SAMIEI SOLUTIONS

Link Build­ing… Time-intensive. Frus­trat­ing. Some­times con­fus­ing. Yet Unavoid­able. Because ulti­mately, it’s still the trump card for higher rankings.

Many of us have been hop­ing that it would go away. In Brett Tabke’s 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sen­ti­ment that many, many web­mas­ters hold on to as a hope:

What hap­pens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that major­ity of the Google algo is deval­ued in var­i­ous ways? Wavers built their for­tunes on “links=seo”. When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The per­ti­nent questions:

1. Will link build­ing still be very impor­tant for rank­ings in the medium term?
2. When will link pop­u­lar­ity be deval­ued in favor of other algo ele­ments (that are less tedious, from a webmaster’s point of view)?

The answers:

1. Sorry, but link build­ing is still going to be the SEO trump card for the fore­see­able future.
2. I wouldn’t hold your breath for search engine algo­rithms to place less impor­tance on link pop­u­lar­ity until the Seman­tic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new pro­to­col. Because links are still the basic con­nec­tor, the basic rela­tion­ship, on the Web. And for the forsee­able future they’re going to be the eas­i­est way for a com­puter pro­gram to judge the impor­tance and trust­wor­thi­ness of a Web page.

What will hap­pen to the way search algo­rithms score links is already hap­pen­ing. The Google algo has become much more ele­gant and advanced, devalu­ing stag­ger­ing amount of links that shouldn’t count, and plac­ing more empha­sis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then ver­i­fied by ele­ments like user data, domain age, and other rel­a­tively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don’t fool your­self. Links that should count are still the key to rank­ings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have cre­ated our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links in 2006. (Yeah, it just so hap­pened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspi­ra­tion, 131 Legit­i­mate Link Build­ing Strate­gies, one of the orig­i­nal author­ity doc­u­ments on link build­ing. It was just get­ting a bit rusty, that’s all (“Host your own Web Ring”?). Any­way, enjoy the update. It’s guar­an­teed to be accu­rate until Jan­u­ary 1, 2007.

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a “101 list”. These get Dugg all the time, and often become “author­ity doc­u­ments”. Peo­ple can’t resist link­ing to these (hint, hint).

2. Cre­ate 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] arti­cles. Again, these are excep­tion­ally easy to link to.

3. Cre­ate exten­sive resource lists for a spe­cific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Cre­ate a list of the top 10 myths for a spe­cific category.

5. Cre­ate a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the peo­ple listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look some­what offi­cial, the gurus may end up link­ing to your site or say­ing thanks. (Some­times flat­tery is the eas­i­est way to strike up a good rela­tion­ship with an “authority”.)

Devel­op­ing Author­ity & Being Easy to Link At

6. Make your con­tent easy to under­stand so many peo­ple can under­stand and spread your mes­sage. (It’s an acces­si­bil­ity thing.)

7. Put some effort in to min­i­mize gram­mat­i­cal or spelling errors, espe­cially if you need author­i­ta­tive peo­ple like librar­i­ans to link to your site.

8. Have an eas­ily acces­si­ble pri­vacy pol­icy and about sec­tion so your site seems more trust­wor­thy. Includ­ing a pic­ture of your­self may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Build­ing Tool

9. Buy rel­e­vant traf­fic with a pay per click cam­paign. Rel­e­vant traf­fic will get your site more vis­i­tors and brand expo­sure. When peo­ple come to your site, regard­less of the chan­nel in which they found it, there is a pos­si­bil­ity that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

10. Syn­di­cate an arti­cle at Ezin­eArti­cles, GoAr­ti­cles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good arti­cle sites is that their arti­cle pages actu­ally rank highly and send highly qual­i­fied traffic.

11. Sub­mit an arti­cle to indus­try news site. Have an SEO site? Write an arti­cle and sub­mit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Sub­mit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

12. Syn­di­cate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (com­pelling, news­wor­thy). Email it to some hand­picked jour­nal­ists and blog­gers. Per­son­al­ize the email mes­sage. For good mea­sure, sub­mit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

13. Track who picks up your arti­cles or press releases. Offer them exclu­sive news or content.

14. Trade arti­cles with other webmasters.

15. Email a few friends when you have impor­tant rel­e­vant news ask­ing them for their feed­back and/or if they would mind ref­er­enc­ing it if they find your infor­ma­tion useful.

16. Write about, and link to, com­pa­nies with “in the news” pages. They link back to sto­ries and blog posts which cover their devel­op­ments. This is obvi­ously eas­i­est if you have a news sec­tion or blog. Do a Google search for [your indus­try + “in the news”].

17. Per­form sur­veys and stud­ies that make peo­ple feel impor­tant. If you can make other peo­ple feel impor­tant they will help do your mar­ket­ing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how under­paid moth­ers were, and they got many high qual­ity links.

Direc­to­ries, Meme Track­ers & Social Bookmarking

18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: sub­mit your site to DMOZ and other direc­to­ries that allow free submissions.

19. Sub­mit your site to paid direc­to­ries. Another oldie. Just remem­ber that qual­ity mat­ters.

20. Cre­ate your own top­i­cal direc­tory about your field of inter­est. Obvi­ously link to your own site, deeplink­ing to impor­tant con­tent where pos­si­ble. Of course, if you make it into a truly use­ful resource, it will attract links on its own.

21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If peo­ple find the sites you tag to be inter­est­ing, emo­tion­ally engag­ing, or timely they may fol­low the trail back to your site.

22. If you cre­ate some­thing that is of great qual­ity make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us pop­u­lar list, hun­dreds more blog­gers will see your site, and poten­tially link to it.

23. Look at meme track­ers to see what ideas are spread­ing. If you write about pop­u­lar spread­ing ideas with plenty of orig­i­nal con­tent (and link to some of the orig­i­nal resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Busi­ness Links

24. Join the Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau.

25. Get a link from your local cham­ber of commerce.

26. Sub­mit your link to rel­e­vant city and state gov­ern­men­tal resources. (Eas­ier in some coun­tries than in others.)

27. List your site at the local library’s Web site.

28. See if your man­u­fac­tur­ers or retail­ers or other busi­ness part­ners might be will­ing to link to your site.

29. Develop busi­ness rela­tion­ships with non-competing busi­nesses in the same field. Lever­age these rela­tion­ships online and off, by rec­om­mend­ing each other via links and dis­trib­ut­ing each other’s busi­ness cards.

30. Launch an affil­i­ate pro­gram. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added expo­sure will almost always lead to addi­tional “nor­mal” links.

Easy Free Links

31. Depend­ing on your cat­e­gory and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free clas­si­fied service.

32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer ques­tions on Yahoo! Answers and pro­vide links to rel­e­vant resources.

33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer ques­tions on Google Groups and pro­vide links to rel­e­vant resources.

34. If you run a fairly rep­utable com­pany, cre­ate a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic spe­cific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

35. It takes about 15 min­utes to set up a top­i­cal Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an indus­try expert. Link to expert doc­u­ments and pop­u­lar use­ful tools in your fields, and also cre­ate a link back to your site.

36. Sub­mit a story to Digg that links to an arti­cle on your site. You can also sub­mit other con­tent and have some of its link author­ity flow back to your pro­file page.

37. If you pub­lish an RSS feed and your con­tent is use­ful and reg­u­larly updated, some peo­ple will syn­di­cate your RSS con­tent (and some of those will pro­vide links… unfor­tu­nately, some will not).

38. Most forums allow mem­bers to leave sig­na­ture links or per­sonal pro­file links. If you make qual­ity con­tri­bu­tions some peo­ple will fol­low these links and poten­tially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

39. Most brands are not well estab­lished online, so if your site has much author­ity, your review related con­tent often ranks well.

40. Review rel­e­vant prod­ucts on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct cus­tomer enquiries and sec­ondary links.

41. Cre­ate prod­uct lists on Amazon.com that review top prod­ucts and also men­tion your back­ground (LINK!).

42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traf­fic streams.

43. Review prod­ucts and ser­vices on shop­ping search engines like ePin­ions to help build your authority.

44. If you buy a prod­uct or ser­vice you really like and are good at leav­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als, many of those turn into links. Two tes­ti­mo­nial writ­ing tips — make them believ­able, and be spe­cific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of hav­ing one. Post reg­u­larly and post great con­tent. Good exe­cu­tion is what gets the links.

46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Out­bound links are one of the cheap­est forms of mar­ket­ing avail­able. Many blog­gers also track who is link­ing to them or where their traf­fic comes from, so link­ing to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

47. Com­ment on other blogs. Most of these com­ments will not pro­vide much direct search engine value, but if your com­ments are use­ful, insight­ful, and rel­e­vant they can drive direct traf­fic. They also help make the other blog­gers become aware of you, and they may start read­ing your blog and/or link­ing to it.

48. Tech­no­rati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts fea­tured on the Tech­no­rati tag pages by tag­ging your posts with rel­e­vant tags.

49. If you cre­ate a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog direc­to­ries.

Design as a Link­ing Element

50. Web 2.0-ify your site. Peo­ple love to link to any­thing with AJAX. Even in the nar­row­est of niches, there is some kind of use­ful func­tion­al­ity you can build with AJAX.

51. Val­i­date and 508 your site. This (indi­rect) method makes your site more trust­wor­thy and link­able, espe­cially from gov­ern­men­tal sites or design-oriented com­mu­ni­ties. There are even a few author­i­ta­tive direc­to­ries of standards-compliant sites.

52. Order a beau­ti­ful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

53. Hire a pub­li­cist. Good old fash­ioned ‘PR’ (not PageR­ank) can still work won­ders. Andy Hagans now offers a link bait­ing pub­lic­ity service.

54. Hire a con­sul­tant. Yes, you can out­source link build­ing. Just make sure to go with some­one good. We rec­om­mend WeBuild­Pages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

Link Trad­ing

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just rec­om­mend rec­i­p­ro­cal link build­ing? Yes, on a small scale, and with rel­e­vant part­ners that will send you traf­fic. Stay away from the link trad­ing hubs and networks.

56. In case you didn’t get the memo — when swap­ping links, try to get links from within the con­tent of rel­e­vant con­tent pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hun­dreds of off topic link part­ners. Only seek link exchanges that you would con­sider pur­su­ing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of think­ing just about your topic when exchang­ing links, think about demo­graphic audi­ence sets.

Buy­ing Sites, Rent­ing Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high qual­ity links from a bro­ker. Text Link Ads is the most rep­utable firm in this niche.

58. Rent some high qual­ity links directly from Web sites. Some­times the most pow­er­ful rented links come direct from sites not actively rent­ing links.

59. Become a spon­sor. All sorts of char­i­ties, con­tests, and con­fer­ences link to their spon­sors. This can be a great way to gain vis­i­bil­ity, links, and a warm feel­ing in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the prof­its to a char­ity. Many char­i­ties will link both to the eBay auc­tion and to your site.

61. Many search algo­rithms seem biased toward older estab­lished sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link pro­file, and link it to your own site, than to try to start build­ing author­ity links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Pro­ceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a com­pany peo­ple hate. When Aaron was sued by Traf­fic Power, he got hun­dreds or thou­sands of links, includ­ing links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Jour­nal.

Free­bies & Giveaways

64. Hold a con­test. Con­tests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thou­sands of dol­lars worth of edi­to­r­ial qual­ity links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool col­lec­tion. Orig­i­nal and use­ful tools (and col­lec­tions of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think rank­ing for mort­gage cal­cu­la­tor is worth?

66. Cre­ate and release open source site design tem­plates for con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems like Word­press. Don’t for­get the “Designed by example.com” bit in the footer!

67. Offer free sam­ples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Fire­fox exten­sion. Make sure you have a down­load and/or sup­port page on your site which peo­ple can link to.

Con­fer­ences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pic­tures of impor­tant events and tell nar­ra­tives about why they are impor­tant. Pic­tures of (drunk?) “celebri­ties” in your indus­try make great link bait.

70. Lever­age new real world rela­tion­ships into link­ing rela­tion­ships. If you go to SEO related con­fer­ences, peo­ple like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sul­li­van are read­ily acces­si­ble. Sim­i­larly, in other indus­tries, peo­ple who would nor­mally seem inac­ces­si­ble are excep­tion­ally acces­si­ble at trade con­fer­ences. It is much eas­ier to seem “real” in per­son. Once you cre­ate social rela­tion­ships in per­son, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engag­ing, use­ful, and inter­est­ing inter­views are an easy way to cre­ate orig­i­nal con­tent. And they spread like wildfire.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buid­ing meth­ods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Direc­to­ries

72. Sub­mit your site to 200 cheesy paid direc­to­ries (aver­ag­ing $15 a pop) that send zero traf­fic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your sig­na­ture file.

74. Exclu­sively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post noth­ing but “me too” posts to build your post count. Use in com­bi­na­tion with a link-rich sig­na­ture file.

76. Ask ques­tions about who pro­vides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address cre­ate another forum account and answer your own ques­tion rav­ing about how great your own site is.

77. As a new mem­ber to var­i­ous forums, ask the same ques­tion at 20 dif­fer­ent forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years out­dated exclu­sively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for pro­files on forums you never intend on com­ment­ing on.

Blog Spam

80. Instead of sign­ing blog com­ments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

81. Start mar­ket­ing your own site hard on your first blog com­ment. Add no value to the com­ment sec­tion. Men­tion noth­ing other than you recently posted on the same sub­ject at _____ and every­one should read it. Car­pet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

82. Say noth­ing unique or rel­e­vant to the post at hand. Make them assume an auto­mated bot hit their comments.

83. Bet­ter yet, use auto­mated bots to hit their com­ments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

84. Send pings to every­one talk­ing about a sub­ject. In your aggre­ga­tion post, state noth­ing of inter­est. Only state that other peo­ple are talk­ing about the topic.

85. Don’t even link to any of the sites you are ping­ing. Send them pings from posts that do not even ref­er­ence them.

Garbage Link Exchanges

86. Send out link exchange requests men­tion­ing PageRank.

87. Send link exchange emails which look like an auto­mated bot sent them (lit­tle or no cus­tomiza­tion, no per­sonal names, etc.).

88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Con­verse, Google, and Yahoo!.

89. Get links from nearly-hidden sec­tions of web­sites list­ing hun­dreds or thou­sands of off topic sites.

Spam Peo­ple in Person

90. Go to web­mas­ter con­fer­ences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affil­i­ates make mil­lions doing nothing.

91. Instead of ask­ing peo­ple what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

Be Per­sis­tant

92. Send a web­mas­ter an alert to every post you make on your website.

93. Send a web­mas­ter an email every sin­gle day ask­ing for them to link to your website.

94. Send ref­er­ences to your site to the same web­mas­ter from dozens of dif­fer­ent email accounts (you sly dog).

95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dol­lar each day until they give in.

Get­ting Links by Being a Jerk

96. Emu­late the RIAA. When in doubt, file a law­suit against a 12-year-old girl. (Fail­ing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

97. Steal con­tent pub­lished by well known names. Strip out any attri­bu­tion. Aggre­gate many pop­u­lar chan­nels and just wait for them to start talk­ing about you.

98. Send thou­sands of fake refer­rals at every top rank­ing Web site, guar­an­tee­ing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or mil­lions of dol­lars in free, unclaimed money.

99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talk­ing on a cell phone or read­ing a book. When you run into other peo­ple say “excuse you, jerk”.

100. Spill cof­fee on peo­ple or find cre­ative ways to insult peo­ple to coax them into link­ing at your site.

101. Sue other web­mas­ters for deep link­ing to your site. Well, this is more “hilar­i­ously dumb” than it is a “bad link­ing practice”.

Related posts:

1. What is a Nat­ural Link Growth Profile?
2. Earned Links Ver­sus Bought Links
3. 3 Cre­ative Link Build­ing Techniques
4. Top 10 Joomla SEO tips for Google
5. Ten Tips to the Top of the Search Engines