Since it becomes clear that the future of SEO relies on organic links, natural links, high quality links or any other term you know them by, we’ve decided to compile a comprehensive list with some amazing organic link building articles. Personally, they’ve added value to my knowledge and some have a different perspective from what I’ve written about organic link building.

1. 15 Types of Content That Will Drive You More Traffic

2. The Complete Guide To Building Your Blog Audience

3. How Content Marketing Affects Search Engine Rankings

4. White Hat SEO Case Study: 348% More Organic Traffic in 7 Days

5. 7 Ways to Protect Your Site Against Google’s Next Update

6. Turning Keywords Into SEO Content

7. Link Building Case Study: How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days

8. The Art of Link Earning

9. Creating Authoritative Content Without Client Input

10. Evolve Or Die – Why SEO & Tiered Link Building Has Changed In 2014

11. How To Steal Your Competitors Best Content & Use It Against Them

12. How I Built A Top 100 Blog In 12 Months & How You Can Do It Too!

12. The Power of Authors and Content for Link Building

13. 12 Scalable Link-Building Tactics

14. The End of Link Building as we Know It

15. The Blueprint to Content Marketing Success

16. Remarketing: How to Make Your Content Marketing and SEO up to 7x More Awesome

17. Link Building Resolutions for 2014

18. What is a Natural Backlink Portfolio? | Understanding Natural Links

19. Six Explosive Organic & Paid Link Building Tips

20. After Guest Blogging…What’s Left for “Safe” Link Building?

21. 5 Creative Link Building Techniques for 2014

22. How to Leverage Your Content to Build Links Without Gaming Google

23. SEO is Dead: Long Live OC/DC

24. What to Do If Your Great Content Isn’t Getting Found

25. Building Relationships (and Links) from Natural Content

26. From Link Building to Link Earning: 3 Ways to Transition

27. Top 8 Google Analytics Reports for Managing Organic SEO Campaigns

28. The Future of Link Building: 5 Important Messages

29. Creative Link Building Ideas For Really Boring Webistes

30. Link Building at The Speed of Natural

31. How to Analyze a Link: Link Building Basics

32. Link Building Fundamentals To Future-Proof Your Online Business

33. 14 Link Resolutions For 2014

34. Referring Links: An Untapped Treasure Trove of Visitor Intent Data

35. Top Search Marketing Trends of 2014

36. Using Social Media to Earn Links

37. Building Relationships, Not Links: Why Guest Blogging Will Never Die

38. How to be Creative in Link Building

39. What People and Data Have to do with Link Building

40. How Relationships Work in Link Building

41. Is this the End of Guest Blogging?… Not for Me!

42. How to write Better Blog Comments

43. Alternative Outreach Methods for Link Building: Thinking Creatively

44. Google’s Love/Hate Relationship with Links

45. I’m Not a Link Builder, I’m a Link Artist!

46. 3 Ways to Inadvertently Sabotage Your SEO

47. Blog SEO for the Modern Marketer: How to Optimize Your Posts

48. Learning SEO From The Experts

49. How to Guest Blog Effectively (Without Angering the SEO Gods)

50. Easy (and Ethical) Strategies for Link Earning

51. How to Improve Your Website’s Rank through Organic Link Building – Not available anymore

52.How Links Impact Authority And Build The Highways To Your Content – Not available anymore

53. Google SEO Best Practices – How to Keep Google Happy

54. How to Grow Your Website Traffic Without Building Links

55. Get Organic Links in Three Simple Steps

56. 3 Examples of Content Marketing Earning Awesome Links

57. 5 Best Practices for Effective Organic Link Building

58. Adjusting Your SEO Strategy For A Post-Hummingbird World

59. SEO for Start-Ups: 3 Powerful Tips for Driving SEO Traffic Early On

Do you have any other articles that you would like to include in this list? Please share them in the comments 😉

Photo credits: 1

The post 59 Amazing Organic Link Building Articles appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Now these strategies that we are about to present are absolutely within Google’s guidelines and viable for the current year. They were created from the Google driven mentality that the links should appear organically. To quote Matt Cutts who stated:

“The objective is not to make your links appear natural; the objective is that your links are natural”

At competitive level, you just can’t survive with shady SEO strategies. This ain’t another league, it’s another game! So without further ado, let’s start talking about the strategies that will help you dominate the SERPs in 2014:

1. Link Earning

It’s essential for everything you do in 2014 regarding SEO to realize that you should earn links. We’ve talked before about creating organic links and how the content that you create on your site or on other sites should bring real value to the user that sees it. That way you’re not only gaining links but also you’re getting  traffic from people interested in what you have to offer. Getting high quality traffic for your website is what you should aim for.

In order to earn those high quality links from websites with authority you need to start producing content that is interesting enough for both your target audience and influencers. It has to make them tick!

You’ll have to find the right balance to incite them to share your content or browse through your website. You’ll need to scour the internet for hot and engaging topics on your area of interest. Also, you shouldn’t just assume content, even if it’s relevant to the users. You need to process and analyze it, then give it a new spin before revealing it to your audience.

Make your audience read and digest the content from a better perspective! Be unique!

Earned links are usually generated in a natural matter. They are 100% organic and may be considered of high quality. Link earning is not some technique in which you seek to obtain links from websites with great authority. You need to go through all the steps of the process, from the development of content ideas, to the sharing and to the engagement. Once you’ve set the process in motion, the results should start rolling. From backlinks and social signals to new website visitors and higher rankings in search engines.

2. Generate Interest

It’s in your best interest that every action that you do should have a final purpose. And that purpose should either be to create brand awareness, custom educations or satisfaction or to generate sales. However, you’re not going to do that simply by pushing the same monochrome sales proposition over and over again onto the internet and hope people will be hypnotized by it.

The equation is simple – the more you talk, the more people are going to read “you and refer “you”, resulting in more and more visitors.

Everything seems all rainbows and sunshine but it’s quite intricate to get from one position to another. I will try to cement the theoretical information with facts. For example, let’s take the case of a e-commerce site that sells watches. To avoid spamming other websites with links that are placed out of context, you should interact organically by creating discussions or intervening in them. You can see in the picture below an example on what kind of sites link back to the “watch” site. Forums >> Genuine People are talking about watches on internet forums, meaning that this site generates a lot of interest among its potential buyers. You should focus on forums and other platforms where there are debates related to your area. Try and interact with communities that have shared interests with you and that have questions regarding products that you sell.

This is a legitimate strategy which helps and also helps potential customers find the answers that they seek. You draw interest to your website and in the process you’re creating a stronger brand image and a profile of organic links. You don’t have to focus necessary on placing links wherever you post. Even though you’ll obtain quality links that are placed in content, your main plan shouldn’t be building links.

3. Generate Relevant Topical Category Links

Well, if you’re set on earning those links pointing to your site and you’re going to engage in conversations and generate interest in your site over on forums there’s one thing you need to keep in mind. You need to keep it professional. For the sake of continuity we’ll use the same example with the watch e-commerce site.

You’ll want to learn more about your potential customer and dig for some insights.

Who uses watches and what content are they interested in ? Your best bet would be to get links from business and tech categories as depicted in the image below. These sites are relevant to you and your customers.

You need to aim for the right category of websites if you want to get traffic from potential customers. In the end, it’s not about seeing big numbers on your screen and getting great rankings in the search engines. It’s about addressing to the right audience through the proper channels. That’s why you need to research and find out more about your target audience and what relevant website categories they are active on so you won’t waste time and resources attracting the wrong crowd. In 2014, when talking about white hat SEO strategies, you’ll see that everything is about being strongly related on relevancy and creating connections that are helpful for the customer.

Conclusion

Big changes have been brought to SEO in the last years. They not only added something new to the game, they changed everything. The strategies seem harder to implement but it’s worth paying the price. With these type of strategies you’ll be able to not only dominate the SERPs in 2014, you’re also going to have a stronger brand image and your products will become authentic and trustworthy in the eyes of your target audience.

What are the white hat SEO strategies you think are going to be successful in 2014 ?

The post 3 White Hat SEO Strategies to Dominate the SERPs in 2014 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

The algorithms developed by Google seem to be going in the direction that they planned for. Given the fact that they are always trying to stay ahead of the curve, Google releases update after update. Their ideal goal is to make the search results impossible to alter for the ill intentioned “SEO”. Since links are one of the most important ranking factors in the algorithm, Google has to find a way to make it harder for the webmaster to influence it. Any good SEO campaign requires some sort of link building strategy, which is no trivial task to perform. That’s why, over the years, there’s been a lot of abuse to generate links. In most cases Google adapted and dissolved those tactics.

We’ve talked on multiple occasions about tactics used to generate links, most of them condemned by Google and some that still work in 2014.

The common denominators for which all of these strategies were dubbed unnatural are excess and abuse. You can clearly understand why they want to destroy the old link hunting mentality. Take a look at Matt Cutts’ latest decision of hitting guest blogging. Guest blogging went from being a valuable source of insights for  professionals to a link building tactic used for the sole purpose of acquiring links. Matt Cutts clearly expressed that this is only about Guest Blogging for SEO.

The Reverse Psychology of Obtaining Links in 2014

All website owners and SEO specialists want to build links and at the same time run alongside Google.

“Old School” Link Building Mentality – Spend lots of time to obtain links & become more relevant in  the SERPs.

“Nowadays” Link Building Mentality – Create relevant & engaging content in order to build a reputation in the community, and get your site linked.

It’s been a lot of talk about how content creates links that will boost your rankings for your desired keywords. If done right, the content from your site draws interest, not only from influencers but from all sort of people from your niche. And when people start talking about you and you’re going to get mentions and links. Building your authority in the eyes of Google means that Google starts trusting you in terms of the topic your are usually writing about and it will boost your rankings even without “rich anchor text” pointing at your pages.

Links are the by-product of a long chain of marketing processes!

One would consider putting an equality sign between content and links, but it wouldn’t be justified. If you’re only pursuing a higher ranking in Google’s search results, you just don’t have to go for all the trouble of creating quality content and promoting it. And you’re probably not going to be satisfied with the short-term results. Creating quality content is more of a long-term strategy and you won’t be able to see the results right away.

We’re living in a “here and now” society and we like to see results right away. That’s why it’s so hard to grasp a concept that seems so vague, as content marketing!

The Imminent Dangers of Link Building in 2014

Slightly fading away, link building still exists in some forms. But Google gets too impatient with this form of “link building” and started to penalize sites, either through algorithmic or manual actions. They even do it for a couple of unnatural links. They had enough with link chasing and trading, and they want to abolish the concept of “link acquisition for SEO”  forever. That is why they took the “penalize” route and not the “ignore” route. They could simply ignore irrelevant links, but it seems that their purpose is to make it very clear that these kind of “link building strategies” are not tolerated.

It may be that Google doesn’t even care how many big or small sites they hurt with their algorithm updates. Google will push forward with their changes, if they think it’s in the best interest of the user to help him get relevant and qualitative search results.

As “SEO focused” people, we’re constantly disputing the ways Google “appreciates” whether a site is relevant or not for a specific topic or query. Before taking your torches and pitchforks I need to remind you that they are the one of the biggest authorities in relevance modeling. If you want to rank in Google, you have to embrace their reality as your own, or else you might end up on the other side of the road. Matt Cutts was talking about link building in an interview in 2012 stating: “It segments you into a mindset, and people get focused on the wrong things”. The conclusion is that Google doesn’t want you to search for “link building strategies” just for the sake of increasing your rankings.

Link Building Becomes Brand Building

While a few years back a SEO Professional was clearly focused on optimizing sites for the search engines through specific technical methods mostly, today we see SEO specialists using information from other related domains such as copywriting, branding, public relations and content marketing. It’s pretty clear that SEO is transcending into a form of marketing which borrows knowledge from areas around.

Everywhere you look around, you will see more advice on long-term strategies and less about short-term techniques.

You don’t see anymore tips on how to create links but rather on how to create engagement and promote your brand on the internet.

Your link building techniques shouldn’t be about focusing on link building solely anymore. The goal is to create a strong reputation in your niche and to establish yourself as an influencer and an active participant. If you’re going to be keen on respecting this essential objective you will also get those desired links that will boost your rankings, in the end.

Conclusion

Link building is quickly changing and shaping up to be something much more evolved and intricate.

The “chemistry of creating links” has changed a lot over the years and it will continue to evolve!

The formula for SEO is definitely much more complex now, and it requires more elaborate planning. Even though Google is trying to label “link building”  as outdated and creating an aura of salvation around relevant content, they didn’t fully uncovered the recipe for future unbiased rankings. Increasing your link profile was always a tricky task for an SEO and that’s why they jumped from one viable link building tactic to another.

Google made it’s best to render link building techniques useless and we’ve all seen the wrath when it comes to punishing those who don’t abide to Google’s Guidelines. If you want to rank in Google, it’s best that you stop struggling to find ways of “manufacturing” links and embrace the long-term Brand Building techniques.

What’s your view on the future of link building?

The post Link Building in 2014 and Beyond appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Hopefully this comic will give you some insight. Enjoy!

The post Un[Natural] Link Building in 2014 – Cartoon appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

A natural/organic link is not necessarily “the opposite of the unnatural link”. It is much more than that.

And although unnatural links are in fashion, maybe its time to put the spotlight on the organic links.

What is a Natural Link?

Natural links refer to those links that are put on websites without a direct intention of influencing the rankings of Google (at least from the POV of Google). These are called natural links because they haven’t been elicited in any way. As mentioned in the Webmaster Tools Help, Google considers to be a vote of confidence a link that page A makes to page B. These “votes”, usually,  help your site rank higher in the search engine. The thing is that this vote, the link, has to be made naturally, meaning that you don’t have to influence in any way someone’s decision to link to you. Shortly, natural link building means that no explicit agreement to exchange or place links was done.

Natural Links are an investment that will pay dividends on the long term!

You might be stuffed with it, but let me illustrate the natural/unnatural dilemma with an example from politics. Elections are in full swing and you, the citizen, have to decide which mayor would be the best for your city. Your vote will be considered sincere and also legal only if your choice will be made solely because you agree with someone’s political agenda or you think that a certain person fits best the role of the mayor of your city. If a candidate or someone from his staff try to “buy” your vote with money or by offering you goods or services, that vote won’t be based on that candidate’s political qualities anymore, will it? That vote will not be relevant and might also bring some legal consequences. The same things apply when it comes to natural links. They need to be obtained organically, without anyone trying to manipulate the situation.

Natural Link Synonyms

Natural links may be found “in the wild” under the following names:

• organic links
• good links
• ok links
• high quality links
• Google friendly links

Why “Natural” & “Link” in the same phrase?

Talking about a “natural” link building strategy might sound like an oxymoron. As they first appear, links were all natural and even now, links are supposed to be natural, right? Yes, I feel the hand of reality slapping me, so allow me to rephrase that.

As the digital world got bigger and bigger, webmasters began to feel smaller and smaller. Site owners started to feel insignificant if not lost in the incredibly large web. The need to create link strategies that will speed up the process and put webmasters in their dream place, the search engines’ first page, increased proportionally with the digital world.

For someone to naturally click on the most relevant site for his search query would mean that he would know all the content from all the sites that exist.

Pretty utopian, isn’t it? How the “natural” process really goes is that users link to the most relevant sites they find from a predefined list of webpages. They don’t really give their vote of confidence to the site with the best content that there is but to the one that is most relevant to him from “the short list” of webpages which is available. With almost 80% of users clicking on links that they find on the very first page of a search engine’s responses, everybody wants to be on that list. Who designs those “short lists”? Algorithms do. The people behind those algorithms are continually seeking to improve their ability in identifying which sites are to be trusted and which not. The sites that appear on the “short list” may be the ones that know how to “dance” along with the ranking factors and not necessary the ones with the most relevant content for a certain matter.

Google’s algorithm job is to spot signals of naturalness. The webmaster’s job is to act as natural as possible. But what happens when the algorithm changes? An action that was considered natural until then can pass as unnatural now. Huge amounts of money are being lost or won based on the algorithm’s rules. It’s a cycle that repeats every day, week, month, year. I think the Ralph Tegtmeier (aka @fantomaster) puts the finger on the problem in the following video:

Link Earning

The concept of link earning puts together all the qualitative efforts that a webmaster does in order to gain organic links. The key to this strategy might be crafting your content for your readership and not for Google. The new SEO context might oblige us to forget about link building and start focusing more and more on link earning.

Here are some methods of earning links:

• Generate original information

A good place where you can put your effort into is original analysis and research. Netizens are more than glad to find out new, interesting things. If you really dig in to find something and you generate interesting facts, you are more likely to get links. We’re doing this a lot at cognitiveSEO, so, let the links come to us! 🙂 The good part with generating original research is that it is not just about linking, it is about sticking in someone’s mind or making a really big difference in a specific area.

You must create content that you yourself would go out of your way and read.

• Be active in social media

Think of where people spend most of their time. That’s right; on Facebook, Tweeter, Google+, etc. If your users spend 4 hours a day on facebook, maybe you should start spending some time there too. You don’t have to just wait for your possible customers to come to you, you may need to pay them a visit. Being active in social media can pay off in lots of ways, not just links. You get to know your target and you can also find new opportunities for your business.

• Share your knowledge

Yes, “how to’s” and tutorials is what I am talking about. If you’ve managed to do something or you discovered how to make something faster or easier, you could help other people by making a tutorial about it. It will be highly appreciated in the online world. Even if you don’t get the pile of links you were hoping for, but you will bring exposure to your brand.

Content for the “Long tail ” only needs a couple of link to rank high.

As I mentioned before, sometimes it’s not just about the links; it’s about having a resource that no one else has. In the long run it will pay off.

• Community Building

Community building is a long term investment that will pay off on the long term.

You can obtain natural links from creating content that is not only relevant and useful but that will have the power to attract links from bloggers, people from forums, blog comments, etc.

• Answer Questions Online

I am talking about answering the many questions people have in the online world. On a forum, for instance, you can answer to a question about how to get rid of some spyware. If your answer will bring the solution or any added value, the community will appreciate. It is likely that they remember that you “saved” them in some situation and most likely they will reword you with a link. So, helping other people can be a big way to do it. Don’t expect to win the Nobel Peace Prize but you may expect an investment that will pay dividends on the long term.

• Offer a Free Service to Your Community

Run a service that people find really useful or something that improves others’ experience in the digital world. For instance, you can create a browser extension. I am sure that you are familiar with the AdBlock extension. This extension is an open source that generated millions of downloads and a pretty nice amount of money made from donations. As you can see, people are grateful and willing to pay off as long as their experience as a user is improved. What is great about offering a service is that you can do the work once and on the long term lots of people will pay you off in links.

Techniques that Don’t Involve Great Content

It is hard to say that there are techniques that won’t rely great content. Let’s see, though, what we can find in this field:

• Controversy

You don’t have to be a tabloid to obtain buzz and links. You don’t have to make a profession out of gossiping or hating everybody either but some controversy might give you a boost of traffic now and then.

Done with measure, some controversy generates a lot of links but is not a long term strategy.

There will be a boost in the beginning but at some point, people will pay less and less attention to you. You don’t want to be like the boy that cried “wolf” and afterwards, no one believed him anymore. If you always get busy with saying “look at me, I am being loud, you have to pay a lot of attention to me”, you may irreparably lose your authority and credibility.

• Site Architecture

I know it may sound common but sometimes we tend to take for granted the little things. You have to make sure that your site has a good site architecture. What is the easiest way to find out? Answer to these questions: Can your site be crawled? Can your site be bookmarked? Can Google or the user get to all the pages on your site? If the answer to these questions is “no” or “I don’t know for sure”, you need to take a look at your site before doing anything else. If your site is broken your changes of being linked at are almost Zero.

• Offline Activities and Branding

Being hooked in the online world we often forget about the great opportunities that the offline world brings. If you forgot about outdoor and smart unconventional advertising and brand building, it’s a good time you bring them back into your playground.

• Newsletters

Another way in which you can drive traffic, conversions and ultimately links are  Newsletters. They might look a bit out of fashion but they still work. This way you make it easier for your public to have your information show up in their inbox and, therefore, easier to click on it.

Common Mistakes

You did everything by the book, but the results don’t look as you expected. So, what could have possible happened? I’ll list three common mistakes that may occur in the “link zone”.

1. You were too busy creating a link building strategy

Your job is not just creating a link building strategy. If your main activity will be focused on building links for search engines, you are cutting off a lot of avenues.

Before being preoccupied with how to get links, you have to build something really attractive, a reason why people would want to link to you.

After you managed that, don’t forget that there is more than the online world. There is a broader area of offline marketing out there that can bring you the links you wish for. You need to get rid of the tunnel vision focused on just links and start marketing your website without thinking about search engines but about your consumer instead.

You use the wrong keywords on your site.

For instance, you’ve just opened a great sushi restaurant in Manhattan. You don’t want to just say “sushi” but you want to include words like “where do I find the best sushi in Manhattan” etc, because it is very likely for people to search for “sushi manhattan”. Think about what the user is going to type and include those words on your page. You need to do a proper keyword research for your own site. Also, let’s say you have a car service shop. Post a list with all the services you have to offer on your site but not in a jpg or pdf format, but in plain text. Put your business hours on your page. It is very likely for people to look for a car service open till late and you might be the one who offers this service;

That piece of information can generate a link and, further on, a client.

You’ve messed up the title or the description of your page

You want to have something that people will actually click on when they see it on the search results.

What is your home page title? If, for instance, I am going to bookmark it, will I easily understand later what was really about or is the title not very suggestive? Also, your description will show up in the snippet and that synopsis can be a link generator or, on the contrary, a turn off for the user.

Conclusion

It is hard to tell whether a 100% natural link building strategy will get you on the first pages of the search engine in a favorable period of time. But one thing is for sure: while techniques and strategies come and go, organic links will always remain.

Everything you are doing is first of all for the audience and not for the search engines.

There is no (or shouldn’t be) such a thing as a manual on how to build links organically, or how to create the exact type of content that results in valuable links. There are some guidelines you need to follow and some directions you can track that can help you have a natural, worry- free link profile.

Photo credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The post Organic Links – What they are and How to get them? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Genuine Guest Posting works by engaging with audiences that are interested in your content.

Guest posting is still widely used as a “link building tool”, for generating contextually relevant links. When it is mostly used  as a “link building tool”, it will eventually blow up in your face with a Google Penalty.

Penalties for mass scale and shady guest blogging will surely come in the near future.  As Matt Cutts says in the following video:

There’s definitely a lot of abuse and growing spam that we see in the guest blogging space.

Regardless of the spam technique people are using from month to month we’re always looking at what sort of things are started to be more and more abused. We’re always willing to respond to that and take the appropriate action to make sure the users get the best set of search results.

The first thing that would trigger a guest blogging penalty will surely be a high amount of guest blog do-follow links pointing to your site.

In order to be prepared for any future penalties related to Guest Blogging we added to cognitiveSEO, a new detection pattern that we named:

“Author Signature”

Good Author Signature Example.

Spammy Author Signature Example

Now, when we crawl your entire link profile we will also search for footprints that are found in the signature that is usually found on Guest Posts.

Here is a research that I have done on some random sites that I picked up.

Qudos-animations.co.uk

This site has a mixed link acquisition strategy. It is mostly related to blog commenting, widgets and guest posts. As you can see 14% of the links are coming from guest posts.  This includes both do-follow and no-follow links.

Here is low quality guest post that has commercial anchor text also. It is clear the intent of this post and it is from any point of view an unnatural link.

Another guest post from this site is this one.

The intent of this guest post was not only to get a link but it is contextually relevant post about using video in the pharma markets.

I would rate this as a great post, except the fact that the link is a do-follow link, which puts it in the list of links that might raise a red-flag to Google.

But maybe this site has the majority of the guest post links coming from No-Follow links. Let’s see:

It’s not the case. They have 19% of the all the do-follow links coming from Guest-Posts. So it is clear that this is a used with high priority as a “link building tool”.

Manifestconnection.com

This is another site that uses the “guest posting” as a “link building strategy” only.

To understand this we need to look at the following charts:

All Live Links

We see a big chunk of backlinks are coming from author signatures. We filter by Do-Follow and we get this:

Live + Do-Follow Links Only

We see an even bigger majority of links coming from guest posts and they are posted on both blogs and article directories.

To quickly get an idea about the quality of these posts I just browse around and here are some examples:

and

We can easily see the link building intent on these guest posts with commercial anchor text. The quality of both the sites that these are posted on and of the actual content is quite low.

These kind of strategies will surely be penalized, if they are not already.

In order to best manage your Guest Blogging Risk, that of being penalized in the future for the shady guest blogging stuff that you did in the past, you should be aware of the following:

• How much of my link profile is made out of Guest Blog links?
• How many are No-follow/Do-follow?
• How many use Commercial anchor text?

Once you know this you can protect your site by taking action prior to a future penalty:

• Start diluting your link profile with high quality natural links, in order to minimize the impact of the shady Guest Blog links in your link profile.
• Change some of the Commercial Guest Post links in your link profile. Switch the links to No-Follow or change the Commercial Anchor Text used. These are potential major triggers to a future guest blogging penalty. Dilute them!

If you want to stay on the safe side, I would recommend following these principles:

• Do not use Guest Blogging as a mass scale “link building tool”.
• If you often link to your site form Guest Posts use no-follow links as much as you can. (you need to remember that the purpose of your guest post is to build awareness & engagement … not juicy ranking links)
• Rarely use Commercial Anchor Text in you Guest Post links that are pointing to your site.
• Do not guest blog the same article on different sites.
• Do not piss people off with “blind guest blog” request.

And don’t forget this one:

Guest Post on relevant sites mostly.

So now that you know all this stuff, you should analyze your site and understand your “Guest Blogging” link profile risk.

By the way, you can check your competitors also and be informed if they are in a safe or risky situation.

You could do this manually, but it would take ages.

We specially created this feature for you, so that you could easily understand the risk you or your competitors are facing when the Guest Post Google Update will come.

14 day Free Trial!

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post How to manage your “Guest Blogging” Risk – Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

We will be discussing advanced links related stuff. Here are some of the topics:

• Link Building Remembering (2000 … 2012)
• What Link Building Strategies still work in 2013
• What will the Link Landscape look like in 2014 and beyond
• Case Studies
• Q&A

A lot of HQ stuff here.

Enjoy your Watch!

Video Transcript

Razvan: Hello everyone! This is Razvan Gavrilas from cognitiveSEO and I have here Wiep Knol from wiep.net. He’s a well known link building master in the SEO industry for quite some time already. I’ll let him introduce himself, in the next couple of minutes and see what he has to say about himself. Wiep?

Wiep: Thank you, Razvan. My name is Wiep Knol, I’ve been into link building for over a decade now and used to do all kinds of different link building techniques and started as a spammer where my first task was to set up a few splogs and basically spam the web. It was the bad way to learn link building but it also was the good way because it taught me how not to do it. And from there on I’ve been doing it for over a decade now. Razvan you asked me to explain what link building should look like or will look like in the next upcoming years. I prepared a few slides which I’ll be happy to share and after that we can take any questions that Razvan will gather. Is that the correct setup Razvan?

Razvan: Yes I think so. So let’s start with an initial idea of yourself on how you see the link landscape now in 2013 compared to what it was when it started, what it was last year and how it will be in the next years.

Wiep: I’ll share my screen here. This is what you asked me to do, to take a look at the past, present and future of link building and I think one of the most important things that has being going on is Google’s slow, cold war against link building, well not link building itself but against the bad side of link building. I have to be honest and my view of Google’s actions hasn’t been very positive until recently and that’s when I figured out that Google has been taking actions but it’s mostly behind the screens and taken it at such a slow pace that you hardly notice it. But if you go back around 10 years which I call “The hidden era” of SEO of Link Building, that’s when everything was hidden. Hidden from users, not hidden from search engines but only shown to search engines and users wouldn’t see anything of it, cloaking, hidden links stuff like that. Google found out, took actions and people had to come more forward with directory link building, reciprocal links, link buying, widgets & quizzes, so links moved out of the background slowly more into the foreground. Links were noticeable by autoweb masters, regular uses, still a bit hidden but they’re trying to come up more. From there on you see that link building it’s coming up in the open. Guest posting preferably on well read blogs, infographics, media mentions, HQ content syndication, stuff like that. People are trying to get their contents opened and their links opened and visible to the public. And if you think about what the next stop would be, the next logical step, I think the only possible step for Google is to make it even more public. It’s what they have already been doing recently. It’s authorship, not to make them about websites anymore, but more about people, about people behind it, about products, about authors. And that’s because scalability, which link building has been until recently or still acts scalable but link building has been scalable a lot, so people could spam directories, mass send out reciprocal link requests, do forum spam, blog comments, a lot of scalable things that you could ultimate. Again Google’s actions slowly moving to less scalable tactics: paid links, guest posting, infographics, stuff like that is still scalable but not as scalable as the earlier tactics. From there on it’s basically spam control, by Google to move to less scalable tactics, and one of that would be authorship.Any form of scalability increases the change of leaving a footprint and when there are too many footprints certain tactics will eventually die and sink below surface. Does that mean that link building will become unscalable? I don’t think so. But you have to keep in mind that any form of scalability increases the risk of a tactic getting exploited. So if you are working on link building in a scalable way, that means that others can probably do that as well, and that eventually people who are trying to take too many shortcuts will get a whole of it and will ruin it for you and for basically many others. So think about it this way: What is the true value of a link, if it can be replicated very easily by others? Again the directory stuff, blog comments but also low quality guest posts, contents indication. If it can’t be replicated very easily, Google will probably not value it that much. So here are my killer link building tips for next year and for all years to come. But I don’t think that it’s the kind of tips that you want to hear.

Razvan: These are Halloween tips I think?

Wiep: Yes, kind of Halloween tips. You have to be creative, you have to be dedicated, you have to focus on networking, you have to be agile and more importantly fully integrate link building within your organization and to not try to scale things but try to be as efficient as possible within your own skill. And that doesn’t sound much more like link building anymore but like a lot of hard work. It’s not easy anymore. It’s not a button that you push and links suddenly start rolling in. But on the other hand nobody said that link building was easy and I think that link building has been moving away from the link building part to more the marketing part. One of the things that you have seen recently, popping up everywhere is content marketing, is that the next way to go? I don’t think that it should be content marketing but just making your regular marketing efforts search engine friendly. And content is just one part of it that most people didn’t use much for SEO for link building because there were other options away available and that’s why content marketing suddenly is the next big thing among link builders, among SEOs but it’s been usable for ever since Google started using links as an algorithmic as part of the algorithm. So before moving on to content marketing what about optimization first? And make your regular marketing search engine friendly? But also fully use the assets that you already have, your existing links, your network of people that you know, network of companies that you know, the content that you already have, or have laying around in your office instead of your website, stuff like that. I think that should be optimized first before you start thinking about content marketing and start basically copying what everybody else is doing and that’s something you should look first at. So…now on to the questions? Any questions from you about that Razvan? It was a little bit clear?

Razvan: Yes it’s clear. Do you think that SEO has becoming more of a PR thing or do you think that technical SEOs would still exist in the future? Or technical SEOs will practically be slowly dying let’s say, if that is an appropriate word.

Wiep: SEO in the exact form of the word I think it’s purely technical. It’s optimizing your contents for search engines and link building is slowly moving away from the technical part more to the marketing part of it. It should be search engine friendly as well…

Razvan: Do you think that Google is becoming better and better in term of discovering which site is important for what category with lower and lower needs for technical optimization of the site. So practically Google became smarter in identifying unnatural links, became smarter in identifying worthier content, became smarter in identifying authoritative sites, but it also became smarter in going through all the junk that is listed on these pages, because that’s the way that Google was practically able to become better. That was the question. Do you think that technical SEO will practically exist in the future and saying about 3 years from now.

Wiep: It will definitely exist, but more in terms like how do you serve 3 millions page websites to a search engine in the most optimum way. How do you make it croll it as efficiently as possible. But I don’t think that link building necessary is part of that.

Razvan: We have a question here from Prash who says: Do you have any advice on broken link building? So this is practically a manual link building activity. What do you suggest to Prash?

Wiep: Well broken link building is something that has been around for quite a while as well and used to be another hot topic, so it’s been used by lots of people as a link building tactic, so you have to be creative with it. It’s not about just only point out to use the link that is broken on your web page and please replace it with mine, because many web masters have been contacted that way.

Razvan: Ok, let’s see another question. So let’s take one of the questions that we had from yesterday. The first question is practically a longer question…the question I would like to ask, Max says: If a link is generated for example from a bookmark which is relevant to my business and which comes from a high PR bookmarking site or a link profile platform, also with good page rank, but the bookmarking site or the profile site could be specifically for a specific business niche which is not related to my business, yet the content from which the link a)high quality, b)relevant to my business. Would you say that it is still a good link or would you fear that Google, for example, would see such a link as a bad link despite good page rank and despite the good and relevant content.

Wiep: I don’t think that Google would see it as a bad link but I also don’t think that it will be seen as a good link, because it’s very easy to replicate by others. It is basically easy to get the links so the value wouldn’t be very high.

Razvan: This is a question from me: What’s your opinion in the level in which Google is able to identify SEO techniques used in different markets – international markets vs. local markets, which have lower popularity like smaller countries: Poland, Sweden and others. Do you think there is a delay in the algorithm that Google is practically applying to the sites?

Wiep: I think so. On one site is the algorithm, most of it is tested on the larger countries, so when it’s rolled out to other countries, the threshold of been marked as spam should be lowered but it should be tested first to see which level it should be lowered to. And on the other hand, there are not as many eyeballs focusing on smaller markets as there are for US or UK market. So spam it’s noticed but not as much as in the US or UK for example.

Razvan: A question from Roman: Any tips on link building for problematic niches like gambling?

Wiep: For gambling that’s a completely different game than regular link building.

Razvan: Why do you think it’s different?

Wiep: Because it’s more like a hidden niche.

Razvan: What do you mean by that hidden niche?

Wiep: It’s not a niche that most people talk about that publicly and be proud to share their examples.

Razvan: Something like adult…gambling it’s something more hidden from this point of view.

Wiep: Specifically in this industry, it’s good to take a thorough look at the industry as a whole, to take a look at their link profile to see that’s common sense or common tactics to use. For example, link buying is much more like a main stream tactic there than it is for example in travel.

Razvan: Do you have any exact strategy, for example that you would apply in this kind of hidden niche?

Wiep: I think I’d take a look at the industry as a whole and try to find out which tactics are being used a lot and to stay on the safe side of those tactics. So for example, gambling probably will have to use link buying, but do it in the safe kind of way that Google will have difficulties in finding it out algorithmically.

Razvan: A more generic question from a man: What link building strategies do you recommend? I mean what tactics.

Wiep: What tactics? It really depends on the budget that you have, on your industry, the history that you have. For example for a new website it’s completely different than for an established website. Are you in a small industry or are you targeting main stream, very competitive main stream keywords. Requires a very completely different approach.

Razvan: Let’s take the example of a small business. How should you approach the link building tactics. Let’s say there is a small business, they opened their business, they create their site, what things they should do in the first half a year, how they should move forward after that. Do you think it’s good to start with more SEO stuff in the beginning or do SEO after a half a year or a year or something like that.

Wiep: Specially for small businesses usually are run by people who do everything themselves, it’s more like a time management issue, than a link building issue. So I say you focus on your regular marketing, the things that you have to do anyway and try to incorporate link building there. So when you are talking to dealers, or suppliers, try to see if you can use that relationship that you already have, that you’re already maintaining to get links from there.

Razvan: That’s practically links that are hard to get by your competitors and are not easily replicable.

Wiep: And also links that there are relatively easy to get for you as well.

Razvan: You just need to be creative. But do you think it’s a good […] because there is a lot of confusion. People start their site and they think that Google will come and will send a lot of traffic and all this stuff. So they start to aggressively do SEO, so practically they over optimize everything they do: they over optimize their site, they over optimize link profile, they over optimize everything. Would you recommend to forget about SEO for a moment in the beginning and focus on the actual marketing part of the site and then try to re-optimize some of the little bits that would give them some more juice and power up their sites and engine.

Wiep: Yes, definitely. I think with SEO common sense you get a long way. And don’t try to get into the details, the over optimization details too soon, because it’s something that you could get so little benefit from if you compared it to the time they spend doing it.

Razvan: What do you think, Rollout inquires, I think, what’s your general approach on reaching out the 2 people. And do you have some tips based on your experience?

Wiep: That also depends on the industry that you are in. For example, if you are in the tech industry people are used to be contacted through Tweeter, Facebook, Linkedin, so I’d definitely use those channels. If you are more in the traditional industry, people prefer to be phoned maybe, or to receive an email, or maybe even a letter. So it depends on the industry, but basically I try to create a list of influences, when I’m planning on launching the link based campaign. Create a list of influences and contact those people in the way that seems most appropriate for them personally.

Razvan: Do you think the influence approache is a scalable thing? I mean do you do it once, you do it twice, you do it 10 times, every niche has a set of influencers which don’t modify over night so they have 20 people that are very important in that specific niche, don’t you think that bombarding them with information about your product with every special launch that you think that you have will practically not allow you to scale the influencial marketing? I mean obviously you can do it the first time you launch the product, you do it the second time, you do something else which is third time, but people get maybe upset if you bother them to much.

Wiep: Definitely it’s the same way with regular marketing as well. Send them too many products, bother them too many times and they’ll get fed up with you. So when you do it the first time don’t focus on the top influencers straight away, try to get one or maybe two levels below that and try to find people that are influencing the top influencers.

Razvan: Practically when you are new, nobody knows about it, the top influencers, the most important people will not look at you, will not replay to your emails or phone calls, the same way they would do to a brand for example.

Wiep: It depends on the requests of a week. It’s probably best also to test to not burn those contacts straight away. And focus on what’s just below that level. And try to even brand them to brand evangelists from the point of first contact so ask them for inputs for feedback and to become part of your marketing strategy instead of a tool within your marketing strategy. Cause people will find out if they have been used sooner or later.

Razvan: Let’s see another question from our guests. We have 94 live viewers at this time. Question from Brian: How big of a role do you see co-citation and co-occurrence playing in the future of SEO vs. Keyword Rich Anchor Text. A great question from Brian.

Wiep: Co-citation I think is very important because you mentioned before that Google is much smarter in figuring out what the subject of a site is and not just because the content is but also because the co-citation so it’s already playing a very important role and I don’t think that it will be much more important that is already but will still remain very important.

Razvan: Do you think that anchor text will practically decrease it’s value over time?

Wiep: I certainly hope so, because it’s the most unnatural signal that Google currently uses. Linking out to others with commercial anchor text is not something that someone would do naturally a lot.

Razvan: If they asked us in the past to link with the anchor text that we think it’s good for that keyword. This with a lot of others that practically Google abdicated the SEO community to do, now it asks them to stop doing that because it’s unnatural. That’s another interesting topic.

Wiep: Exactly like you got to help us with this because we can’t figure it out ourselves that, and once they have figured it out or they think they say: okay you can stop now, don’t do it anymore. We’ll take it on from here.

Razvan: But they forgot that they had to do it first off all. Yes. In my opinion anchor text lost a lot of its importance because Google can really understand if you have this ??nippet?? of the link and words around it and context to those words, Google tries to understand those and practically identify keywords in the vicinity of that anchor text maybe, and use those to rank your site better. But what do you think about the authority of a site. How important is the authority of a site for a new page that you post on that site to rank for a very commercial keyword, very competitive keyword. What’s the boost that it gets just because of the authority of the main site.

Wiep: It used to be anchor text that was the main influencing factor but like you said it has decreased over the past few years. And I think its place has been taken in by both relevance and authority. The lead Google manual rating documents, they also talked about vital results into search engines. I think when you want to rank for a certain keyword, it’s very useful if you want to get a link from the website that’s vital for that keyword. Because that’s the website authority on that topic according to Google, so if you could get a link from that site, that can and will have a very big impact, more than what’s an anchor text.

Razvan: Yes. What do you think about the latest year with all the unnatural links and the manual link penalties and what’s your opinion on that. The Google disavow tool does it work only for manual penalties or also for algorithmic penalties?

Wiep: I think it’s also part of Google so called world fair. It’s a tool that’s being used in a limited way by Google at the moment but I think that behind the scenes they are preparing to use all the data they are gathering in a way that will have a much more impact in the future.

Razvan: So practically you are saying that they are training their algorithms and they didn’t release yet their big weapon.

Wiep: It would be stupid if they wouldn’t use the data in the future. They are getting a lot of signals that they try to figure out algorithmically. They can now check with data that they get from web masters so…

Razvan: So all the web masters are practically like small little mechanical clerks for Google.

Wiep: Yes exactly.

Razvan: It’s interesting how they forced the web master to do this, and practically they get crowdsourced voting for their validation of algorithmically results for free. You can’t do anything. If your site is penalized and you want to recover obviously you try removing links, you try to delete your links and build your high authority content, but you also have this weapon: the Google disavow and you always ask yourself should I use it, should I use it not, it’s so mystic everything about this tool. They don’t confirm if it works for algorithmic penalties. They reply sometimes, some other times they don’t, so why shouldn’t I do the Google disavow? It shouldn’t hurt me if I am sending only the unnatural links.

Wiep: I think that’s a situation that Google tries to create deliberately, so if you get an unnatural link warning that you really have to think about what have you done, about what you have to do to clean it up. So you don’t make the same mistake twice. So all the uncertainty and all the un-clarity I think that’s something what Google will try to maintain.

Razvan: Yes indeed. They are using all the signals practically to train their algorithmic for the future, improve it with human validation for free. What do you think about competitive niches like payday loans, buy Viagra or anything which is super competitive and spammers abuse it very hard. There was the latest payday loans update that Google did, and they practically started to filter out those people that they were increasing their ranks there. Do you think it still works or it will work in the future?

Wiep: I think that certain tactics still work, but risk management is a big factor in it. You have to ask yourself it is worth it for me to take a lot of risk and to burn them all on my side. On the other hand is it worth it to be completely white hat and spend a lot of money and not to rank for the next one of two years. So it’s a risk evaluation and it depends on that you think it’s the best on your situation.

Razvan: Yes obviously depends on your business model but if your business model is to rank for the next day or the next week and then burn that site and do it again and again and again. This is what is happening in super competitive nations. They don’t care about their brand, they only care to rank there for a few hours, for a few days to just cash in and get out. Practically from how I see the problem, payday loans became more of an informative, informational keyword. They started pushing in a lot of news content, similar to Wikipedia content, which doesn’t have commercial intent though they do still organize those informational results with commercial sites which they consider to be very authoritative. But from time to time I saw that they still catch some spammer there.

Wiep: Well that’s the word that Google is having behind the scene is against short term spammers.

Razvan: In the past this was practically lasting, I mean you ranked your site there, it was staying for 2 weeks, 3 weeks, then it was going down like 2005, 2006.

Wiep: Websites were able to build a brand because of the spam that they have been doing in the past. And I think that Google is in some situations they prevented that from happening, that they new this before they had the chance to back up the spam that they have being doing with regular links that they are learning now, that they have a good visibility in search engines.

Razvan: I have a case study here that I did in Stockholm, when I went and I’d like to show the case a bit because it’s about the subject we are talking now. I’ll be screen sharing. Okay. So in the topic of my discussion there was: Unnatural links in the Nordic Market and not only. And the case study that I did for them is about the equivalent of the payday loans keyword which is “Sms lan”, but the idea of this case study: these are the top 10 organic servers for this keyword in the Swedish version of Google. And the bright orange sites are sites which that are frequently spamming Google and 7 and 10 are still spamming but with not so much power. The others are more naturally looking link profiles and some of them do still have shady stuff into. But what’s interesting is that this first result here on this column it’s the number of referring domains at the domain level pointing to this sites. So this first site has almost 2000 referring domains pointing at it and here is the monthly link velocity and daily link velocity. On the monthly link velocity practically they required in this chart here which is a monthly chart since the existence of this site. There are only 20 or 30 referring domains but here in the daily link velocity are the rest, so practically this is for the last 45 days it’s out of the chart. In 45 days they acquired 1800 almost referring domains so with a very high speed, very high link velocity and with super targeted keywords anchor text. So the top 3 most linked anchors are SMS Lan Online and SMS Lan and this is also a partial match domain which is SMS LanOnline.ac and this site was ranking there for quite sometime, so how it was used to be like 5-6 years ago in the international market which I found it awkward because practically these are very fragrant techniques that they use. If I follow on the next slides, practically here Google says that they don’t care about NoFollow. They don’t follow and don’t give any importance to these links, but this is the chart that shows the distribution of the NoFollow, DoFollow links pointing to the top 3 results in Google and the first site even if though it has almost 2000 referring domains, the green line is the number of DoFollow links coming from that domain, so they only a few hundred links, but they are coming from 50 referring domains and yet they are ranking number one with 50 referring domains with DoFollow which is very, very awkward again. And then, in term of naturalness, they do have a very, very spamming link profile compared to the others which don’t push the pedal that much and we can see here practically the majority of the links are unnatural links with a lot of commercial anchor text because they use that SMS Lan, SMS Lan Online and what I wanted to show you is that the link building strategy that was used, so practically they use here in these charts that the majority of the links pointing to these sites are coming from blogs and we might think that okay, they are blog comment, but they aren’t blog comments because if I’m looking to the link positioning in the next chart I can see that the majority of links are coming from blog comments. So they pushed the pedal so hard and still it worked with automating blog comments pointing to their site and they were ranking there at least for one week and a half when I looked so again other stuff which was very easy to see by Google but they didn’t analyze that site is the web page language. So the pages that were linking to this site which was written in Swedish were pages in English while if we are looking to the other 2 competitors which have more natural link profiles they have links coming from Swedish content which would be natural but still Google didn’t see that. And I wanted to ask you Wiep why do you think this discrepancy in the local markets exists practically, why do this techniques that internationally don’t work anymore, I mean this is a basic technique for a black hat spammer. This is nothing extraordinary. Most advanced black hat techniques now they use parasitic, hacked sites and a lot of others are hidden links with CSS, JavaScript stuff, CSS clocking stuff and all this, but this is in the day light but yet Google didn’t catch this site and others in time because they are others using several others simpler techniques like this. Why do you think this is still going on in local market?

Wiep: I think it’s a combination of different factors, for example the spam threshold, like I mentioned, is probably not sensitive enough in smaller countries because it’s built for large countries where spam only becomes visible after a certain level. It also depends on how many people fill in spam reports in Google Webmaster tools for US query there will be a lot more than for example in Sweden or in the Netherlands and it also depends on the people at Google who are able to look into it. Do they speak the language and how many things do they have to do except from taking a look in those spam reports.

Razvan: Ok Thank you. Let’s take a question from one of our watchers here so we have Doran asking what’ the best practicing to get ranking back after link penalties revoked so…?

Wiep: Kind of depends on what you did. If your link profile mainly existed from spam links and you have to disavow everything it’s basically you have to start over from scratch instead of getting your rankings back because your rankings weren’t earned naturally. If it’s just a few links that were bad and you received your penalty because of those and then in most cases it will recover in time, but how much time it would pass…that depends.

Razvan: Yes. There is this misconception that if you get the Google penalty you submit a disavow or you do whatever you do in order to get an approval from Google that okay you are fine now, people hope to see their rankings go up, but the problem is that they don’t go up, because there is this thing getting out of the disavow and approve disavow and it’s like you never had those links practically. What’s your opinion on this?

Wiep: I agree. In some cases I have seen it happen, so if the penalty was lifted the website popped out back into the top 10, but in most cases most lots of links have been disavowed or devalued, so your rankings would never be the same they have been and people are still complaining I want my rankings back…well you are not getting your old ones back but now you are have your new ones.

Razvan: Ok. Why do you think that Google doesn’t penalize those site owners and not just not take into consideration that link… Why is Google now trying to practically remove those links using the web masters and why not simply not take those links into consideration.

Wiep: That would mean that you would get away with spamming the worst thing that could happen.

Razvan: But you won’t rank, you just spam the web but you won’t rank. So spamming will stop because it doesn’t work eventually. Why doesn’t Google do this now? Aren’t their algorithms advanced enough?

Wiep: Because their algorithms are not water-tight. So spam will pass trough and spam still works in some situations. There will always be black hats trying to gain the algorithm, but those people I think Google that could never get them to move on to white hats side of SEO but they’re trying to educate the people that are still on the line between gray and black. And try to educate them and lure them to the white hat side.

Razvan: Yes. So we could look at this whole unnatural links and Google disavowing as something that Google tries to educate the SEO community once again with things that they should do.

Wiep: And give them a tool to use and also to prevent negative SEO from happening and to disavow links that you haven’t been creating yourself.

Razvan: Yes when negative SEO will stop existing it means that Google is smart enough to differentiate very quickly between good and bad links or good and bad signals and don’t take the bad signals into consideration in the rankings. And at that point in time practically you could spam all day long and it won’t make any difference.

Wiep: I think that day is a long day from here.

Razvan: Yes. It truly is. Okay let’s see another question from one of our attendees. All SEOs buy links, so maybe not all, but he says all, all SEOs buys links, guest posts, the new media sites, private networks, etc. In haven niches it’s impossible to rank without link buying. Your opinion about link buying.

Wiep: It’s a tricky subject because Google is very clear about it. Link buying is bad, and you are not allowed to do it. Unless you are Google of course. I think that link buying is basically walking on the line to see what’s an option and what isn’t. So if you are for example, you are advertising on a website with banner advertising and you are asking for an editorial link as well. You are getting it, because you are advertising on that website, is that a paid link or isn’t it? I think that’s a bit of a gray area that should be okay, but buying links as a paid link strategy within your link building strategy that’s not something that I’d recommend, unless your website is something that you are able to burn and build up from scratch again.

Razvan: Let’s see another question. How does Google look at blog comments these days? Do they ignore them or do they take actions against the site? So I think that we covered this subject with the case study before. Do you have any opinion on this?

Wiep: It also depends on the scale. So if 99% of your link profile contains blog comments then I think that’s something that Google will take action against sooner or later. But if it’s just a few percents or just a small amount of links, then I don’t think that’s a problem with it. Especially if those links are written by real humans instead of a spam box.

Razvan: A quick conclusion from how I see all these questions that I have here and I have a lot of questions, I won’t be able to answer all of them, but I see a lot of questions like…probably you noticed everything is related to link building as it used to be. Can I do broken link building? There is another question. Can you ask about wide side links and anchor texts? Are they still a good practice? So practically Google educated us so powerfully, so hard and this area of this kind of signals…technical signals which now practically are kind of unnatural. And people are still focusing on this. What should they do? Should I get a site wide link or should I not. Should I get a commercial anchor text link or should I not. How should I improve the ranking for that specific keyword if I buy a site wide link. Is it okay? Is it okay to buy a link or not buy a link? Will I get penalized? They are still playing on the edge. A lot of SEOs do this very risky stuff. They don’t even realize that they are on shaking ground. Have you noticed the same mentalities in the SEOs? How do you think SEOs should look now at link building. What should they do in order to improve their rankings without getting penalized by Google and without getting penalized in the future.

Wiep: I think one of the most important things to do is to accept that things are changing and they are not the same as 3 years ago anymore. But the same goes for when it was 3 years ago, when people were asking directories are they still any good? That’s a question that I haven’t heard a lot during the past year or two. So people are changing but it takes a bit of time to realize that things are changing and their own approach is changing as well. But I think that for me, what I tried to do when I think about a specifically link or specifically link tactic is to try to translate it to the offline world. Would I be doing this offline as well and not completely take Google out of the consideration. But would I be doing it if it was offline as well? So an example for directories: Would I be advertising in all kinds of offline business lists? Probably not. Because it doesn’t generate any leads or sells.

Razvan: Yes…the power of a link is given by the power of the people that are passing through that link, because the link finally is something that all started from web directories and web directories were the first thing to navigate the web when search engines didn’t exist where it was web directories. From there anchor text and links evolved and turned into search engines and so on. But the power of the link was in the people that were coming from that web directories to your sites. A good link is a link that sends visitors. If it doesn’t send visitors it doesn’t matter in my opinion. It won’t matter in the future.

Wiep: Yes. For example my father used to advertise in the phone book but when is the last time you used the phone book yourself?

Razvan: Exactly. So we have a question here from Josh: How long do you guys think links will be a major of page signal and when do you think it will be matched or over taken by social signals. What do you think about links as a signal?

I personally think that links are still few for the engine that Google has. And that’s why there is all this emphasis now with good links bad links, educational stuff for the web masters, remove those links, disavow those links and everything is about links. Links that I don’t think that are going away in the next year or in the next two years. They are very abused as with any other signals that would probably come. Google and any smart engines tries to find ways, making it hard for people to fake them. So search engines practically started with onpage stuff and they were ranking only on onpage stuff. Then they introduced links as a page factor because it’s harder to fake, but people started to abuse it so much and they became very good at it. If social is the next step and they only introduce social, it will happen the same. But I think that Google is working on many fronts and they are building their own high speed ISPs , they have their own browser. They have a lot of things. They have smartphones, so they have a lot of data about us. And they surely use that data, but still links are very important for the ranking. It’s not enough. They probably need to scale that much in order to take the links out of the question or to put less emphasis on links. What do you think about this subject?

Wiep: I think that they will be capable of much better…

Razvan: Distinction between good and bad things or what do you want…

Wiep: Distinction between website recommendations and a personal recommendation and of course a personal recommendation should be valued differently than a website recommendation. And all the things that you mentioned like the android phones but also all the precaution they have been taking with Google+. They are making sure that real people are using it instead of gamable entities or whatever.

Razvan: Yes. They make you practically sign up with your phone, they send you an sms, they validate you. So practically each Google+ account they try to identify as human beings. Obviously it will be harder for people to fake the signals but they evidently could do it in the end.

Wiep: They try to take away the anonimity.

Razvan: Do you think this is a good or a bad thing?

Wiep: For their search results it will be a good thing. As a user I’m not always a fan of it but eventually they will try to do what they think it’s best for their search results because that’s what’s best for their shareholders.

Razvan: It’s an interesting topic. Maybe in the future we will check in into Google, only been logged in for example so they can’t identify us so it’s like a big high way but you can enter in the high way only if you give them the passport let’s say. So only if you are logged in. So rank tracking will be dead, everything will be dead because you need to be logged in. It’s an interesting topic I discussed it with other people. Let’s see some other questions because we have about 14 minutes and this hangout will be over. So Gabriel is asking: Do you think that Google is really precise at assessing whether or not a site has just bad links rather than someone doing negative SEO. What I mean is negative SEO should affect rankings vs. bad links, how it affects rankings vs. bad links in the past so do you think Google can practically differentiate between negative SEO and SEO that you do yourself?

Wiep: Is it a negative SEO or is a more sentiment like in links that are in a negative sentiment?

Razvan: No, I think negative SEO. No, he is referring to unnatural links done by myself, I think the unnatural links build by a third party trying to harm my site.

Wiep: It depends. I think that when you really want to you can take a link out of the Google search results, if the site doesn’t have too much authority. So I think that Google isn’t as good in it as they should be. But they are getting better with most other things.

Razvan: Do you think it’s harder to do negative SEO in big sites?

Wiep: Definitely, they have a lot more authority so they can get away with a lot more before things are picked up algorithmically.

Razvan: So do you think if someone starts to do negative SEO on Amazon.com would they be able to bring it down?

Wiep: I don’t think so…no…unless they hack themselves into the sites so they don’t have only outsite signals but also onsite signals. I think Amazon will be quite safe. If someone new enters your industry and you want to get read of them before you get bothered by them, I think it’s still something that it could be used. I wouldn’t recommended it but it’s Google concern that it can be used.

Razvan: Do you think, we have someone here asking, Rankel: Can you rank only with social media links? Do you think social media signals, I don’t think he meant links.

Wiep: I haven’t see a lot of examples because mostly social signals are being followed up by regular link signals. So just social signals would be quite an odd signal because usually those come in pairs.

Razvan: Yes but I think that they are very good signals for indexation if you want to be very quickly found by Google, just tweet or +1 something or do it on Facebook and the crawlers probably, there is a greater chance they will come faster than just posting on your blog so…in term of indexation I think they are using their these signals better but for ranking at least at this point in time it’s questionable. I haven’t see any exact examples that serve ranking only because of the social signals.

Wiep: Exactly the so called correlation studies between the top search results that the top ranking websites have more social votes, than websites that don’t rank. It’s made basically it’s often the other way around. It’s not that they rank because of those signals, but they have those signals because they rank well.

Razvan: Duncan asks what do you consider is the difference between paid links, sponsored posts and adverts. Do you think there is any difference between them?

Wiep: It depends on the scale, on the intends, on what kind of adverts, websites accepts, so if websites mainly coexists from advertorials that’s a paid link and I’d definitely want to avoid. But like I mentioned before, getting an advertorial mention because you advertise on a website it’s a thin line but it’s something that you could get away with.

Razvan: Yes. How do you think Google treats this thin line because if you are advertising, if you are buying a sponsored post in the newspaper for example, they are known for practically sending warnings to newspaper saying don’t sell links on your site or you were caught selling links. How do you think they practically identify those pages which don’t have any direct signal in it as being a sponsored post and look like a normal article newspaper.

Wiep: I think it’s the footprint that I mentioned earlier, by leaving a lot of paid link footprints or is the newspaper leaving a lot of editorial footprints then Google will be able to follow those and leave it back to you, or to the newspaper.

So, if it’s just here and there and you are not using too many commercial anchor texts, if it doesn’t stand out and people won’t notice it within 2 or 3 minutes when they are taking a look to your link profile then I can guess they are safe but when it’s one of your top anchor text and it’s just 2 clicks away from any link tool that you use to find out that you are using paid links and you are definitely at risk.

Razvan: Another question here. This is one of the last questions: After last Penguin updates I’ve lost ranking for many of my keywords before 5 months I submitted link removal request to Google Webmaster tools and there was no luck in those case. Google shows more links now. Is Google disavow tool working on how to get rid of this penalty. Practically this is a case where I think he gets an algorithmic penalty and he submitted Google Disavow but no one answered. It usually happens like this and no one answers.

Wiep: Well, if you file inclusionary requests then you should get a confirmation that the inclusionary request has been received. And later on that it has been processed and then you get a reply if it has been accepted or not. But I think it’s important to combine the data from a different tools sets from Jessica SEO from Google webmaster tools because the overlap may be 80% but it’s the other 20% that you want to include as well.

Razvan: Yes that’s what I recommend always to all of our costumers also because we take the data from MajesticSEO and others and we aggregate, duplicate all of this results and we also allow the Google master tools report and I always recommend to have more older links than you can have but it’s important to look at the live links not at the lost links. That’s another differentiation that you need to do first of all. There is also this confusion with people that want to work only with the Google webmaster tools dataset, because they say if Google is only showing me this, this is what I should work with, but in some cases they don’t show all the data. It’s a known fact.

Wiep: In most cases they don’t.

Razvan: And he asks how to get rid of this penalty. It’s a very general question. He practically needs to increase the authority of his site or there are situations when if you have all your links, 90% of your links are unnatural and built with shady tactics you might not have any chance of recovering. You might be better off starting a new site if possible. What do you think about this situation when you are put in this position to leave this site, any common site for example, and start off with something new.

Wiep: In some cases getting a rebrand might be worth considering, especially if it’s an opportunity to get some press attention and the press as well and to use it as a moment of marketing but in some cases it’s better to start over anew.

Razvan: Yes…okay…let’s take one more question: Most link building businesses aren’t trusted anymore. Most of them are still just spammers. How do you find legitimate reliable SEO link building services? What would you recommend to someone looking for this kind of services. What to look at.

Wiep: Ask around. Ask people you know, you trust and you think are knowledgeable to recommend others. And also try to look at good link profiles maybe on other industries, give them a call and ask them who is taking care of their link building, so you can see this is a good link profile and they have been doing a good job and try to find out how’s been doing it and hire them.

Razvan: Yes. But in this situation you need to know what to look at. If you are a non SEO person and don’t have any clue about SEO, you have all these companies which sell you dreams. The day you will rank number one, they will penalize your site. This is what happened practically in the past with a lot of people and is still happening a lot of sites and that business owner is not aware of this problem practically.

Wiep: Just try to create a summary of what the company has been promising you ask it in Google groups.

Razvan: Do a research online.

Wiep: And ask them if this is something that should be okay or that’s something that should resolve in big problems.

Razvan: Okay, let’s end this hangout. Any conclusions for this hangout? Do you have anything special that you would like to conclude and draw a line?

Wiep: Nothing that I haven’t said already.

Razvan: I recall now a question from someone about content marketing. So practically how would you define content marketing and is content marketing the next thing to abuse in Google? Like commercial anchor text? Or any other signals?

Wiep: I think it’s the next biz word. I don’t think it’s different from any other type of marketing.

Razvan: Okay do you think it’s going to be abused in a bad way? I mean abused so badly and used so badly that it becomes a negative signal?

Wiep: Link bate in the past has been used too many times that people associated it in a negative way. And content marketing used to be a way of using contents to market your stuff and now it’s a way of using content to market your website. So it’s basically a new use of an old thing.

Razvan: Yes it’s nothing new, I mean content marketing was for 100 years or so as a concept it’s not that just appeared with Google. This concept appeared in the Google world as a natural next step. But it’s something that existed from a really, really long time in the newspapers. So, to conclude this, I think links subject is a very complicated subject and it has a lot of faces and it’s always interesting to talk about links with smart people. I want to thank you for being here today with us on this handout and sharing your expert knowledge with our SEO fellows. Maybe we try practically to educate in a better way the SEO community so hopefully everything will be for the better. Thank you and talk to you again 🙂

The post The Link Building Landscape in 2013 with Wiep Knol appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Edwards writes, “What do you want out of a personal relationship? Loyalty and value are at the top of this list. This is the same way you should think about link building and how you should approach it. Be valuable and loyal to people and you will have a high return on your time invested. It’s important to find those areas where the like-minded people are that you wish to communicate with.”

I couldn’t agree more with that assessment about personal relationships, value and loyalty. Finding like-minded people is important, but that’s not link building. Nor is it simply relationship building—it’s called networking, and it’s been around for as long as humans have walked the Earth.

Chameleons and Buzzwords

Relationship building, link earning and other new buzzwords are being thrown around to replace link building because of its admittedly sordid past. The industry as a whole doesn’t focus on building spammy links anymore, but we still build links. People are quick to leave the old at the altar and marry new terms. They’re quick to rebrand themselves. But at the end of the day, we’re still building links. We don’t need to abandon ship. We can build relationships and build links at the same time, but they’re not the same thing. One cannot replace the other.

Relationship building isn’t bad—it’s one of the keys to success in business. Link building is not the same as relationship building. When link building reaches its highest potential, it includes elements of relationship building. The middle of that particular custom illustration should be large and robust, but they’re not the same thing.

Survival Becomes Marketing

Let’s talk about relationship building, though, because it’s an important topic. For the purposes of this article, let’s embrace the old ways and refer to it as networking.

Imagine a tribe of cave people. They knew how to kill the woolly mammoth, but they were cold. A neighboring cave tribe knew the secret of fire, but they didn’t have much to eat. Cave tribe A networks with cave tribe B because, hey, they have something in common and they can help each other out. They build a relationship. That simple concept has escalated forward into marketing, sales, link building and everything else we do.

We build links to make money. We need money because we want to support our relationships just as much as we want to support ourselves. Nothing in this world happens without relationships. That’s especially true with link building.

The thing about that, though, is that you can’t force relationships. Sometimes when you write a guest post and it’s placed on the perfect site, you don’t exchange more than a few words with the webmaster. Either they don’t have the time or the interest. It shouldn’t happen that way the majority of the time, but that’s reality. You’ve still created a good link, but a relationship wasn’t built in the process. A relationship doesn’t automatically flicker into existence when a hyperlink is created. In the best circumstances, a relationship is created along with the link, but there are plenty of times when that’s not the case—and the link is still perfectly good.

Who You Know

The relationships you do build are important, however. They’re not just important for your link building campaign; they’re also an important part of your overall marketing strategy. You might even make an actual friend in the process, which is just as important.

Good relationships often provide us with great link opportunities, give us new ideas and allow us to take a look at the industry from a different perspective. They also open doorways into other new relationships.

Getting to know the editors of a popular industry website is a fantastic networking opportunity. The same goes for participating in the industry’s online community with comments and social media. Those are valuable relationships for obvious reasons.

I talked about it before, but link building and networking should cross over often. In an ideal world, the two would always cross over. A quality link can be built without a relationship, but if a relationship is built along with it, your overall marketing strategy will be better off for it. The two fit together closely, but they’re not the same thing. Networking is essential for businesses. Networking is an essential component of any effective online marketing strategy, and so is link building. They work together, but using a fancy new buzzword does not mean that link building is the same thing as networking.

When Edwards writes, “Try thinking about link building as a way to build value and loyalty with people in your vertical. Not only will it be a longer-term effort that just spamming people for links, but the effect will be longer lasting and way more authentic.” she is absolutely correct.

Spam, as far as effective link building goes, is a thing of the past, for a normal business (shady tactics still exist … and they might get you a quick rank and along with it a big ranking penalty). Though we’re still mending some fences, the industry has moved beyond building spammy links and onto creating useful links powered by human brains.

We want to approach every blogger and webmaster like a human being and provide something of value—but that won’t always yield a relationship. Link building is not networking, but they’re both valuable weapons in any online marketer’s arsenal—especially when they cross over.

About the author

Jon Ball is VP of Business Development for Page One Power. Jon specializes in developing highly effective link building strategies for clients across the world. Trained as a professional portrait photographer, he still passionately pursues photography as a hobby.

The post Sick to Death of Relationship Building appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

From the point of jumping into a new business and landing on the first page in search engine results, there’s a long way. The SEO land is full of bad tips for getting backlinks from spammy websites and working with shady SEO consultant that will bring your in no time on the first page. Which is basically impossible to do in short time, if you want to grow your backlinks profile naturally.  

The debate about the influence of backlinks in rankings has never ended and evolved around the years. In case you’re a newbie and you want to grow your business, it is important to understand what Google sees as natural links and try to follow their advices and SEO experts tips. Some examples of valuable resources are:

• Webmaster Central Blog where are published news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index;
• Google support where you can find answers for a lot of questions regarding all Google’s products;
• Google forums where you can find real time advices to your problems from other people using the same Google products as you;
• cognitiveSEO blog where you can find case studies, guides, SEO insights. 

Link earning the is the most efficient and valuable technique of building high quality backlinks. It is a white hat technique, and it doesn’t imply the death of link building. For that you need to think in terms of quality content with valuable information, engaging communities through social networking and bonding, personalized user experience, outreach campaigns, influencer marketing programs built on relationships, media exposure in press releases and so on. Link roundups are also a great link building idea you should consider. 

From a generic point of view the overall important characteristics of a high quality link are:

Domain Authority

If an important domain has backlinks to your site, there is a good chance that your website has something important to say in your niche. Similar to real life, if an important person mentions you, the overall impression of the listeners will be influenced by his high authority in the field. That way your importance will grow and it can bring an increase in organic traffic, conversion rate.

Relevance

A relevant backlink is a link that is positioned on a site/page that talks about the same subject, or is in the same niche with your site. The relevance of a link may be given based on the content of the linking site or page and the contextual relevance of the words surrounding the link.

Uniqueness

A high quality link has even more power, if it’s hard for your competitors to get a natural link from the same source. Links from relevant and authority sites that only talk about your website and not your competitors can be considered great link opportunities because they are unique to your site. A quick example of such a link, would be conference sites that link to the companies and speakers that are participating at that conference. Naturally, not all your competitors can be present at that conference so that is a great place to build some high quality and unique links to your site.

Traffic

If a link is not clicked, than the initial purpose of the link is voided.  It is important to have your link in a visible place on the site so that people click it and therefore drive traffic to your site. For example, footer links can not be considered important as they are only seen by search engine crawlers and are rarely clicked by people.

A footer link on a popular domain can have a significant influence on your site and it can help you improve your rankings. On the other hand, multiple footer backlinks to your website from sites that connected with each other can bring you a Google Penguin penalty.

From a technical point of view, we can model the properties of a high quality link as follows:

• Authority
  • From a High Authority Referring Domain.
  • Linking Domain Ranks Well in Google.
  • Linking Domain has a lot of Referring Domains.

• Relevance
  • In the Same Niche as your site.
  • Links mostly to content in the same niche.

• Uniqueness
  • Does not link to all of your competitors.
  • Links to Informational sources mostly.

• Traffic
  • Has a Big Number of Visitors.
  • Has an Active Readership. (if it is a blog)
  • Has Good Social Media Exposure.

• Other Important Properties
  • In-Content Link. (from a blog or content page)
  • Few Links on the Linking Page.
  • The Site Links only to Relevant Content.
  • Non-Commercial Anchor Text Rich.
  • Non-Sponsored.

All of the aspects mentioned above fall into the white hat SEO tactics and this means it respects Google’s Quality Guidelines.

Looking forward to your characteristics of a high quality link. What do you think is “the thing” that best differentiates a highquality backlink from an average backlink?

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The post The Definition of the High Quality Backlink appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Let’s face it: you’ve heard enough about guest posting, press releases, and article directories.

If you’re looking for some fresh, actionable tips you can apply to your link building campaigns today, then this post is for you.

Today I’m unveiling seven advanced link building strategies that I use to complement the bread and butter techniques we all know and love.

#1: Siphon PageRank From Pinterest

Remember the good ol’ days when Pinterest links were dofollow…

…and you could get link juice from pinning and repinning images?

Just because those days are long gone doesn’t mean Pinterest has lost its SEO punch.

Why?

Because the links to your website in your Pinterest profile is still dofollow:

Usually these profiles wind up as PR0 or PR n/a.

But you can quickly turn these pages into authorities by siphoning PR (which Pinterest has a lot of).

Here’s how:

1. Find authority pages on Pinterest with the most siphoning potential. You can use Open Site Explorer to find

pages with the most PA:

2. When you find an authority page, comment or like a pin:

And it will send PR towards your Pinterest profile page…and onto your site!

#2: Audio Sharing Link Building

You probably already know that you can leverage podcasts to nab links from dofollow podcast directories like Podcastdirectory.com and Podcast411.com.

But you may not know that there are plenty of authoritative audio sharing sites that you can grab quality links from with a few minutes of work.

Here’s how:

1. Create your .mp3: Use the free Vocaroo.com to create an audio file from your browser window. It doesn’t have to be the next White Album…just talk or sing into your computer mic.

2. Create a profile (with a backlink) at these high PR audio sharing sites:

http://yourlisten.com/

http://reverbnation.com/

http://8tracks.com/

http://sharemyplaylists.com/

http://sutros.com/

3. Upload your audio file: Most audio sharing sites will give you a link whether or not you upload any audio. But the audio file builds internal links to your artist page…making it more powerful.

#3: Knowem.com

Knowem is a treasure trove of link building opportunities. Knowm is a site that

helps you claim your “brand real estate”, like social media profiles and blog platforms.

However, it’s also used by white hat SEO agencies to build quality links to their client’s sites. If you dig enough you can find

dozens of authority sites that offer dofollow links to their users.

In fact, I’ve found completely new link building strategies using this site.

First, head to Knowem.com and put any keyword:

Then sort through the list of social networks.

In my personal experience, the “Design” and “Entertainment” sections have the highest concentration of dofollow targets.

#4: Site Evaluation Websites

Did you know that there are sites out there to get real-world feedback on your site’s design?

Pretty cool, huh?

Well, I don’t usually pay much attention to the advice I get from these sites…

…but I DO pay attention to the links I get by submitting my site to them!

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a page that I built at BounceApp.com in literally 30-seconds, rocks a dofollow link:

And is PR2:

Here are a few more to consider submitting to:

ConceptFeedback.com

SuggestionBox.com

ABTests.com

Obviously, you need a family-friendly site for your link to stick and accumulate feedback. But as long as you have that down, you should be able to get a handful of authoritative links with a few minutes of work.

#5: Host a Scholarship

If you run a legit site, you can turn $1000 into fistfuls of top-quality .edu links by creating a scholarship.

I discovered this idea by accident one night when I was reverse engineering on of my client’s competitors.

I noticed that they had an insane number of .edu links…which is weird considering that the site was about investing.

When I dug deeper I realized that they ran dozens of scholarships for schools in their area.

And you can easily do the same thing.

Here’s how:

1. First, grab a list of all the schools near you (this adds an extra layer of legitimacy to your scholarship).

If you don’t want to make a school-specific scholarship you can make yours specific to an industry related to your niche, like physical therapy or accounting.

2. Create your scholarship page. Make sure to list your criteria (age, essay length etc.) and your award amount.

If you have a lot of ads on your site consider making a custom ad-free page just for your scholarship. This will increase the chances that you people actually link to your scholarship page.

A good scholarship page to use as a template:

This particular page has attracted 60+ .edu links…not too shabby!

3. Look for lists of scholarships with dofollow links using these search strings:

site:.edu “scholarships”

site:.edu “scholarship information”

4. Email the people that run that section of the site to let them know about your new scholarship (be sure to remind them to link to your scholarship page!).

#6: Lists of Terms

One of the best shortcuts to establish yourself as an authority in your niche is to start coming up with your own terms or coming up with solid definitions for terms in your niche.

And if you list these out, they’re likely to get linked to all day long.

Just look at the link profile from this “Glossary of Internet Terms” page:

DA: 68

PA: 73

LRD: 1,382

Amazing, right?

I’d be willing to bet that there’s already a glossary of terms in your niche.

However, I’d also bet that it’s incomplete, outdated and in need of improvement.

If you can swoop in like a superhero and create something better — and email the people that link to the now-obsolete glossary to change their links to your page — you can get some insanely authoritative links.

#7: .edu Link Bait

I’m sure you already know about link bait: where you create a piece of content that (hopefully) attracts attention, social shares and links.

But you don’t need to post something controversial just to get links…even from authoritative .edu sites.

Skeptical?

Check out this page from a commercial site in the nursing school niche:

It’s simply a list of 100 online libraries. Not the least bit controversial or attention-grabbing.

But what makes this page such a link magnet is that it’s a great resource of nursing students.

And when I say “link magnet”, I really mean it.

This particular sites has attracted a dozen top-notch .edu links by creating pages like this.

Think about how you can list 50 or even 100 resources for the community that your site serves. It could be 100 best DIY home improvement Google+ profiles, 100 of the most helpful search strings to find niche-specific information, or a list of 100 of the best bloggers in your niche.

Once you do, reach out to .edu webmasters to let them know about your killer resource.

The post 7 Link Building Techniques that might still work in 2013 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.