SEO Moz subscription. Your competitors are the sites that are already ranking in the top spots for the keywords you’re targetting, in the search engines you want to rank in. Looking at their link profiles gives you loads of ideas for sites that might give you a link. SEO Moz has got a number of other tools to help you find links, like Juicy Link Finder.
External blogs
Building a blog from scratch and getting it to the stage where it has enough link juice to be of any benefit to your main site is a lot of work. There’s a strong argument for putting all your best content on your main site instead (and perhaps having a self-hosted installation of WordPress in a subfolder for blog posts). However, there are many sites that offer you a free blog which creates a subdomain of their (sometimes highly authoritative) site. For example, My Telegraph. I haven’t done any testing worthy of publishing but when I post an article with a link on my Telegraph blog, the content I link to is spidered by Google within the hour and sometimes within seconds, and I’ve noticed positive correlations in traffic. I suspect it is better to have a hosted blog on a subdomain of an authoritative domain than it is to try and build one from scratch.
If you would rather have a blog on your site, consider using a subdomain. I’ve been watching a client’s competitor’s website that’s using subdomains for different countries for a while now (all English content). Each subdomain has unique content and its own link profile. I strongly suspect from watching them climb the rankings that those subdomains are adding authority to the root domain. See here for help with blog writing.
Answer questions on Answers websites
I’m not the first person to recommend doing this to get links to your site! The Yahoo Answers pages get indexed quickly and some hold high positions in the search results. Links are ‘no follow’ but I’m with the crowd that believes no follow links do have some value. There are more answers sites besides Yahoo Answers but it’s Yahoo that I use most.
You’ll need to get to Level 2 before the links you post are live, but once you’re there, all the links you’ve ever posted suddenly become live. I recommend you don’t spam but answer questions in different subject areas to those you’re trying to promote and don’t just link to your own site. Try and give really good answers as you’ll get picked for ‘best answer’ and you’ll get to Level 2 a lot quicker.
Scribd/Document sharing
Just signing up to Scribd, the document sharing site, allows you to add a profile link (and there are plenty of other doc sharing sites – try DocStoc, Google Docs, MS Office Online, Gazhoo.com). As well as profile links, doc sharing sites often let you put links in your documents – okay, not great for SEO but great for driving traffic if you get a popular article (I released one on tips for taking your GCSE exams around exam time and I’ve been really happy with the number of views – it includes a little promotion and a lot of good content).
Wikipedia and Wiki sites
Wikipedia lets you have a user page where you can stick some no follow links. I’m told they will be deleted if they are viewed as spam – so interact with Wikipedia, add some value to the community and you’ll likely keep your user page complete with links which I have. Don’t add promotion-type links to Wikipedia’s pages themselves – they’ll be deleted as spam and you’ll lose your account with it, plus you just junk up what is a valuable resource for everyone else.
Article websites
Since Google’s PANDA update, there’s been a lot of talk about article websites being of less value. This may be the case, but it’s hard to ignore that Ezine still has a PR of 6 and there are plenty of article websites that still have high PRs. Look at their traffic rank too.
To date, I’ve had 30,659 views on Ezine with 12,470 of those on a single article entitled ‘Separate Legal Personality of a Company’. Traffic from the 35 articles I have live (linking to various different sites) is around 600 visits a month and growing. Even if my links are worth nothing, I’m happy with that stream of traffic for the little bit of effort I’ve put in, in creating the articles.
TIP: If you already use article marketing, check back over your old articles and make sure all your resource links point to sites you’re actually promoting.
Social networking sites
There’s plenty of social sites where you can get a link – Facebook pages/groups, Bebo, MySpace – these sites often allow you a link back to your website. You can use a service like Ping.FM or Amplify to update them all at once. Ping.FM has a good number of sites it works with which gives you more ideas for places you can get links from.
Photo sharing sites often let you have a profile link too – do upload a few decent pics as a minimum to make your account worthwhile though.
Forums
People often say forum links are low value. Sure, they can be – but I still see forum threads appearing high in Google’s search results for some topics. It’s like anything else – post up quality content – answers to questions, helpful information – and the thread may well get noticed.
There are two ways to get links in forums – the first is easy, sign up, create a profile and add your website link. It’s a little naughty but you can get stacks of links just doing this, albeit low value ones, without interacting in the forum itself, although if you never post up you sometimes see the account being deleted. Another thing to watch is that those profiles aren’t always visible if you’re not logged in, in which case they have no search engine value. The second way is through signature links – you’ll often find restrictions on these, like you can’t have one until you’ve made 50 or so decent posts.
Don’t spam forums with links though – you’ll lose your account and lose all the links you’ve built on there with it.
Blogs
You can get high value links posting comments on decent blogs. Again, don’t be tempted to spam them, it’ll just get removed. If you offer a sincere comment of value, it’s less likely to be deleted.
Industry specific sites
Search for industry-specific sites that allow you to register as most will let you pop a link in your profile! You can then of course create further links by submitting articles/press releases, contributing in the forum, and creating quality content just for them (guides, reviews, etc).
Google local
If you’re not already on Google local, get your business (or your client’s business) on there, along with the website link it gives you.
Business associations
You’ll find plenty of these online – search for business associations in your local area that work to promote local businesses. They often let you have a listing, with a link back to your website. Some of these you have to pay for so consider the value of the site (link profile, traffic) before you shell out the annual membership.
Business directories
FreeIndex and TouchLocal are two examples of business directories where you can have a link to your website. FreeIndex lets you build deep links to product landing pages which is handy. If you can get customers reviewing your site, you’ll get bumped up the listings. Yell also offers a listing with a website link.
There are thousands of other ‘business directories’ but these are frequently very low value. There’s a pretty good list here which you can order by PR: Directory critic. Here’s a better quality list that’s more of a review. The links will be more valuable if they’re relevant to your business so search for terms like ‘keyword’ + ‘add URL’, ‘keyword’ + ‘add website’, and so on, to find relevant directories which will be worth more. Stay away from paid directories unless the payment is genuinely to consider to be included (not guaranteed) – Google’s advice is not to buy a link unless it’s no follow, and I’d stick to that.
Squidoo lens
Squidoo has an awesome domain authority and I’ve seen lenses we’ve created get very good rankings and decent traffic as a result. Build a decent quality lens and get people to ‘like’ it to get it climbing up the rankings. You can also use HTML to drop a website link into the profile section on the right hand side of every lens. Sadly, Squidoo have made sections of the lenses ‘no follow’ – but not all of them.
Other sites like Squidoo
More and more sites like Squidoo are springing up all the time – check out Hub Pages, Wikinut, Wizzley. See here for help with building Squidoo lenses and other similar types of pages.
Sponsored reviews
It’s great to get external feedback on your website and one way of doing this is through sponsored reviews. A review on a high profile website (sponsored or otherwise) can bring you recognition and traffic from both search engines and readers. Sponsored reviews, such as those offered by SponsoredReviews.com, are a bit of a grey area in SEO and if you want to go down this route, you’d do well to follow Google’s guidelines on paid links. If you pay someone to review your website, product or service, you can:
- Insist that they add rel=”nofollow” to any link they make to your site – instantly, this is okay with Google.
- Ask that any links are redirected to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.
These measures are taken directly from Google’s webmaster guidelines. If you purchase reviews that include a link and these guidelines aren’t followed, you risk a penalty.
Linkbait
I love the idea of links that build themselves. Create a good enough article or something valuable to people and they WILL link to it, saving you the trouble of running round searching for links yourself. Link bait can include videos, articles, games, scripts, widgets, free stuff like website templates and graphics. Try and keep what you’re giving away relevant to your website – for example, if you’re a coffee shop and you want to give away a website template with a link back to your site in the footer, at least make it a coffee themed template!
When it comes to creating content, you need to put stuff together that isn’t available elsewhere, or create a sort of ‘101’ that pools lots of ideas together (rather like this one!), giving due credit for any brilliant ideas you include that come from other people. Being provocative, controversial or a contrarian about a particular topic can also get you attention.
Sales listings
I’m not suggesting you create these just for links but if your business (or your client’s business) sells stuff on eBay, make sure you link back to your main website. The same goes for job advertisements and any other online advert. It all counts.
Affiliate links
Running an affiliate program means not only do you get other people promoting your site for you but you also get affiliates linking to your site from theirs. Sometimes these have a value with link juice, not always – otherwise, they drive traffic to your site.
Press attention
Some press release sites will allow you to pop links in your articles (although often you can’t specify the anchor text) – you usually have to pay to post a release or for an annual account. Some of these sites have a high PR – journalism.co.uk for example has a PR of 6. I’ve noticed Nexis news feed pick up content from Instablogs before (free to create an account and post) currently with a PR of 5. Other sites for submitting press releases include: http://wn.com/ and http://www.pressonshd.com (Do you know of any more?)
Don’t make the mistake of distributing the same news article all over the web as well as putting it on your client’s site. I’m currently looking after a client who does this (they simply don’t have the time or budget to rewrite) and their articles are ranked higher on other sites than the news section of their website. I worry that one day Google will give them a penalty for having duplicate content on their site – even though it’s actually theirs!
Bookmarking
Although not strictly linking, bookmarks do draw attention to the content of your sites – getting Google and the other engines to index it quicker. It also has the potential to drive some nice traffic your way. Look out for those cheeky profile links – Clipmarks for example allow you to pop a link in your profile. Don’t spam – bookmark other sites too, or you may find your account is deleted. Here’s some to try: Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Tagza, Bibsonomy, Buddymarks, Folkd, Mylinkvault, Jumptag, a1 webmarks, Delicious, Faves, Diigo, Clipmarks. I’ve had some fair traffic from Stumbleupon with 400 or so daily uniques from this source for some of our articles – you can see the peaks below in this one website’s traffic graph when we have released articles (this shows traffic purely from Stumbleupon).
Video sites
If you can create even a single video, you can get links from all over the place including YouTube and Vimeo. You can make videos of your screen (for example to demo how software works) using free software like CamStudio if you don’t have a video camera. Mark your videos up using something like RDFa and use video sitemaps for extra exposure. Don’t forget to set up your profile links on any sites you submit your video to.
Reviews/testimonies
People like it when you review their products or services. Do a good job and you’ll get links to your review. Don’t forget to let them know!
Finally…
It’s likely that Google will move further and further towards a model that counts only high quality links – reviews and in-content – as indicators of a quality site. So your long term strategy should focus on obtaining these, but that’s not to say you should ignore everything else – and don’t forget that Google isn’t the only search engine. It’s also worth remembering that links are likely to take a back seat as a ranking factor over time, with quality content being by far more important – check out this article by Dr. Pete. But for now, links are still important so happy link building, I hope my ideas are helpful.
That’s it for now. If you’ve got any more ideas of where you can get links, high and low quality, please share them below.
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