Is Link Building Still The Same?
Search engine algorithms are constantly changing and the change is forcing changes to our SEO practice too. It guides and compels us to change the strategies for link building we are using.
With every update on search engine algorithm the incoming links became even more valuable. Today you can't rely on the link building methods to hunt for backlinks that were most effective just a couple of years ago.
Are you sending emails to web-masters with a proposal of link exchange? Hahahaa…
If you have noticed, those emails have exactly in same content, format and structure. “Post the link in your website then send your link and anchor text. 
Your links will be published right here [pr 3] “. Funny! And I guess they must have purchased some software that promises to make them millionaires in no time!
What about blog commenting, forum profile links, Squidoo lenses? Are they still working for you?
Oh! With forums, I can't forget the misfortune I experienced. Back in the day, I found some forums that were really nice places to hang out and the benefits were huge numbers of back links and traffic! With addicted participation on two well reputed forums (mazzako forum and ddboard forum) I gained a good amount of backlinks and one of my sites got PR6 (psexam.com). It used to be a great link building method. Can you imagine the downfall to PR2 from 6 after both of those forums were closed for unknown reason? 🙁 I wonder how long these types of forums will survive!
So, what can be the better reliable strategies for link building? I hope you can suggest a few more, but here's my best guess for what will work best in 2012. If search engines are smarter, we too aren't that stupid! Let's explore the three methods that are hot in trends recently.
Link building with free Themes, Plugins etc.
There are thousands of new bloggers coming online everyday. I remember David Risley said “They are coming” – the millions who yet don't know blogging and social networks, online marketing etc. and that implies still the huge opportunity.
Because THEY are not yet confident to spend money for themes, plugins and diverse other essential blogging tools, free themes, plugins and many other web applications are very popular in the blogosphere. If you have a creative mind and possess some skills, how about getting decent links back by giving your tool away for free?
You are not earning money out of your creative work, but the monetary value of the link building could possibly surpass the amount of money you might earn by trying to offer it for a price.
Back Linking from Social Networking and Bookmarking sites
This is another lucrative avenue for you to explore. If a nice piece of content goes viral, it and can offer huge amounts of backlinks. Search engines have started to value social networks higher. Google already declared that social engagement is a ranking factor in their algorithm and suggests to incorporate the +1 button on your websites and blog posts.
There can be a debate on NOFOLLOW links but be assured that the crawlers have grown smarter!
Mason Stoller has already published a post on the importance of Social Bookmarking sites for SEO here on BasicBlogTips. The post is worthy enough to visit and be sure to check out his list of social bookmarking sites.
Guest Blogging as The Best Form of Link Building
Needless to say, there's no better proactive strategy to acquire those highly valued links from within the blog post other than guest posting. We have reasons to believe that all links are not equal and one link from inside the post area outweighs dozens on comments or in the footer or sidebars. Kimberly Castleberry calls these links Editorial links and she has a nice post about this topic – Editorial Links vs Blog Comment Links.
I hope it is not very hard to get an guest blogging opportunity if you have a decent reputation. Anil Agrawal has a list of 100 blogs that allows guest blogging to make you easier. Don't wait, approach the blog owners with your quality post. You are most welcome with your nice and useful piece to publish in my SEO MMO Tips blog too. Please find my contact information below in Bio box.
I'm sure there are lot more effective link building methods that you want to share it with me, don't you? Waiting for your comments.
Nice Article on New Strategies of Link Building…! I’m bit confuse on free Themes & Plugins, How this strategies work? and How can I build link for my blog since I’m very new to this field.
Thanks,
I think this is actually not a new link building strategy but it requires some skills to create helpful themes or plugins, then people will give us back links for attribution, or we can just put a link at footer of our theme.
Btw, I also mentioned the issue in my recent post and I agree with you that link building with comments and forum profiles is dead now.
You are absolutely right Tuan, commenting under your niche’s blog rarely gives backlinks but it gives lot of exposure which is requires the most in this competition world.
One can’t survive in an ocean full of talented Sharks without learning the way of swimming. Similarly to established marketer/blogger and newbies.
I think commenting under other blogs could give backlink if this blog is a do-follow blog, and finding the do-follow blog to comment on is the problem, we don’t have much time.
Nguyen, I have stopped valuing nofollow and dofollow. If the link is from a well reputed page and placed on prime area is certainly looked up by search engines compared to the dofollow links at the footer. Nofollow or nofollow free is just the page author’s verdict and it is not necessary for the search engine to always obey what page author has suggested. I’ve found a lot of nofollow links listed in my webmasters screen and believe nofollow links too are good to have!
Hi Suresh, what you have said on the last part about guest blogging, all I can say about it is that guest blogging is indeed timeless and always works like charm 🙂 Very impressive write up Sir 🙂 I am on a guest blogging journey and I do hope I will make it through 🙂
Cheers!!
Herbert
Thank you Herbert! So, I can expect your guest post for my blog soon, isn’t it? 🙂
Sure Sir! If my content will merit your requirements, why not 🙂
Cheers !!
P.S.
Will i be expecting yours at mine too?:P
There is nothing for me to doubt on your skills. I’m gone though your recent post on your blog. That post is good enough and I’m sure you can always come up better!
Would love to step in into your blog too, soon with a suitable post. Glad to get connected with you through Ileane’s blog and a big thanks goes to her share!
Dear Ganesh, that strategy works for anybody who can create new plugins, themes or might be nice graphics or photographs. If you offer them for free but make them necessary to link back to your blog, you can effectively build up links.
Because you have a blog about computer science multiple choice questions, you can try to build up a plugin that extracts 5 or 10 questions from your database and display on sidebar widget. If the widget allows uses to mark the answers and get result there, this plugin can be interesting to other websites working on similar topic. When those people install your plugin and use your content, the plugin is giving you a back link to your site. (This is just an example to explain you, how about creating a plugin like this?)
Nice Reading ! I also lost back links from above two forums as you.
Hi Bikram. It was really a heavy loss. Did you face downfall of you PageRank too? How devastating was that incident for you?
yes. I am victim of from that . Pr went from 2 to 0 after the forum shutdown.
Hello Suresh.. thx for your article… great article and great info… best regards, Henrik
Thank you Henrik for stopping by and your comment. Glad you like the post.
Thank you Puneet for the comment. Yes guest blogging is proved most effective for link building efforts.
Are you saying link exchange is bad Suresh? I have some exchanged links on my blogroll which all of them are blogs of fellow blogger friends. Are having these links on my blogroll bad and risk being penalized by search engines?
If you have a couple of links of your favorite blogs on sidebar, there is no problem. I’m talking about automated link exchange with an ambition of huge incoming links everyday.
If you have exchanged links that point to completely irrelevant blogs and in some case if bad sites, there are certainly risks of getting penalized. Are you exchanging links with the blogs in same niche?
I have 11 of them on my blogroll and yes they are in the same niche. It’s that too many?
I don’t think that too many and hope Google will not be alerted with those handful links. How long are you been publishing those links? Is it from earlier to the recent PR update or after that? I’d like to know if you find any change in PR when it will be updated again.
I was PR 1 and had 10 exchanged links before the Feb PR update. Now my PR is 2(increased). After that I added some as well as removed some that’s no longer active/updated. Not going to add more than what I’m having now though.
Its good you got positive impact. Whenever you link to other sites, simply make sure that they are good sites. As your site grows bigger, you can increase the number relatively. Wish you good luck.
What do you do when you’ve got a website about cigarette shop reviews? It’s not exactly a topic that you can get others to guest blog about…
It seems to me that if you’ve got a niche website then you are stuck to rudimentary backlinking tools such as directories and articles.
p.s what plugin are you using to display someone’s latest blog post
You are true Silvestru, it is bit harder for unusual niches, still the first and second tips still applies, though there will be fewer blogs you can get guest posting opportunities.
The plugin that lists recent post is commentLuv.
Creating back links through themes and plugins are excellent way to gather more back links not every one try this method. Guest blogging is also a good way to create quality one way back links.
Hi Naveen. I found the images too a good way to build link. If you are graphic designer and can create images useful for blogs, you can offer them for free with a link back to your blog. Bloggers are happy to offer one link back if they can use the image on their posts.
I read your recent post about WP Robot Premium plugin. It can be great for the amazon niche sites. However, though it is not against any TOS, what would be the issue about duplicate content?
The time years ago and the time now has completely changed for webmasters.. It has been too challenging these days..
That’s true Dipendra. We need to update ourselves and change the strategy suitably to keep going.
Hi Suresh,
Super helpful tips here.
Getting social media backlink juice is huge. Google places heavy weight on Facebook, Twitter and of course G Plus clicks. Share your content and your buddies’ content on these networks to see a nice boost in your SER.
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan Biddulph
Thank you Ryan for stopping by and your comment.
Social media are gaining more power in SERP and now they are just more than hangout places.
Guest Blogging, ya agree. Can’t wait to start sending my guest posts actually..
That’s awesome Nhick. I’m expecting your interesting guest post on my blog as well 😉
White hat seo technique is always work great it may take time but gives you what result you want and that is always genuine and if you are planning for long run then white hat seo is always recommend.
Absolutely true. I completely agree, Becca. Though slow, if you are steady, you’ll certainly attain goals.
I have essentially built my entire blog audience from three places… Twitter, Blog Commenting and Guest Posting…
A little bit of SEO work but nothing serious…
This Stuff Works!!
Thanks,
Ryan H.
Thank you Ryan for sharing you experience. You’ve followed exactly the most essential rout to drive traffic to your blog.
Visited your blog for the first time and it’s truly impressive. Followed you and subscribed your feed. Expecting great interaction in future!
Thanks Suresh! I look forward to it!
Really good post Suresh.
I know that things change all the time and sometimes it’s hard for me to keep up. But then there are posts like yours here at Ileane’s place that notify me of the things that have changed and some of the things I should be doing to move in the right direction.
I feel your pain with the forum’s closing. I had a similar thing happen to me last year as well. My site never got to a PR6 but it was at a PR4 and then went down to a PR2. That hurt but it’s climbing back up. We just need to find what’s working best for us where we don’t have to rely on too many sites that may not make it in the long run.
~Adrienne
Thank you Adrienne for the comment. The benefit of interaction with other bloggers is to identify and correct whether you’re still in right track. After all blogging is learning and sharing the experience!
After the unfortunate incident, I learned that you should not focus all of your efforts on one or two places. Diversifying and expanding the foundation can keep you more secure!
Link exchanges are all but useless anymore but guest blogging with your link and anchor text woven into the article are still a valid and very beneficial means of grabbing some backlinks. Google+ should not be underestimated since Google is putting so much weight behind it, there is no doubt growing your social connections and using Google+ can greatly improve your rankings among people searching in your network. Overall Facebook and Twitter still drive the most traffic to my site as far as social networks go.
Thank you Justin for the comment. You are at more safe ground when you base the traffic source on social networks that solely on search engines. Good work!
Never heard about Gremln. Appears its a good service. Going to try it soon. Thank you for pointing it out.
You hit a couple of important points – the first goes to a lesson we have to be very careful of these days – “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. I think most people tend to gravitate toward a particular platform or method and when it’s successful, that’s where we stay. But as you saw, what happens when that platform or method goes away? So we need to be more diverse in our thinking.
The other important thing is that link exchanges – and buying – are really becoming things of the long, long ago past. Even content marketing via traditional content aggregators (like ezine and all those sites) are going away. Good riddance, but changes the strategies.
I think one of the best things we can begin to do today is get our stuff on Google+ and hook it up as many ways as possible to our G+ accounts, get it shared, plus 1’ed and all that. After all, Google is the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to search. And now Google is saying “hey everyone, go social! And do it here!” I have a feeling that people who are connected to Google are going to get shown in Google. And that’s the point of back linking anyway, so I’d go right to the horse’s mouth.
My sincere thanks, Carol. It very easy to drop every new egg if you’ve already got a basket rather than looking for more baskets. It has taught me a good lesson. Diversification is a must whether link building, monetization or connection.
Haaa.. 800 pound gorrilla, I never got time to weigh it properly, that Panda is always at the front! 😉
Google has its extra benefit to push Google+. Yes, we better consider Google+ more serious.
Subscribed to your blog and now will be able to follow you more closely 🙂
Thanks, Suresh, I appreciate that! Maybe we should start calling Google the 800 pound BEAR! 🙂
As we all read the Over-Optimization update to the algorithm, I have to congratulate you on identifying Guest blogging as the next step in link-building. With the shift toward content, creating content and ignoring anchor text is the next step forward for SERPS.
Thank you Paul for the comment and I agree with your view. I hope there’ll be a day when we can just focus on best possible content and best user experience to work as SEO!
I use only white hat techniques, as I have a few friends who got their sites de-indexed due to black hat seo. From my own experience, it might take longer to rank a site (at least 6 months) using healthy methods, but the benefits will be on the long term. I usually use forum posting, directory submission article marketing and last but not least social networks to build links. If the content is good, other people will link the site too, naturally.
It won’t take that long as 6 months if you effectively use social networks and blog networks like BlogEngage, Blokube, BlogInteract and Bloggers.com.
Thank you Jack for your time to comment.
Since I started reading this kind of blog a few years ago I have seen a huge rise in link building through guest blogging, it makes it interesting for the reader too so I aprove of it.
Thank you Harriet for the approval 🙂
Hey! I’m using Samsung Galaxy Ace (not Plus). I like it very much but feel sorry as it does not have front camera 🙁
I think Google+ is the new link building strategy. If you big on Google+ your high in the search results.
Yes Paul, its time to focus more on Google+. After all its from Google!
Hey Suresh….
Good too see you here my friend 😛 By the way things are change Blog Comments,Forums Squidoo not too much effective most worthy thing is content and proper Social media promotion more promotion more traffic and still no doubt “Content is King”.
Hi Rizwan, thank you verrrry much for the comment. Search engines started a whole new branch of knowledge known as SEO and now gradually they are turning us back to our content and interaction. Yes Content is now more powerful King!
Excellent tips Suresh, you made some valid points. Google has made Google+ and +1 essential tools for improving SEO and link building, and it’s something web masters need to realize quickly. The way we do SEO is changing before our very eyes. I get more guest post pitches from companies who no longer see article marketing as a viable option for improving their search engine ranking.
Oh ya Fabrizio, I also got some offers form SEO companies and I allowed couple of them, but soon realized that they are just after the links completely ignoring the essence of guest blogging itself. Now I am more conscious and will allow guest posts from bloggers only.
The recent post on your blog contains some really useful DONTs for gravatar. I wish everyone is aware of it. btw, I forgot to smile in my gravatar image 😉
Excellent post. I’m too scared to even bother building links. Google has removed so many webmasters I just don’t want to be the best one. I think it’s time to focus on content.
Thank you Chikara for the comment. There’s nothing to get scared of building links. After all they are links that ranks your site. Just avoid unfair methods and identify the effective methods!
Wish to see you more often and we can further discuss on the topic!
According to my experience links from guest posts are considered very strong and powerful to get ranking in organic searches.
Thanks Azam for your comment. I do agree with you.
Hi Navin. Thanks for commenting. Feels good to see you here on my guest post 🙂
What I wanted to stress on post is – if you can create something useful for other bloggers and site owners, may be themes, plugins, widgets, images etc, how about offering some of them for free for backlink? This can be a good method to get huge number of backlinks. But the other way round won’t be that possible. I mean learning to create plugins and themes for backlinks won’t be much easy job 😉
Btw, I went through your recent post Online Clock. Its interesting that 17 FM stations are provided as alarm. Does it contain Nepali stations too? Can we choose stations?
That’s awesome Navin. And we need to promote that product as well as pay attention that the plugin is really useful to tempt the bloggers use it. How about starting to look for a developer in oDesk?
Forum link building is def. not dead. Great way to build niche links.
Its great to know forums are still working good for you. However, don’t forget to diversify your link building efforts so as to remain safe in future. Good luck David!
Great post. Neat and worth every word. Keep up the good work 🙂 🙂
Thank you Harneet.
Visited your recent post and that is really interesting post. I liked the last 3 tips, especially FAQ. I’ve not yet created this page yet and going to post a FAQ as soon as possible.
Guest blogging is certainly a nice way to get high quality backlinks, and for publishing your guest post you have to write appealing and informative post after knowing the taste of particular blog.
We use to cut jokes as “Every dog has a tail” 😉 No matter what’s your interest and targeted group of readers, you can always find a good blog to guest blog. All you need to do is build up a good relationship with fellow bloggers and approach them with an offer!
Thank you Ashma for you comment.
Hi Suresh, Good points and as far as guest posting, we have been doing it for a while now and been benefiting from it already.
Thanks
Thank you Aaron for stopping by and your comment.
Oh! ya, you raised the topic of copyright infringement. That is really an interesting and informative post. Currently I’m being troubled as there are some printed books which copied the content from my website (icttrends.com) and the bad thing is that the enforcement copyright law in our country is not that strong. This really has been the worst thing.
Did they gave you credits for it or nothing at all.
I do agree with you.
With google latest purge still in the news(i am hoping they go after some more) good link building is very importent. I do a lot of guest posting but as said before mostly on my own niche. Keep it informative and relevent and you should be ok
Thank you Kevin for your time to comment. I agree with you the post should be informative and relevant.
So, after you’ve made a lot of guest posting, how did you find the improvement in ranking and PageRank? Are they now much better than you started guest blogging?
Great article , love the idea of building and supplying wp addons or themes to gain backlinks , the question i have is how do you get in to guest blogging when you are new to blogging in general , is it just a case of asking and submitting requests until some one takes a chance on you ?
Hi Alex, it won’t matter whether you are new or seasoned blogger if you have a nice content to share. All you need to do is build up good relationship with fellow bloggers. Approach personally (twitter, facebook, contact form, emails and so on) and show your intended post for the blog. The blog owners do not see how old you are! You are most welcome to my blog if you have a suitable interesting post!
Nice stategies! I agree that using themes and plugins are also better in creating backlinks. Like you quoted, since there are million of newbie blogger (including me) everyday, there are chances that you will gain a little to great amount of backlinks depending on you work :D. I think I can give it a try.
Thank you Christian for the comment. Navin came up with idea of hiring some developers from oDesk or Freelancer to develop useful plugins and offer it for free to get back links. I guess it should be tested, how it performs. Will discuss more in future.
Haha, very well said…. may be a noob might send such proposals to webmasters !
Indeed guest posts as well as social networking and bookmarking sites are trending methods for link building but does link building from themes deserve this?
Thanks
That is a valid question Salman. I do agree that you’ll just get one or two links from footer but the accumulated number of links might be worthy enough to consider. I have an experience of good PageRank boost when I got a footer link from .gov website. So, I hope it can boost your ranking if the theme is used by some good websites.
Yep … in that case, this link building method might prove useful. But for a template to be used by a high authority site, its design must be something that gives a premium look
You know, I’ve concluded that link building and google bots are always going to be in a state of flux. Just keep building smart, informative links!
That’s correct Paul. I do agree with you.
Guest blogging is something I have been wanting to get in to for a LONG time, but my ability to put together an article that’s more entertaining and engaging vs. boring and educational is lacking. Hopefully someday! Great tips.
I agree that guest blogging is indeed one of the best ways to not only create a nice backlink, but also to reach a new community in the hopes of bringing them over to your community.
Thanks for the tips!!
Absolutely! Guest blogging has benefits from all aspects. On one side I got a huge fellow bloggers to communicate with and on the other backlinks are already there. I found some truly great blogs and connected with them which would never been so easy without this guest blog here. I feel it as a nice conference of talented group of bloggers.
Thank you Morgan for your comment. Truly appreciate that!
Link building is actually important right now as all bloggers need to do everything just to make their sites increase traffic its ranking..
Thank you Kazzsandra for your time to comment. After all we all need good traffic and for that higher search ranking helps a lot!
Its very informative and helpful post for me and others bloggers. Thank you so much for this great post.
Thank you Abhinav for the comment. I’m glad you find it helpful.
Thanks for sharing the list Suresh. I was looking for some innovative ideas to build backlinks as with panda 3.3 the normal way of building links is not enough to be in competition.
That’s true Sam. The value of links are increasing and search engines started to ignore much of traditional methods.
Really great resources you share with us.Its very helpful for improving my blog thank you so much for sharing this post.
Thank you Abhinav for the comment. I’m glad you liked the post.
I like the idea of guest blogging the most. It is simple and can build some nice new relationships with bloggers on whose blogs you write.
Thank you for the list of bloggers, I will try to do some link building that way, though it is a little slow to write a lot of articles.
That’s truly a lovely aspect of guest blogging. The relationship is easily extended up to a new group of audience.
Looking forward your nice guest posts!
Effective link building requires effort and patience. It is important to keep up to speed with Gooogle’s requirements and all the available platforms to build quality links.
That’s an amazing summarizing of the post. Thanks Neil for the comment.
Google keeps changing the playing field every 6 months and as you pointed out Forums back links are some what dead. As to follow and NoFollow links I like to get an mixed bag personally. I have found that search engines prefer having a mixed bag to just having all Follow links.
We have to consider where Google is heading next in order to capitalize on what we need to do to rank higher. They give out subtle signals with where they want to head but I do not think they are heading in the right direction at present.
Remember when Google introduced Multi Media into search algorithms? Well now every one is posting to YouTube in order to gain better rankings. Recently Google announced that their Google +1 will give a better understanding of where a web site should rank. Wow is this telling us that we need to start building Google +1’s? If so there are going to be a lot of web sites wiped off the face of this earth because they will never receive a plus one vote in a million years.
Hmm, interesting post. I didn’t think that blog comments were valued less than links in the main body of the post, but now that I think of it, it does make more sense. I haven’t done any guest blogging but I’m preparing some articles to begin with.
Modern crawlers are more smarter and search engines have better algorithm to return the most relevant results for user queries. We can very easily assume that any link inside the post is much more relevant than the links in comments or footer. There are convincing arguments to believe the fact.
You are most welcome in the guest blogging world Adrinna.
From my point of view nofollow backlinks are good and surely not useless like in the past.
As for link building methods, I still find forum posting a great way to increase PR and traffic, same with blog comments in some cases. As for new methods, I don’t have any new methods…
Few can create a theme just for the sake of getting backlinks…
What’s the best way of going about guest blogging? Is it as simple as sending a request? What’s the ‘etiquette’, for lack of a better term.
Thank you Cristian for your comment and sharing your experience. That’s true, few can create a theme, but if you can create one, it can offer you huge number of links. How about hiring some freelancers to develop? How about offering articles for blogs or images for blogs?
Link building is indeed very tiring and time consuming but it is worth every second you spend doing it. SEO might change from time to time but the goal is always the same :Get more readers. This posts gives very helpful tips!
Thank you Rashmi ji for your comment. I agree it takes time and its well worth. However we should always avoid spamming and black hat technique!
I totally agree with you. I believe that “10 quality links than 100 junk ones”.
I’m managing a Travel blog and I’ve followed the common standard of creating hundreds of backlinks using some of the “Naughty” methods that you mentioned. The fact is that the results weren’t satisfactory and in my perspective, it was a complete waste of time.
Quality is the answer. It takes discipline and some criteria, but I believe that is the most effective way to reach the top.
Thank you for your work.
I am 100% agree with your 1st strategy as a new strategy, but the 2nd and 3rd are very old strategies. They are not new. You told two of the forums are already closed and you lost lot of backlinks from those. This can be happened to the social bookmarking sites and guest blogging sites. So I consider those as the same as forum posting.
But I want to say link building is not a one day process. That’s why it is called a strategy. It means it is a long term ongoing process. So my opinion is every link building strategy is still working. Forum posting also working yet. So one can tell this strategy is not good.
There is so much good information on here liked Ryan Hanley
blog although I dont blog will be following some of his findings on my website. My inbox has some good information coming into it at the moment thanks everyone
Sorry! “Suresh” not Irfan 🙂
I am not sure if it has been mentioned in the comments yet because there are so many but do you have any tips on guest blogging or have a how to article? Thanks!
Hi Suresh,
For me, guest postings alway work the best. Guest posting gives quality backlinks, traffic, build online reputation, fans and improve our writing skills. I also believe in quality links rather than several junk ones. Thanks for sharing Anil Agrawal’s list of 100 blogs that allows guest blogging and it makes work quite easier for newbies.
Basic blog tips is great, obviously the article is excellent, but what I really like about basic blog tips is the commentors are so smart, some of the advice is excellent!
The quality of links seems to be dependant on competition. The worst links in the world seem to work for niches that don’t have a lot of competition, while highly competitive keywords need better links.
Did you know there’s a guest blogging community out there? I believe it’s called Myblogguest.
Build a better blog is the best resource out there for SEO optimization for a small blog like myself! Thanks for your insight on this. I was wondering if you had any opinion as to what the largest contributing factor to the shift in link building is in the past year? I know personally, I’ve seen a massive shift since Facebook has integrated its “sharing” feature a bit better, I’ve been seeing a lot more back link traffic!
Backlink building is the most un-fun part of my day!
I like the idea of themes/plugins, but I don’t think that’s a super-easy way – especially if you get 1000’s of new people flooding the internet with free themes and plugins . You then need to make sure your stuff is used by others!
You are indeed right that link exchange practice of building links is now extinct,commenting and guest posting are still great ways to build some quality backlinks.
Guest blogging for me has worked wonders and it still is. I love guest blogging on this blog because it brings me great traffic and I sure know that it builds backlinks. Blog commenting too has had great results for me and I love it because its a free way to get backlinks and traffic as well.
I have a software which builds themes for blogger and wordpress, I was considering making free themes and add my link in the footer. I might just start doing that 🙂
Thanks for the lovely post, keep up the good work!
commenting and guest posting are still great ways to build some quality backlinks. These kind of post are always inspiring and I prefer to read quality content so I happy to find many good point here in the post, writing is simply great, thank you for the post.
i agree with the points that you have made but still the older trick for generating backlinks is being used by bloggers and they are performing well!
Really unique post and very useful, I like idea for giving theme for free but getting backlinks in return, that’s for sure maybe one of the fastest ways, imagine how many people will just download that theme.
thanks for sharing
Hi Suresh,
Your posts are always great inspiration for webmasters and bloggers. Link building from theme, plugins etc are really great and its viral method to get backlinks. On the moment of non stable Google algorithm, only the strategy which works is you mentioned above.
Hi yes a found quite a few of my pages in the last month have shot up note sure if its my effots of because of google panda. I have been in a lot of forums and a lot of people have been hit. Bit of advice if someome is promising you the earth for a few dollors then watch out for the big panda!!!
Hey Suresh,
Very true title, ‘Link Building is Not What it Used to be’, Very Catchy title.
Coming to the post, GREAT tips and true too. And I think the best way to build links is to Guest post on other sites.
That is the evergreen method to build links.
🙂
Man… I feel like I’m late to this conversation!
I’ve just about decided that people (myself included) have been placing too much of an emphasis on links for improving search engine rankings and not enough effort in building links for direct traffic. If you’re getting traffic, who cares if you’re getting rankings? Besides, if you are getting traffic, you’ll probably get rankings as well, which brings in more traffic. And remember, we’re not really after higher search engine rankings. If we all had high rankings but no traffic, no one would care. What we really want is traffic, so that’s what we need to focus on.
I haven’t done much guest posting yet, but I plan to start this week!
Thanks for sharing!
right now, guest posting is the best for easily making quality backlinks and blogengage is the best plateform for backlinks and easily explore your content on online market.
thank you for this awesome tips.
Grady I could not agree with more. Rankings mean nothing if you are not making sales and I agree, let’s get organic traffic and the sales will happen.
great article. you are right, link building is just not the same anymore and social media is growing in it’s influence in the rankings. thanks for the helpful links as well.
I think social media is good for new bloggers, they can post some links on face book twitter, if that goes viral than they hit a jackpot
Social media sites like facebook is good source of traffic….writing guest posts are indeed the best way in link building…:)
Link building has changed a lot and for the better in my opinion! Only links from relevant high-quality sites count anymore and this makes life a lot easier.No more hunting for profile links or posting on irrelevant forums.Less is more! A few guest posts on relevant trusted blogs will help with the ranking a lot more than 100 links from irrelevant low quality sites.Bloggers have more time to focus on great content instead of chasing links.
Hi Suresh,
I agree with guest posting – – not sure where the various social networks and bookmarks will lead in intermediate term.
My issue with guest blogging is that my blogs are essentially my local customers’ business sites. I know a little about those businesses, but not enough to write a guest post based on my personal knowledge.
Love that you included the guest posts. It is not only helpful for links, but very fulfilling, as well 😉 -Deborah
Well I have taken the plunge by writing my first guest blog. I am looking forward to an increase in traffic.. I have also allowed someone to guest post on my blog as I believe that it also helps to gain traffic.
Guest posting is one way to build links. You are right about that, since that isn’t going anywhere and will still exist deep into the future.
If you have good ROI results one specific blog you post on, then use that in your strategy to build your links.
That plugin or theme development trick is a very fine way to promote and get traffic from. Good job.
It certainly is not the most used, since they are a huge bunch of scammers using other tricks on Google.
But you’re right. It works to get links and definitely get targeted traffic.
Hi Suresh, The tips you shared are awesome, however I don’t agree that building links from free themes and plugins is a good idea, I have heard that such backlinks are not useful and can cause penalty.