• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Why your link-building techniques suck

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 26, 2008 in Link Building

Tamar Weinberg at SE Roundtable wrote a brief post today about risk-free link-building techniques. Recapping points posted in a forum discussion, Tamar summed up the basic link-building tips that are still making the rounds in SEO discussions:

There are a number of tactics that can be employed to build natural links (and perhaps a few unnatural ones). They are: press releases, social bookmarking, blog posts, article submissions, forum posting, getting relevant links from .edus and library websites, posting original research (as per Matt Cutts), and creating good content that people will naturally link to.

As someone who has advocated virtually every one of these methods over the years, I feel some trepidation when I see other people continue to promote them. On the one hand, we can all say, “Well, these techniques still work to a certain extent, so why not use them?” On the other hand, none of these techniques works consistently. They never have.

It comes down to how well you execute the plan. Here are some of the strengths and weaknesses of each technique, and some suggestions on how you might be able to get the most benefit.

Press releases - I feel like I’m trapped in an old Dr. Pepper commercial: “The press release wars are over.” Hm. Maybe. Then again, maybe we need to slap a few SEOs up side the head about their press release strategies. People are using press releases for a number of purposes these days. For example, certain press release services are now indexed by Google News, Live News, and Yahoo! News.

Most SEOs seem to blind themselves by only seeking link opportunities from press release services. In 2006, Matt Cutts says PR Web press release links didn’t help Avatar Financial. Some people in the SEO industry seem to have forgotten the post. Of course, there have been two Google upgrades since that blog post.

Do press releases pass link value? Yes, as long as you look at ALL the search engines and ALL types of link value, not just PageRank and anchor text. Should you use press releases for link building? No — not unless you’re being strategic and using the press release to actually reach out to people, telling them where to point their links.

One possible way to get some links from press releases might be social media press releases. However, depending on third-party sites to drive PageRank and anchor text toward your own content is a crap shoot.

You would do better to post your own press releases on your own sites. You know the links won’t be nofollowed and the search engines will assume some editorial choice was involved. You can build value in your press releases and through them build value in your Web content.

Social Bookmarking - This practice comes with its own perils, as many social media sites are aware of SEO abuses of their systems and they generally don’t like it when SEOs just come around to drop links. Supposedly, some of the social bookmarking sites are no longer trusted by search engines, but opinions vary on that topic.

You can build more trust in the social linking sector by allowing other people to post links to your content. Of course, that means you should write link-worthy content (not link bait, just link-worthy). Many SEOs now use passive social bookmarking strategies, mostly by asking people through plug-ins and widgets to post links for them.

It is still possible to manage your own social bookmark service but you should be dutifully linking out to other people’s content, especially really good content, so that your contributions are better accepted. Nonetheless, social bookmarking is a time-consuming link-building process. I know there are scripts and things that speed up the process, but social bookmarking spam doesn’t warm the cockles of my heart.

Blog posts - Blogs do work — as long as they are not exiled to supplemental indexes. Just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you have a magic bullet. And posting comments on other people’s blogs is a very time-consuming and inefficient way of building links. Many, many blogs now routinely nofollow comment links and/or moderate comments.

So how can you build value into your blog, so that its links help you (or your friends, family, and clients)? First, blog. You can add new pages to any static Web site and get as much immediate value as you’ll get from adding posts to a blog. But your blog is designed to automatically ping blog search indexes, and that pinging helps publish your blog immediately. With a static Web site you may have to wait days or weeks for your content to appear in search indexes.

It doesn’t take much effort to earn enough search engine trust for a blog that it will immediately appear in Main Web Search and have a reasonable chance of ranking well for moderately competitive queries. All you have to do is add a post every day for a couple of months. But blogs are timely things. They lose their link-passing value if they are abandoned or don’t have enough content to keep the search engines crawling through their pages.

Just creating a blog is not sufficient. Keeping a blog active, current, and interesting is important because interesting blogs do attract links and those links help build trust and value in your blog.

Community blogging will ease this burden, and we may soon be inundated by a multitude of “SEO friendly” community blogs. When these dark horses start thundering over the hilltop into your search perspective, be picky. Don’t try to use them all. Exercise your own editorial judgement because as soon as there is enough volume to establish patterns of abuse, you can believe the search engines will figure out which community blogs to trust and which ones not to.

Article submissions - Free article distribution remains the hallmark of the Cheap SEO. Low-budget SEOs rely extensively on free article submission. Generally speaking the quality of their articles is pretty bad. They rarely provide any new or insightful information, they usually write obviously self-promotional nonsense, they repeat outdated SEO advice or basic SEO principles that every school kid has learned, and they flood the free article services with mush content.

Free articles can and do pass link value. In fact, some people (like me) create whole Web sites based on free articles that other people have written. I can’t speak for anyone else but I’m very, very picky about which free articles I’ll republish. Over 99% of all free articles never make the cut with me. You can get valuable links from repurposed content sites provided those sites earn search engine trust. They have to create real value for people. It helps if you enhance the free articles with your own original content (you cannot and should not modify the articles — comply with the free article service terms of use).

I would advise most people to NOT try to build links through free articles until AFTER they manually built a few Web sites that use free articles for content. Be careful about whose articles you use. Be careful to research these people and make sure their “facts” are legitimate and credible. Assume you cannot trust the majority of the free articles you find online. Be an editor when you create your repurposed content site.

After having to wade through a few hundred badly written articles, you may be ready to write something exceptional that other people will want to use on their own sites. I have written very few free articles but most if not all of them have been republished multiple times. A fair number of those republications came from spammers, but some came from people who were thoughtfully putting together resources from repurposed content.

Relevant links from .edus and library Web sites - This is a pipe dream. There are many such linking resources on the Web. Most SEOs don’t work with sites that really deserve that kind of editorial love. Of course, only time and lack of talent prevent any Webmaster from creating a truly useful resource that universities and libraries will recommend.

Rather than obsess over these perceived high-value links, teach yourself to accept that there are other resources which provide equal or better value and which are more likely to provide links to the average business site. I’m talking about chambers of commerce, nice business directories, community Web sites, city government business directories, etc. I’ve been preaching the “join-an-association” approach for many years. Governments, non-profit organizations, professional and business associations, and specialty business directories have always been great resources for links. People actually visit their Web sites and browse those links.

Posting original research - Tamar attributed this to Matt Cutts but people were recommending this as far back as 1998 when I first became aware of search engine optimization. Original research tends to be long-winded and informative. If it’s well-written it will capture attention. Look at Wikipedia. Their original research is of generally low quality but it attracts all sorts of links.

A typical business site can publish original research in the form of white papers, case studies, question and answer documents, and press releases. It all goes on your Web site. You can be creative with your URL structures if you want but the point is to create a body of research documents that people will want to read.

Good content that people will naturally want to link to - This is damned near impossible for most business site operators. Using “Business site” and “good content” together is a common oxymoron. After all, how many of us really use BMW’s site to read about auto history? Actually, you can find a lot of well-written feature articles on comercial Web sites.

Unfortunately, most business owners and decision-makers still don’t get it. They insist they don’t have the time or the talent to write “the history of Bob’s used car lot”. Okay, no one is really interested in Bob’s Used Cars’ history unless it’s been in business for 60 years, has hosted annual chili cookoffs, sponsored winning community sports teams, and helped raised money for little kids with huge medical bills.

There’s nothing wrong with telling people how your company has participated in its community. There’s nothing wrong with telling people how your grandpa opened the first car dealership in Calaveras County. There’s nothing wrong with telling people how you started your business if you have some real history to share.

And people won’t care how well-written your on-site history is, although you obviously want to have someone check your spelling and grammar.

In fact, I think there is value in documenting Web sites that provide company history and feature articles. Think about how you can leverage that concept for yourself, your clients, and your friends and relatives who all have small business sites.

Link-building techniques suck because … they are overdone, underdone, and poorly implemented. Every time someone shares a link-building tip in an SEO blog or forum, tons of other people in the SEO community rally around the linking flag with cries of “Great post!”, “Great ideas! I can’t wait to use them!”, “Oh, Magoo! You’ve done it again!”

In general, link-building tips are nothing new and they are hardly link-worthy. In fact, the more people who implement a link-building technique, the less likely that technique will work for everyone.

On the other hand, if you’re going to put someone else’s link-building tips to use, go the extra mile. Put some thought behind your approach. Implement the technique with style. Do something no one else is doing.

But exercise editorial control over your self-promotional link placements. Telling people about your Web site provides absolutely no value to them. Telling them you have the answer to their problems on your Web site makes you look like a cheap self-promotional shmuck who doesn’t know how to promote Web sites. If you’re going to place a link to your site on someone else’s site, do so in a way that enhances the value of that other guy’s site.

After all, the more value his linking page accrues, the more value his link passes to you. And you may one day be the other guy whose site is being used to link to some other person’s site.

Shmuck-to-shmuck linking is just plain stupid.