Since March 2012 a lot of attention has been focused on how to build back links without falling into any of the filters that Google has in place.
Many people including SEO Optimisation companies are still making mistakes when it comes to building links to your online business, this article will explain in easy to understand terms what you need to be doing to ensure you not only keep growing your business but never fall victim to any false information about link building.
What Is a Local Backlink & How to Find Them In 2017
Backlinks play a large role in a website’s rankings, whether it’s a local service or brick-and-mortar business. But how do you find links for these types of businesses?
The traditional thought process when we think about link building is that we want high authoritative domains to link back to our websites and we want as many of them as possible. But, that way of thinking might not always be relevant for a brick-and-mortar and small business website. Article Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-backlink/213290/
This article is written from our own experiences with link building as well as resources from SEOMOZ research who I believe is the leading authority when it comes to SEO and Linking Building.
How To Build Back Links For Best Effect
This is something that many are still getting wrong and are blindly creating back links to their sites without actually knowing or understanding the consequences.
As Google’s algorithm evolves the chances of actually tripping a filter that can see your website receive a penalty increase each time.
You will see a screen shot further down the page of how devastating a penalty from Google can be when it comes to un-natural back linking.
There are many different ways to build back links, and the first step is understanding a little about how to correctly use anchor text when linking back to a site. The wrong mix such as only deciding to use three keywords which are what many are still recommending may not have the best outcome for your efforts in the long term.
What you need to be doing is looking long and hard at what is required and make your link profile as natural as possible, from our research this is what we believe to be the most effective anchor text distribution you can have for your link profile.
Breaking Down The Back Link Profile
To help you understand what all this means I have placed the explanations below so you can fully figure out what are the best back link building practices for your online business.
- 30% for brand this is your website name
- 16% for keyword phrase this is a combination of words that contain your keywords
- 18% for exact match keyword is the primary keyword for the page
- 17% for URL links this is the actual URL link of the page
- 16% for Other links this is anything else such as read more, click here, check out this great site and so on…
Getting this wrong can have very damaging effects to your business where once you had excellent rankings you find yourself on the 83rd page of Google simply because you were too aggressive and over optimised your link profile.
The below screen shot has been taken from Google Webmaster tools from a site that was ranked at number #3 on Google for the very competitive keyword term “affiliate marketing”. What happened was due to aggressive link building practices his site received a notice from Google about unnatural links and was dropped like a rock in the search engine rankings for some very competitive search terms as well as losing over 500 visitors a day to his site a decrease in traffic of over 70%.
The webmaster of this site never took the time to understand how to make a back link and simply used a back link builder that was outsourced overseas.
After speaking with him at length, and finding out how he had gotten into this situation I discovered that all he wanted to know was how to build back links fast and at the most affordable price. For him, that had worked throughout 2009 until March 2012 when his website was hit with a massive penalty losing all his top ten rankings, and there were hundreds of rankings lost over night.
In total, this site has over 460 pages of content, and every one of them received a penalty due to poor link building practices.
The owner of the site is now going to allow me to make a full recovery and I will keep you all updated as to my progress and what I did to turn this site around.
When You Know How To Build Back Links, The Results Are Long Term
Below is another screen shot from Google Webmaster tools of one of my clients that have used and continued to use our services to create back links. This site is also in a very competitive niche marketplace and has a lot of competition to contend with to get into the top 10 positions of the search engines.
This is only a fraction of the keywords this site now ranks for in the search engines with more than 300 keyword terms listing in the top 10 results of Google.
If you would like a free consultation about how you can improve your online business, please use this form to contact me obligation free.
What you have read so far will only give you a fundamental understanding of what is required when learning how to build back links. There are other factors to consider such as link footprints, meaning the different platforms that you can get links from being web 2.0 sites, social bookmarking, guest posting just to name a few options.
If you are planning to use the link building strategy above, then you not only have to diversify the anchor text as discussed but also where those links will be coming from which is what a link footprint is all about. As an example, you would be wasting your time if the only links to your site were from blog commenting that would look completely un-natural to Google, even if you used the anchor text diversity above. You might want to take a minute to read our article on Link Spamming.
How Do Back Links Work?
Having relevant back links coming into a website is very important, it’s a way to firstly get a site indexed and catalogued in the search engines. It is also considered a vote for a website in regards to the popularity and importance of the content you that site is providing.
You should also know that not all links are created equal, using my site as an example which is a web design and marketing business and someone is linking to me from a lawn mowing business website that link is not going to be anywhere near as effective as another site related to web design or marketing. If the links you get are coming from sites that are closely related to your site, you will get more influence and authority, and you will need fewer links.
The key element to consider here is the more influence and related the link is coming to a website the more authority and ranking it can potentially receive. If you can achieve this, you will need a lot fewer links which will reduce your link building costs considerably.
Even though knowing how to build back links is not the whole picture of ranking a website on the internet it is a good way for others to see the worth and authority of your site. By building authority which leads to trust, this will naturally draw other webmasters to your site allowing you to create further associations with others online and possibly get more relevant links for your website.
How Spammers Hijack Abandoned URLs To Spread SEO Garbage Across The Internet
“Black hat” and “grey hat” search engine optimizers (SEOs) — those who knowingly violate Google’s rules — create vast networks of interlinked spam content sites, in part on the ruins of the old, Web 1.0 Internet, for the sake of boosting their clients’ own sites to the top of Google’s search rankings. (A spokesperson for Google requested detailed questions, then declined to comment for this story.)
Buying up dead domains for SEO is not a new technique. In the words of Jason Duke, industry veteran and co-founder of the.domain.name, an SEO data site, “Bringing a site back to life, taking the power of its links, that’s been around for 15-16 years.”
Article Source: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/09/how-spammers-hijack-abandoned-urls-to-spread-seo-garbage-across-the-internet/
Do You Know Who Is Linking To Your Website?
If you would like to see how many sites are linking to any site you can use this simple command in Google Search (links:www.domain.com) and to see links to an individual page it is (links:www.domain.com/internalpage.html), you will need to change domain.com to the actual website address.
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of how to build back links to not only grow your business but improve search engine rankings without the fear of being penalised for your efforts. Here is an article that explains what understanding what a do follow and no follow link is this is another aspect you need to be aware of when link building.
That’s a million dollar question. Why? Because if you can build backlinks to your site from bad neighbors, so can your competitors on your name. This is called negative SEO. And if your competitors are building ugly backlinks pointing to your site, that may have a negative impact on your rankings. Google is trying to prevent others from hurting your site rankings and even states that on their Google Webmaster Tools, “Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”, but they can’t be 100% accurate.
Hi Danielle
That is exactly right Google can not guarantee that negative SEO will not effect your site. I have just completed a full recovery of a site and regardless of what many are saying about the anchor text the biggest cause of the penalty was the high amount of links coming in from very poor quality websites. The links were all coming from blogs mostly WordPress blogs and about 20% of those links coming in from blogger.
What I mean by poor quality is this, no real structure or theme to a site. No pages that allow you to contact the webmaster or even disclaimer or privacy pages, actually all there usually is with sites like this is post after post of sometimes spun or copied content where the site owner has added the site to a link network to get content in return for links.
Something that I did notice was even though the webmaster had spent all that time building those links whether it was to manipulate PR or not the link network site owners had added “nofollow” to well over 50% of all the links created. So how effective was it really for all the trouble it caused in the end.
I also believe that with the disavow tool that Google has introduced that these sites are now being identified by site owners who have used them in the past and received a penalty. Google may be using this information to slowly but surely identify more and more networks.
You still need to be very aware of the anchor text you are using and a good rule of thumb is to mix this up as much as possible and make sure you are building links to all pages of your site and use as many different anchor text links as you can, your brand should have the highest percentage when looking at your back links. Also from as many different sites including social media and web 2.0 sites.