Link building is a vital part of SEO ever since search engines started using the link structure of the web to capture the relative importance of web pages.
The link building economy especially took off since Google introduced PageRank, their algorithm for prioritizing the results of web keyword searches based on analyzing the citation (link) graph of the web.
Link Building in 2009
But is relying on PageRank still the way to go with link building in 2009, 10 years after Google introduced it? I don’t think so.
And what about these link building tips from 2002 for requesting a link (see the “131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies” article, which is worth a read anyway)?
- Always have a link already put on your own site before you ask for a link in return.
- Always give them the exact link text to use.
- Make sure they actually have a links page.
I neither do think this is the best way to go with link building nowadays.
How to find and get those real juicy links?
I think link building these days is fundamentally different from link building as it has been done for years now. I could tell you why I think that right now, but instead I like to point you to an excellent presentation of Christoph Cemper which he gave at the A4Uexpo Europe conference in Amsterdam two weeks ago.
In his presentation “Advanced Link Building in 2009 – How to find and get those real juicy links!” (embedded below) Christoph Cemper succeeds in pointing out what link building is about these days. My summary and a resume of what he added to his slides in his presentation.
What did matter in link building?
Christoph starts his presentation naming what used to work in link building, being:
- Precise anchor text
- Google PageRank
- Alexa Rank
- Google backlink data
- Google cache date
Google PageRank
Precise anchor text is discussed below. Talking about PageRank, that did matter a lot in achieving high rankings through link building. But its weight in Google’s algorithm has decreased, as SEOmoz illustrated.
There’s a lot more to search engine rankings than PageRank nowadays. Even pages with little or no PageRank at all are making it to the top of the search results.
Alexa Rank
The accuracy of Alexa Rank has always been discussed. Leaving aside the possible value of Alexa, it is clear that Alexa Rank is not a data point to trust determing the importance of a web page.
Google backlink data
The same goes for Google backlink data using the link: search operator. Google’s Matt Cutts recently confirmed again that the link: operator returns random sample data, so please do not use this in anyway for link building purposes nowadays.
Google cache date
The Google cache date of a page is often used to conclude when Googlebot last indexed a page. However caching and indexing are not the same processes, so be careful drawing your conclusions on Google’s cache date.
What does matter in link building?
Cemper proceeds his presentation with naming what does matter in link building these days. It comes down to 2 key elements: relevance and trust. To explain this, he names his 7 golden rules of link building.
7 golden rules of white hat link building
Christoph Cemper defines his 7 rules of link building from a white hat perspective (being to work in line with the search engine guidelines).
- Relevant page & in-content links
- Domain trust
- Natural anchor text distribution
- Nofollow
- Juicy page
- Don’t spam
- Don’t buy links for PageRank
1. Relevant page & in-content links
The most important thing in link building these days is to have relevant links to relevant content. A relevant link means a link on a relevant page within the content. So a link in the footer or sidebar of a page is not the way to go anymore.
Think like a user, not like someone performing SEO. Therefore relevant external links are good as well. Don’t worry about wasting PageRank, but think about adding value for the user.
2. Domain trust
Second to relevancy comes trust when performing link building activities. You need links from trusted sites to become trusted. And this trust is important for both links from and to a page. When it comes to trust the domain age of a site is a strong indicator.
But Christoph Cemper also coins an important term: “co-citations”. This basically means that a page is part of group of unlinked pages that share the same inbound links, and are thus co-citated.
Co-citations and SEO
In 2006 link building expert Jim Boykin wrote an article on co-citation in relation to SEO. There are 2 basic lessons that can be learnt here. It is important…:
- Who you link to with and
- Who is linked with you.
Build trust
Think about this for a second or two (and read Jim Boykin’s article). Then you’ll understand how Google can algorithmically determine if a link is relevant or not and if the link is within a “bad neighborhood“.
So it is important to build trust through relevant domains, not only links. Because trusted domains respond differently and more quickly in search engines than ‘regular’ web sites.
Authority and PageRank
Trust is often referred to as authority, which is becoming increasingly important in Google’s algorithm. A recent comparison of PageRank and SEOmoz’s mozRank indicate that PageRank started weighting in authority as well.
3. Natural anchor text
A natural anchor text (or link text) means that not all links have the ‘perfect’ anchor text. But search engines can detect this and devaluate your site. So make sure you realize a natural anchor text distribution.
The problem is that there are too many companies (SEO companies too!) that fix on PageRank and precise anchor text, but even big companies (trusted sites) can get in trouble with it (see Christoph’s case study in his presentation below).
A natural anchor text distribution is reached by doing link building as follows:
- Vary the anchor text
- Add nofollow to some links
- Add useless anchor texts (brand name, site-url, read more, click here)
The important thing here is that regular users don’t care about anchor text. Therefore ‘useless’ anchor texts make sense. So vary the anchor text and don’t worry too much anymore about a precise anchor text.
Basically you’re in trouble if all your links look like they were built by an SEO. If a lot of the links to a certain web page have the same precise anchor text, search engines can figure out that is not a natural link profile.
4. Nofollow
Did you ever build nofollow links, on relevant pages that is? Sounds strange for SEO doesn’t it. But yes, you should! Because you don’t care about PageRank that much anymore (do you?). Also realize that normal users don’t care about nofollow either. They do of course not see or know if a link is a nofollow link.
Turning this around: if you don’t have any nofollow links that could be a footprint. But don’t overdo it. Based on data, from the SEOmoz’s index built for their Linkscape tool, 2.7% of all links on the web are nofollowed. Another interesting fact is that 73% of those are internal, so nofollow is actually far more popular as a link sculpting tool than a spam prevention device.
Remember the 2 key elements of link building nowadays: we want relevant and trust, not a ‘filled green bar’. It needs to look like it is build by users.
5. Juicy page
A juicy page is actually simple to define: it ranks. And therefore a juicy page is a page that passes value to you.
How do you check if a page is juicy? If we follow the definition that a juicy is a page that ranks, check if a page is juicy as follows:
- Pick unique phrase from the page
- Search Google for this phrase (with “quotes”)
- Check if the page is on position number 1
If the page does not rank on position number 1, it’s not that much of a juicy page. In that case competitors probably stole the content of that page and, even worse, Google thinks that page is more relevant (or is the page you’re checking a copy?).
How to find relevant pages?
Extending this approach you can follow the next steps to find a relevant page for link building purposes:
- Search the keyword phrase you are targeting and look at the top results
- Use combinations of the target keyword
- Filter commercial, duplicate, etc. web sites
- Check if the page is juicy
- Are there any spammy looking links on there?
6. Don’t spam
This is not a surprise, especially from a white hat perspective, but you should not spam links. Practices which do not look natural (= built by users), and therefore could be marked as spam, are:
- Links on duplicate content pages
- Adding links into pages which are years old
- Links within a bad neighboorhood (see Co-citations above)
7. Don’t buy links for PageRank
Especially since Google started manually adjusting the PageRank of web sites that buy or sell links for ranking purposes only, it’s not a smart move to buy or sell links for PageRank only.
Besides that paying for links is against Google’s guidelines, it doesn’t align with the 2 key elements of link building these days: relevance and trust.
Not all paid links violate Google’s guidelines. As Google states: “Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.” [= adding a nofollow tag to it]
By the way, the PageRank value and weight in Google’s algorithm is deflated anyway. So you don’t look at PageRank anyway. (do you?)
Conclusion
So what works best doing link building these days? A summary of the learnings above:
- Do not look at Google PageRank or Alexa Rank
- Do obey the 7 golden link building rules above
- Do not worry about wasting PageRank or anchor text
- Think like a user! (not a SEO)
Hey Eduard!
You did an AWESOME job summarizing/transcribing my presentation. I have a hard time finding anything that’s missing.
Well done and thanks for putting this together, including the additional resources from SEOMOZ etc…
Cheers,Christoph
Appreciate the education. I’m new to this particular field and this post is helpful. Glad to have some experts who can keep up with Google’s everchanging practice.
Good guide to link building, thanks
Eduard, without doubt this is the best post I’ve read about SEO in 2009. Thank you for sharing this. Agree with nearly all of it. It’s a pleasure to actually read such a well articulated post about building a good link profile. Thanks.
@Christoph
Thanks, Christoph, much appreciated!
But the credits are yours. My article is primarily based on your great presentation!
@Bill @Sam
Thanks!
@David
Thanks a lot, appreciated!
Let me know if you still have that opinion by the end of 2009
Great content. Very to the point. I will tell our linkbuilders to take notice. Thanks.
Eduard, excellent article on building links for 2009. Very informative and refreshing to see some tips I haven’t seen before – will definitely take note of it.
Tom
Very good article. Especially about the no follow. I agree that you always should think like a user and not like a SEO. And don’t hang up on Google’s Pagerank
greets
Hi Eduard,
Like a mentioned on Twitter: terrific article. Thanks for this wisdom. Enjoy your weekend.
Cheers Jorg
Great information! Thanks for posting it.
hi Eduard! You truly have great content in here, with pretty good tips, but I got to be sincere in one thing… I LMAO’ed with the “do-in-paint” scheme!! eheheh.. But don’t worry! keep on writing great content.. that’s what really matters!
Very nice article! Brings in a totally new point of view for me! I’ll print these golden rules
Great guide, really enjoyed this. Cheers.
Thanks for the summarize of Christophers presentation. I will use it for a client
Great artcile on link building very useful for bloggers.
Very useful article. Thanks to the author.
Another good post. Yeah, it’s always the readers/users first before google or anything else.
Thanks! This is a very useful information for me as I am new in SEO business.
@all
Thanks for all the great feedback and comments, appreciated!
I am new at this link building, learning my way for better ratings on the search engines. This was very helpful. Look forward to putting it to use and watching the results.
Perfect…!!!
It is very hard to make linkbuilding actually and now the new rules, it make it some difficulter
now have every webmaster to find new ideas to get more links and a better pageranking
Great article. Learned a lot..
Here in Belgium we’re far behind concerning optimization for users and search engines.
Kind regars
Olivier
I’ve been looking for white hat link building tips then I found your great article. I really appreciate your effort to help those are new to SEO. Keep up the good work!
You mention an article I co-authored (131 LB tactics…) back in 2002, and then summarize it with three bullet points? Of course things change. And some of us were never foolish enough to use those tactics that now do not work. Don’t insult the old school link builders by intimating their approach isn’t effective. As I enter my 15th year of link building, I reckon I’ve requested a few hundred thousand links for a few hundred clients. Never did I use the tactics you deride as useless today, because frankly they were useless then too to anyone with the f’n sense to know it. What you describe as effective today is what many of us have done all along. You just finally realized that what I’ve preached for over a decade turned out to be correct, then and now. Merit based linking never goes out of style, friend.
@Eric
First of all thanks for your comment.
With mentioning your co-authored article I wanted to provide some background, as I think that article still is a really good resource in link building. Of course it is not possible to summarize it in 3 bullet points, but my point was to illustrate things have changed.
Furthermore I state that in my opinion those tactics are not all the best way to go with these days. I do not say those tactics are useless.
I really appreciate the work you are doing and you inspire me for several years now! I also think that the link building methods I describe above are used for years by many of us (including myself).
The presentation by Christoph Cemper at A4Uexpo in Amsterdam just summarized well what I and other people realized before, definitely also thanks to your writings. And as I do not see these kind of link building methods described a lot these days unfortunately, I chose to write this article.
Excellent write-up. did picked a couple of tips from you. Thanks v much.
Thanks to you I have slowly watched my search engine placement improve. Thank you!!
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This was well done and easily understood. Thank you for explaining it so well.
May I go for some trusted/authority site that are not relevant? Do you think few of them really hamper the other rank building factors?
Good article it is. A page is juicy when there are a lot of information you can actually squeezed out of the write up.
Good stuff. The pages that already top Google for keywords and niches that are related to yours, are the ones you want your link on – makes sense doesn’t it!
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