I knew Ileane was going to ask for another guest post. She mentioned so in a reply to my comment I made here. More than that, I could not afford to miss an opportunity of a blog like this. But there was a beetle in my head and I could not decide on the topic yet – anything was not Okay for BBT!
There was an inquiry in my Gmail inbox. I had removed all the direct Ads from PS Exam that were already expired and not paid to extend. Because I was busy for exams, I did not send the payment requests and all those expired Ads remained there for three months for free. While corresponding there, my head triggered – why not to talk about linking? I pulled my Windows Live Writer and pressed the fingers down.
Linking – the most convenient and essential utility for the web to function, has grown to acquire multi-dimension. You would see me typing dreadful IP Numbers, had these links not been devised. Today, people are offering money to place their link on a high ranked websites! Mike wrote a post on FamousBloggers to warn against buying and selling links. Linking shaped a market too? It amuses. The market is mad!
Forums, comments, guest posts, subscriptions, emails, advertising, what and what not the links are acquired, exchanged and purchased! But are all the links valuable?
Good Links and Bad Links
Yes, there are good and bad links. No, no, I’m not talking about dofollow and nofollow links. Both are good and a natural mixture of dofollow and nofollow are the best linking strategy. You can get millions of them that may contribute to only 0.001% towards the ranking of your blog or post. Links coming to you from the pages that already have a number of outbound links; the pages that are completely irrelevant to your blog’s content do not count much. Moreover, if you fall in the bad neighborhood, you may even get penalty from search engines – burying deep down in the search results that nobody can ever discover.
The recent update of Google algorithm and the buzz of Panda is getting louder. It’s been more obvious that just acquiring BIG number of links might prove counterproductive. Panda is watching you.
[box type=”important”]So, what makes a link GOOD? Just a few points to consider:[/box]
- Is that link coming to you is from a page that is highly related to your content?
- Does that page has only a few outbound links?
- Is that link from a page that has a high Google PageRank?
- Is that link from an authority and a quality site in your niche?
If the answer is Yes, Yes and Yes, only a handful of links may miracle to boost up your blog in search results.
So, How to get links?
Getting links back to you is not difficult. Even if you just sit idle – without making any effort, you’ll get a number of them provided you have Killer Content. If you want to run faster the track, following are some of the commonly used methods, I’ve noticed:
- Create a terrific site with great content – It’s obvious, isn’t it?
- Request links from other related sites – Just send an email or use their contact form. Most of them are eager if your sites are related and are in somehow equal or better ranking.
- Establish relationships with other people in your niche – Asking with friends is much easier than with strangers. Twitter, Facebook can be really handy to connect with the blog authors and owners. Follow them and poke them!
- Actively participate in forums – Forums used to be really popular and still today there are some great that has higher PageRank; and allow you to use your URL in signature.
- Write eBooks and distribute them freely or through a paid scheme that will distribute your links across the web. I found it most effective for my ICT Trends blog as many people bookmarked the pages where I’ve offered download link.
- Use blog networks like BlogEngage, Bloggers, Blokube and many others. They are popular and some even offer you dofollow links for your submissions.
Be wise on outbound linking
The blogging world is full of spammers – hope I’m not a pessimist to say that. You might be getting a number of comments and trackbacks to your blog posts. Out of generocity, it is probable that you approve them blindly. But beware! You should not allow any outbound links without knowing them properly. Your outbound links should link to quality, authoritative sites only.
Search engines prefer “quality groupings” which means you link to pages that are closely related with each other. For example linking between pages of WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugins and WordPress Tips can be formed quality grouping.
How to analyze links?
Well, there are plentiful free and paid tools at your disposal. I wish to point out some nice free tools here.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
There can be no better tool to analyze incoming links. You can get the number, the status and explore deep down till to the page from where the link came. However, you should register to Yahoo Site Explorer to submit your blog and verify that you are the owner before you can reap off the benefits.
SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer
There are a couple of good things for this tool to be the favorite one. First is, you don’t need to register – Just open the site, enter URL and hit Enter. Second it lets you specify another URL to compare so as to check against the competitors. The third, it let you explore even more if you upgrade to Pro with a small fees!
Google Webmaster Tool
I guess I won’t need to say anything about it. There can be no blogger who is not using. It has an excellent backlink checker and can tell you about the outbound links too. It can tell if you have errors in your sitemap. With these tools, blog optimization and finding quality links is much easier.
I find the OBL to be a big problem for every link builder. You eventually find a page with a nice pagerank, and it already has 100+ and going outbound links. Since we don’t know for sure the numbers and how much they influence the authority passed through that link… math is complicated 🙂
Math is complicated! Yes Maria and in most case the Common Sense is only what you have a tool.
Some tools are available to check and analyze the outbound links from a page or domain but again the question of authority passed can’t be easily quantified.
Thank you Maria for the conversation. Appreciate that!
From my experience, the easiest way to get quality backlinks by guest posting. Also that, it is said that the link in content is worth highest for Google Search Engine.
That’s very true Dana, we can easily understand why the links inside posts are worthy than anywhere else. You are right to say guest posting is the most reliable way to get quality backlink.
Wonderful article, Suresh. Getting backlink’s is not a tough art these days, since everyone knows about Guest Posting and Niche Blog Commenting. But you need to do them consistently. If you build links today and leave your link building work for almost another one year, then your competitor will beat you for sure even if you have a high quality website. So my point is whatever you do with SEO, do it consistently.
Sathish
Ya Satish, consistency. It has been a never ending race. Don’t forget you’re always in track.
Getting backlink has been easier these days and we’ve well learned the art, but the other aspect has grown even harder. What about offering links out from your blog? We need to be more conscious to control bad outgoing links.
Thanks Suresh for your great tips. And yes, there are good and bad links. Especially, those which come from your blog towards other blogs. Spammers are so blindly offensive that can harm your image against SE. I personally delete each and every one of spammy comment. For backlinking, I am 100% with quality guest posting either for me or for others who want to guest post for my blog.
You got it right Steven. I’m seeing lot of comments that are queued on Spam Comments page. Most of them look like perfect legitimate comments. Some of them have a hard-coded link to their site (I hate it. When I’ve allowed to leave their blog link, recent post link and even enabled keywordLuv plugin, they don’t need to write links inside comment body. That is a spam no doubt).
Similarly there are many comments which have nothing offensive. Nice comment, no links inside comment message, but still the comment author’s name is ‘Replica Handbag’, ‘Replica Watches’ etc. If I were not running other sites and not seen these kind of comments, I would never notice that these comments are spams.
Yet another kind of headache are those trackbacks – Uff! How will you be able to visit and verify all those trackback links.
Hope future won’t be as harder.
Hi Suresh
Thanks for such an informative post. Knowing where your links come from is very important. Must say I am really strict with what I approve on my site. Don’t want to link to bad neighbourhoods.
Patricia Perth Australia
Its good to look at the page where we approve a link to appear on our site. This will reward legitimates and remove greedy eyes.
Thanks for these great tips. I totally agree tat when link building one should pay attention to the type of neighborhood they are getting links from. problem is sometimes, you just can not do anything about it, specially the ones you have no control of.
There is no better way than to keep an eye where the links are heading. Thank you for the comment.
You can also use a simple Google search (link:www.yousitename.com) to know how many backlinks you get. Because GWT only shows the domain name (with a bounty of links).
Yes Mani, the Google search for link:www.yousitename.com displays the incoming links. You need to look for other tools to have more data and analyze. Thank you for your input in discussion.
Great post Suresh…
Great topic and one we ALL enjoy hearing and learning more about. At least I know I do.
I’m always getting requests from people that want to link to my site but the majority of these guys have nothing to do with what my blog is about. And of course, they have a much lower PR then my blog. I’ve learned to just ignore them now.
I haven’t been active in many forums and am just getting started in the blog networks so I hope this will really help me in the future for linking.
Enjoyed this post and always like to be reminded that what I’m doing will take me down the right path.
Adrienne
You are certainly on the right path Adrienne. Forums can be helpful to build just another community for bloggers as we grew one through commenting on blog posts. Regarding link exchanges, I request to pay more attention. Only quality links are what Google is insisting. Look at those trackbacks, many of them are spammers.
Thank you Andrienne, you inspired me work harder.
The outbound link/page rank debate will never be settled until someone can definitively say what effect do follow comments have…..which is not going to happen.
I hope the distinction of Nofollow and Dofollow and the debate will dilute gradually. As search engines are growing more capable of determining link quality, they will no longer need to rely on the link posters to tell them whether they should follow or not for that particular link.
Thank you Edell for your comment. Truly appreciated.
Dilute slowly; good luck with that. it’s been 5+yrs for me so far.
Google has already stated more then once, comment links are being devalued more and m,ore almost on a daily basis…..some just prefer to keep writing about it.
I did not like webmasters have that dofollow or nofollow tool to tag the links. Its better search engines themselves analyze and determine whether they will flow down or stick just there, isn’t it?
All WordPress comment links are inherently no-follow, if you want do follow you need one of the plugins.
Hey Suresh,
It’s interesting to see what people are finally waking up to that has always been there: create great content and you’ll be rewarded.
People have tried to game the system for far too long; everyone knew these kind of updates were coming but they still pushed forward with vapid websites in the hopes to make it big on very little effort.
It’s great for many of us because the old tactics don’t work like they used to. Crappy websites now don’t outrank great content because of abusive SEO tactics. We’re now going to see a nice shift in search results that will benefit us all.
One a completely side-note: really like your writing style 🙂
It had almost turned useless to try to find something useful using searches. Now the there is increased hope to realize. Good work should be rewarded and unfair benefit avoided. Let’s welcome the good move!
Hi Suresh
Thank you for clearing things up and for sharing some very nice online tools. I agree with you that Google Webmaster tools are a must. How about Bing webmaster tools! Have you tried that one? It is not as great as Google Webmaster tools, but I think it is nice to follow some stats on both Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Hi Thomas,
You are very right to remind bing and yahoo SEO as well but it might be because over 90% of organic traffic are from Google alone, we often under value the other search engines easily.
When studying operating systems in college, I remember a good friend, who wondered on how OS designing cared even those nano and micro seconds to optimize performance. In fact every little bits piles a huge mountain. But first let us grab that big bite. 😉
I’d be happy and appreciate if you share some tips. Be it our next post, why not?
SEO is hard progress that need to work hard to get the best result.
That is true Tony but I guess it is not that hard as many HARD words you’ve used 😉 kidding mate!
Hi,
It’s great that you sumed up in this article a lot of ways and techniques for green SEO linking, they’re really efficient. The main one I consider that is the ‘having a terrific site with great content’ because that’s what’s all about in the online domain, having a good-looking website full of useful content for the user. Nowadays, the webmasters forget to create the website for the user and instead – they create the website for the search engines which is wrong. Congratulations and thanks for the article, very inspiring and useful!
Since history, it is the content that made a website survive. Websites created for search engines without useful content are the water bubbles that blows large, floats for some time and busts without leaving any trace of its existence. Long term strategy always follows serves at least ONE reason.
You mentioned:
“Is that link coming to you is from a page that is highly related to your content?”
I agree that this is the optimal link source, but I have had great success with posting quality comments on pages with a decent PR, and with strong backlinking to them, even if they are totally unrelated to my site. I wonder if we stress to much on keeping everything relevant.
All those are the criteria to collect scores on those factors. It won’t always be necessary to score full marks but at least knowing what are the criteria will help bag in more marks.
I don’t know, but lets see what will effect after this Panda effect.
Suresh,
This is a great post and very timely for me.
I really need to read up on the new Google Algorithm.
It seems there is a real buzz. I have managed to get on page 1 in Google for a number of great keywords and I don’t want to lose my positions.
Thanks
Selina
Hi Selina,
We can expect good from this update if we did good content and white hat SEO. I summed up some good posts on Google Panda Update on my Friday Gems series in my blog. Please find the link on my comLuv link below.
Hi Suresh,
Those look like a number of great articles.
Thanks for compiling those.
Selina
I agree with you quality of links is most important for ranking. Links form a irelevelant site is harmful for website ranking or page rank.
Thank you Suraj for agreeing with me!
I haven’t actually been utilizing yahoo site explorer that much to be honest. I can actually get by in using SEO quake plugin on firefox.. Or am I missing a lot?? Other than that, I do utilize google webmaster tools quite efficiently. I am looking forward to using SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer though 🙂
Thank you Ling. Give a try to Yahoo site explorer, its a good tool. But it depends, what data you are looking for and how you are analyzing. Everybody does not use all the tools 😉
Yup Nipon! consistency is the key for every success. We are hurried to see the effects and get success. So we are distracted sooner, success appears still at distance. But consistency…yes.
Great post bro !! Got to learn a lot from your post as well as from the great comments above 😉
thanks for full too informative post !
Thank you Shashank for your comment.
Excellent views on productive linking Suresh. I as well believe that there are only 2 new core factors for links to really qualify these days:
1. The link’s placement (within the content, which emphasizes absolute relevance)
2. Link’s topical relevance
Yes Jason, it has been more important the links from where rather than how many links.
Thanks for all that you written ,In my opinion guest posting is the best way to get efficient back links
Guest posting is a wonderful opportunity to get a link back to you from right inside the post and this link is much more valuable.
One of the greatest way I think bloggers can apply to build backlinks naturally is design/develop a WordPress theme and then freely distribute it to people. The cost will center around $300 – $360 for a simple theme, but the effect is really enormous. Or you can simply create a plug-in and post to WordPress.org. People will eager download it and spread the links for you.
Wonderful idea and agree with the enormous effect it can have to boost up your linking. But this is only for them who are good at designing and word-press programming. I’m not that good in designing 🙁
The price for a simple theme you have mentioned here is not the fact, it’s cost might be very less than you brief. It take only time period to work as SEO.
Last time i have accept all comments on my posts by bulk selection and approve at once. Now I should take care according to your advise don’t approve all the links in a blind way because Search engines prefer “quality groupings”. Thanks Suresh Khanal!
That’s right William, sometimes it can be notoriously devastating!
My traffic has increased 32% ..!!! 🙂
By controlling the comments according to their subject or by any other means ?
Hi Suresh,
Its very informative article, I have been very cautious before approving comments or trackback. Most of the trackbacks are just spam. Anyway safe guarding our blog is nothing but protecting about heard earned business.
Nice share Suresh..
-Imran
Thank you Imarn. It feels good to see you after a bit time. I agree its a hard earned business and you can’t be mad about linking anywhere. Worthy links are worthy kick away those spammers.
A very good briefing of benefits and penalty of good links and bad links according to search engines eyes. Thanks!
Thank you Monique. Glad you liked the post.
Blog commenting is indeed the easiest way to do SEO. But it needs a proper way to do this perfectly. You must choose blogs that enables dofollow links. For google only considers dofollow links. In that way you blog commenting is an effective SEO tactic.
Blog commenting has different dimensions and many people engage in commenting for different purposes. Many people use it to draw attention of post author to their own blog and this is very much possible when you communicate with interesting view point.
Commenting is best beneficial for link building as well. But I want to add that it not only the dofollow links, Google counts the nofollow links as well. A good and natural mixture of both type of back links is the best link building strategy.
Thank you for the comment.
There are a lot of crap articles about SEO floating around this crazy place called the Web…This one is not one of them. Well written with good info for us less experienced.
It is most probably because there are lot of people talking about SEO. I don’t think you should focus too much on SEO if you have some basic knowledge, using WordPress platform and installed a few good SEO Plugins.
I’ve found here very impressive points regarding good and bad backlinks, even irrelevant backlinks can degrade our site by Google Panda. Now we try to follow your guidance and get strong backlinks. Thanks man!
All your tips and guidance is right, but what about our comment backlink from your this blog for our un-relevant site for e.g entertainment or sports link? as you explained for good and bad backlinks.
Hi Ileane! nice analysis of good and bad backlinks, really sometimes far irrelevant links cause to degrade our blogs. Thanks for useful info.
Linking – the most convenient and essential utility for the web to function, has grown to acquire multi-dimension. Thanks for putting light on this subject and nice guidance about plentiful free and paid tools.
Hi does it mean that if a post has already hundreds of comments it is worthless to add another comment with backlinks, and does all the comment included in a post will be less worthy?
If you put your links on related site that is not just good for the SERPS but also for traffic through that link.
I believe if I had a link on the homepage of cnn.com or something like that, even though it is totally irrelevant to what I do, I would still shoot up in the SERP.
Hey Suresh! Getting links from great blogs a really great luck! But it all happens with hard work! Moreover, the better the relationship with the blog owner, the better and quality links you (might & should) get!