To use link building strategies or not to use them, that is the question?

Link Building has been in the news a lot lately. For us, it peaked around MozCon 2015 where representatives from the major search engines specifically stated that you should NOT practice link building. From there, many people took to Twitter voicing their support for this decision and others stating that they will continue to use link building strategies regardless if the search engines say don’t do it.

How we see building.

We don't do link building - period! 

Why?

We don't want to waste your money.

Most importantly about link building?

Link building is prohibited by the search engines and they will penalize your website for doing it. How you ask? One way is losing your site's search rankings and credibility. Heavy black hat link building can get your site banned by the search engines.

Link building is ineffectual these days. It takes many hours to get one link curated by one author. Some authors do their best to keep their contact information safe so they can not be solicited.  Putting the majority of your time in trying to get links to your content is not the right way to spend your efforts. For every 1 link that get's curated, how many hours upon hours have been used to reach out and connect with authors and webmasters by writing a personalized mail to them? 

Naturally being linked to by others, who admire your content and want to share it, is absolutely fine. It's great sign that your content is high quality and is reaching its audience. However, we want to focus on areas that can give you SEO results more quickly. We don't want to throw money at a big "maybe" that is —to be honest— annoying to many authors. 

Remember telemarketers? Many don't like them and that is what you will most likely sound like when reaching out. 

There are different levels of link building

Outreach

This is where a webmaster will try to reach out to authors of other websites and try to get a link back to their website. They will target articles that may be mentioning or talking about a subject that their product or service does.

Link Repositioning or Improving Anchor Text

This is not as bad as the first one. This is where another author has already mentioned your brand, product, or service and they have a link to your website. Asking them to make a slight change to the anchor text or even the page that they are linking to may not meet with such apprehension as asking for a link outright. 

The reason for an easier gain is because it can help make their article better. If your link can offer them a more accurate or better additional information, they will like it. For example, if they talk about one of your products, yet they link to your homepage, it would be more beneficial for them to link to that specific product. 

So what can you do for link building on your own website?

Instead of reaching out for links, focus on making your internal linking structure better to give your users a better user experience.

End the "click here" for internal links

This anchor text doesn't provide any more help at all. Sometimes other authors use that. It's odd that the creative juices can stop at this point as we still see authors saying "Click Here for more information." For the search engines, they don't see any value in these. It's better to have the specific text linked directly in the article.

For example, "The PRODUCT can clean your car with ease!"  where "Product" can actually be linked to the information page instead of following up with a sentence like "Click here for more information on PRODUCT" with 'Click here' linked.  

Are you getting contacted by link building companies?

Feel free to contact us today to see if we can get your website more visitors from qualified traffic without lost time and money.