Risk-averse link building | Weboptim

Link building is an incredibly common request to agencies and consultants, and in some ways it is recommended. Whether you do the link building yourself or hire someone else, it's a good idea to follow a few rules of thumb.

The vast majority of agencies want to get good links for their clients, but often don't know how to do it. Most of us don't do link building ourselves, or if we do, it's either guest blogs or popular online magazines where you can easily get links.

How can we build really good relationships with our customers?

What is the framework that we need to look at to make sure that we are risk-averse and that customers can get a stronger link profile without taking any risk?

1. Never build a link that you cannot remove

A Penguin algorithm since the update, this is particularly important as it can be a nightmare to get rid of unwanted links. We often feel better if we simply receive a link.
Now that negative SEO has the potential to cause problems, Google is seeking to reduce the value of links as opposed to penalising them, but the regulation is strong. Never build a link that cannot be removed.

But how do we do this?
There's a difference between earned links and link building.
So if it turns out that we didn't do anything (we didn't pay) for the link, we just got it because we have great content, we don't have to worry. But if you want to be actively involved in link building, there are a few rules to follow, and there are actually some interesting methods to try.

A. Canonical "burn" sites
This is really just a security policy for links. The idea is not to put all content values and link values in the same "bucket".

Let's assume that and we decide to do some kind of reconnaissance-based link building. In this case, we would create another version of the sub-page and ask people to link to that version of the sub-page. This page will be identical to the original and will have a canonical tag that will pass link strength to the original.

Of course, you don't have to make a thousand "door pages", but sometimes it is worth doing the separation.

Let's say we reach out to a webmaster who says our article is great and puts it on his blog, but what not to tell: "Oh yes, by the way, I have another 100 blog articles on my link farm". We just got a bunch of spam links pointing to our site. Of course we don't want them to point to the website. The chances of this guy removing our link out of hundreds or thousands of pages is very slim. The worst case scenario here is that we've lost the page, the link page and it's time to create a new one and proceed with that.

What if the opposite happens?
Start ranking the site for good content, get great link relationships, but someone decides to spam the site with links.
This is common in the legal sector, although you would think it would never happen to a lawyer, but apparently lawyers are not afraid of another lawyer.

Regardless of what you can do in such a situation, simply get rid of the original page and leave the canonical page that contains the links.

So what we do is we split the different pages into different baskets without losing the ranking potential. We call these canonical burn pages.

B. Know the link provider
If the links are from a site where you have to pay $50 for a package that gives you x number of links from specific sites, you will never be able to remove them unless you use something like canonical burn sites.
But in this case, we're trying to get good links, we're building a relationship where the person can understand that in the future they might need to remove the link. This means that we may lose some links, but in the long run we can protect ourselves and our customers.

This is the point where sales will be very strong. Imagine a customer call, a sales call or someone comes to you and says they want link building.

They have been burnt before. They know what it feels like to be punished. They know what it's like to be told: I don't know how to do it.

If we tell them that we can build a link and we are confident in the quality of our offer, we can promise and guarantee that we will have these links removed within 7 or 14 days if necessary. It is this kind of security policy that makes our product invaluable to customers who are concerned about the potential damage that links can cause.

2. We cannot buy links (except user value)

This is rule number two. It's a great way to describe Google's guidelines, which state that you can't trade links, only user value.
There are many people who bought links years ago. Many people used to think that this was the only way to build links. Today, you no longer have to cheat to get good links. You have to work for it, not cheat. There are plenty of ways to justify the value of a website and say it is worth giving us links.

Let's look at some examples:

• make some tool and look for websites that would like to link to this tool
• we can offer data or photos from
• accessibility: look for good content that is inaccessible or not useful for people who use screen readers. Repurpose content, follow accessibility guidelines and everyone will connect to the site. We can say: "Look, it's great content, but unfortunately a certain percentage of the population can't use it. Why not recommend me as an accessible version?"
• broken link rebuilding
• skyscraper content, where you can create fantastic content

There are so many ways to make good contacts.
But to do this, we need content that is worth linking to. If we send the content out by email, it means the content is not good enough. As SEOs, this is our responsibility. So we need to create better content. With better content, we can get better links.

3. On your device!

This is the last thing. Better indicators and better workflow can be achieved with different tools. There are many ways to do this.

First, we need a good link tool, e.g. Link Explorer. We need to look for websites that talk about us but don't link to us.
You can also look for specific link analysis tools.

Once we have found these, we can create trusted links for customers. Nothing will improve your brand reputation like link building. Link building is the street cred of the industry. There is no stronger phrase than "Igen, we build a few thousand contacts for our customers every year", sounds much better than "We bought it" or "We have outsourced".

If we follow the first 2 rules and use the right tools, we are on the right track.

Source: moz.com