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Link Building Basics: Why your link strategy sucks

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 2, 2007 in Link Building

Another hopeful self-published author dropped by the SF-Fandom forums to tell us about his book. I wish every self-published author all the success in the world, I really do. But dropping by a forum to promote your book is about as ineffective as dropping by a forum to tell people to buy products from your ecommerce site.

Strangers who roll into town have absolutely no credibility. You’re the Music Man without his talent and inventiveness. You can’t go around singing about trouble in River City, rousing the rabble to buy your goods, no matter how good they may be.

People who drop links in forums have either figured it all out for themselves (Hey! I just need to create as many links as I can!) or else they have been reading too many SEO blogs and forums (and, frankly, I doubt any of the reputable ones still recommend this tactic anyway).

Let’s recap what we actually know about links (with respect to SEO Theory):

1. Most links do not pass value
2. We don’t know which links do pass value
3. The value a link passes is comparable to how difficult it is to get the link
4. Most SEOs don’t know what they are doing when it comes to “link building” — they just follow the steps in the Link Building 101 Manual

Take it from an old link builder: you won’t find a complete, reliable link building methodology on any blog or forum. A lot of the old link building wisdom has been lost to the community. A very few people, like Eric Ward, still practice old school link construction. But no one shares all their secrets. And most SEOs today just compile “Top 10 Ways To Build Links” and “101 Free Links” lists.

Let’s take a look at some of the old linking tricks that have fallen out of favor. Let’s start with forums. Why is it a bad idea to drop links in forums? Because people know you’re just there to abuse the forum and hoodwink the community into becoming your loyal customers. They won’t bite. Maybe a few idiots will click on your links out of curiosity (I might do it just for a laugh) but the odds are pretty good that an active forum is moderated and the moderators will zap your link; whereas an inactive forum may be filled with useless link spam.

Forum links generally do not pass value (PageRank, Anchor Text, and traffic) any more because forum operators generally don’t let them. However, many forums still let you create profiles where you can link to your home pages. But they now often impose rel=’nofollow’ or the equivalent on those pages, or disallow them in robots.txt. So neither crawlers nor people will see your worthess link spam in those multitudes of profile pages you have created for yourself.

On the other hand, if you pick 2-5 forums and participate in them on a daily basis for about 2 months, helping people with good advice, feedback, avoid getting into flame wars, etc., you may find that if you include a link to your site in your signature that people will visit. That’s pretty sound advice which has been handed around the SEO community for years. It’s a pity that hardly anyone actually follows it.

Even signature links rarely pass value any more. If a forum doesn’t block the value a search engine almost certainly will, but they cannot prevent people from clicking on those signature links after you have become an active participant in their communities. And the value that a non-value passing link can pass is that it may lead other people to link to your site from their sites.

Call that deferred link value. It’s a non-quantifiable quality that cannot be represented by PageRank. How many deferred links have you earned this year simply by being a nice, helpful, friendly person in a forum? You get value by giving value, and it’s much less stressful than harrassing people with link requests.

Well, if everyone frowns on dropping links in forums, but if there is deferred value to be derived from participating in forums, is the same not true of blogs? Bloggers hate the link spammers, but they love to get comments on their posts. Some bloggers will let you include a link in your comments. Some bloggers won’t. The only way to find out if you’ve earned that kind of trust is to be supportive of a few bloggers. Encourage them. Thank them for taking the time to share their thoughts with you.

Link to their blogs without asking for anything in return.

Linking out to other sites simply because you find them to be useful or valuable is the oldest linking trick in the world. It’s the natural way to build reciprocal links, but it’s also the best and greatest form of link bait around. If you show your visitors that you are extremely selective and won’t link to just anyone, they’ll respect your choices (even if they disagree with some of them) and they’ll often link to your site regardless of whether you’re linking to them.

Now, if you create a truly influential link resource, you’ll undoubtedly receive heartfelt requests for links back to new sites. You should consider such requests carefully. Is the person making the request just building links for SEO or is he striving to become part of an extended Web community? There is a difference. I’ll often link to people who are sincere.

In fact, I was recently offered money for a link from Xenite.Org to a very well-designed, highly informative, non-commercial site. I took the time to look at the site and, without telling the marketer what I intended, I decided it was worth linking to for free. I never sell links from Xenite anyway. Offering me money is useless. But if you have a worthwhile resource, I may give you the link just because you do have a worthwhile resource.

You can get some useful links if you go out there and beg. There are people who have built up value in their sites who will exchange links with you. You can get some useful links if you sign up for reciprocal link management services. The service operators who want to stay in business have an incentive to monitor their clients’ sites and activities and kick out the bad performers. But even so, exchanging links with other sites “because it’s good SEO” is about as bad a reason for exchanging links as one can imagine.

You can gain more links faster by creating truly useful content. People WILL find it, despite the frustration you feel because you think your competitor has 25,000 visitors a month and you only have 25 visitors a week. There was a time when I only had 25 visitors a week. I still remember seeing my first hit counter cross the 25 threshold. 3 of those hits were mine.

There were days when I was so hungry for traffic I would sit there and click REFRESH on my pages so the hit counters rolled up. But I wasn’t fooling anyone. The pages that got traffic were the pages that offered value to my visitors. Everything else languished. That’s still the way it is.

I did eventually learn to link to my own content liberally. A lot of people are afraid to do that. They’re afraid they’ll be making a bad impression on visitors, or maybe penalized for spamming. Trust me: you cannot possibly be spamming anything if you use your own pages to link to each other. That’s called editorial judgement. That’s called good navigation. That’s SEO.

A good link creates visibility for you. It may or may not boost your PageRank (and even if it does boost your PageRank, that won’t help your rankings in search results). A lot of people eschew links from PR 0 pages. I’ll take them. If you’ve got a PR 0 page and you want to link to some good content, please tell me you think I create good content by linking to me. Your opinion means more to me than the opinion of someone who operates a link-swapping PR 7 site.

All Web sites start out with PR 0. It’s stupid to refuse to link to a site because it’s toolbar PR value is less than some arbitrary number. You’re not hurting yourself by linking to good content. Google doesn’t know what good content is. They are completely clueless about good content. Why do you think they developed PageRank in the first place? They want us to find good content and link to it.

You shape the Web every day by the links you create. If you only create links for yourself you look petty, selfish, and pathetic. If you link out loosely without regard for the value on the other end of the link you look cheap, desperate, and pathetic.

Your link building efforts should not be altruistic any more than they should be all about you. Instead, your link building should focus on helping recognize value. Show people where to find something useful, something different. In link building, for every link you create that passes value to another site, you get value in return: the value of your editorial choice is embedded in your content, making your content unique, useful, and perhaps well worth linking to.

Of course, many people have been schooled in bludgeoning their way to the top of search results with link anchor text. And yet many of you would be amazed to learn that you usually only need a little bit of that precious link anchor text to achieve those high results. That is because most of the links you think are helping you don’t help you. They have long ago been stripped of their ability to pass value, or they never had it.

Just because you find a PR 8 site that lets you create a profile page doesn’t mean that page has the ability to pass value to your sites. You can throw links all over that PR 8 site and they may do absolutely nothing for you. There are many PR 7 and PR 8 sites today that get little to no traffic. They were once shining stars, dominating their sectors, illuminating small Web communities. But no longer. Their lives are spent and all they do now is collect outbound links from people who mistakenly believe that a Google PR update actually means something in SEO terms.

Before you create a link to your site on that free profile page, ask yourself the following questions:

“If I don’t put a link to my site on this page, is it still a page I want to link to from my site?” If the answer is yes, then call your bluff: link to the page for six months before you put your link on it.

“If I don’t put a link to my site on this page, will it still get traffic other than me?” If the answer is yes, then call your bluff: look for links to that page (not the site, but the page). If you find links pointing to that free profile page, put your link on it.

I feel your pain every time I launch a new site. I have to build value for it, get links to it, make sure it doesn’t fall into the Supplemental Results Index. I relive the nightmare every day, every month. I know I cannot change the Web by clicking REFRESH in my browser.

If you want 25,000 visitors a day, you need to give those people 25,000 reasons to come visit you. It may take that many queries in search engines for them to find you. They may find you through links they discover on other pages. They may find you for expressions you never bothered to optimize for.

They will find you because you create something worth finding, not because you go out and drop links on other Web sites. If you are the only person linking to your content, you have a serious problem. You can kickstart the process, but if no one else ever joins in, you probably don’t have anything worth linking to.

And no linking strategy will help you dig your way out of that rut. You can spend the rest of your days creating faux links, or you can do something to create value worth linking to. This is one time where the strategy “if you build (value) then (links) will come” actually does work.

Maybe you’ll only get 10 visitors a day for a while. But those 10 visitors can snowball into 1 million for any one of … oh…a million reasons.

That’s why your link strategy sucks. It’s too narrow. It’s all about you. And why on Earth should I or anyone else link to you? Don’t get defensive. Give me a reason to link to you. I really do want to.