October 2, 2013: Moz.com recently published the results of its 2013 Link Building Survey. Survey respondents included SEO Link Builders, Team Managers, and Executives and Agency Owners.
Taking account of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates — which penalize sites attempting to gain Pagerank — the survey notes that “2012 was a bad year for the blatant link builder and 2013 has been no different.”Given the difficult environment for link building, it’s eye opening that 5 percent of survey respondents admitted that they continue to use Paid Linking as a link acquisition method, even though Google has explicitly prohibited the tactic. Guest Blogging (which may or may not violate Google’s guidelines, depending on whether money was paid or other indirect consideration was provided) was by far the most popular tactic, with 46 percent of respondents reporting they used the tactic, followed by the “safe” tactics of Content Marketing Initiatives (21 percent), Resource/PageLink/Building (8 percent), and Digital PR (7 percent).
If you’re frustrated by the link building challenge, there is one method that wasn’t reported in the survey that you might valuable. It is very simple and completely legal, and I have found it to be effective in my own link building efforts for my own web properties. It is to link out to a select group of authoritative sources in your particular field without regard to whether you will ever be linked back to.
Why link out? Well, there are several benefits, first, that you are demonstrating to Google and the other engines that you are associating yourself with legitimate, authoritative sources. Secondly, from a branding perspective, you are deliberately “standing next to” these same sources, which will make you look stronger in the minds of your human (non-robotic) visitors.Thirdly, you are giving the webmasters of these same information sources an ample reason to link back to you. Remember, these webmasters are likely watching their traffic sources as carefully as you are. If and when they see traffic coming over from your site, they may decide that your site is linkworthy. Such a decision may not happen overnight, but it will happen one day if you’ve chosen your targets wisely.
The “Link Out” link building tactic is simple, completely legal, and completely organic. Its biggest drawback from an SEO perspective is that you will “leak” some PageRank by conferring your portion of your own authority to another site, thus theoretically depressing your own PageRank. It is therefore only recommended for high-authority sites that have accumulated enough of a PageRank surplus to be in a position to spend some of this capital.Fortunately, any temporary PageRank reduction you experience will be more than offset when you are linked back to, making the “link out” tactic a justifiable investment for webmasters seeking to organically grow their PageRank in a way that is beyond the search engines’ reproach.
So go forth and link out!
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