February 4, 2013 (Note: this article, by Chris Irby, was originally published on Inceptor.com.) The rules for acquiring links have changed considerably, especially in the wake of Google’s Penguin update. In her article on the SEM Clubhouse blog, Carrie Hill explains why old link building strategies are no longer relevant, and offers suggestions on measuring the health of your own incoming link profile.
Adopting an “Engagement and Education” Mentality
According to Hill, we need to get out of the mindset of building links and instead focus on the goals of “engagement and education.” Rather than buying or trading links, we should be striving to earn them by writing great content and building relationships.
“Be helpful, guest blog with relevant content, don’t make every link you get on a guest blog or traffic-driving directory say ‘spammy keyword phrase,’” she writes, “and above all, if your website visitor would never click on it, need the content, or remotely care, don’t bother linking to it, or getting a link from it.”
Measuring the Health of Your Incoming Link Profile
Hill lists a number of factors to consider when evaluating the health of a link profile, as well as a link building strategy.
Carefully evaluate numerous links from a single domain.
If these links drive traffic, are relevant to your readers, and rank well on their own for your keywords, then this could work well to your benefit. Since the links are pointing to multiple pages, your SEO cold take a slight hit. However, the boosts in traffic and business could be considered a fair tradeoff.
Check the anchor text on your incoming links.
It should be varied, with the top two or three most popular anchor texts referring to your brand and/or domain. Exact match anchor text looks suspicious to Google, so rather than obsessing over cramming your anchor text full of keywords, focus instead on providing text that accurately describes the page being linked to.
Consider the types of sites that are linking to you.
General directories that consist of nothing but thousands of outbound links were hit particularly hard by Google’s last update. In addition, Google is also scrutinizing blog comment links to make sure the site being linked to is relevant to the content of the blog.
Beware of “networks” that require you to link to other members.
They may not be calling themselves “link farms,” but they certainly are in Google’s eyes. Even if you’re not required to link to everyone, you’re still part of a system that can be easily detected and traced. Hill’s advice is succinct: “Don’t do it.”
Don’t look at links as a numbers game.
Instead, focus on building great content for your readers, and then work on engaging your readers and leading them to your content. “A great network plus great content,” writes Hill, “will equal a great link profile and a great website; a winner in Google’s eyes.”
Have a question about your link profile? Didit’s experts can help.
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