One of the reasons more and more webmasters prefer whitehat backlink building every year is that it doesn’t require as much maintenance as blackhat backlink building. You’re not trying to outwit Google, you’re working with Google to promote your high-quality content.
But that doesn’t mean that things don’t change. We’ve already seen Google introduce what might be a game-changer for backlink building—Google Authorship. And the Penguin update has moved some greyhat techniques into blackhat territory. Here’s what you need to keep increasing your traffic in 2013.
The Basic Rules Stay The Same
Your backlink building should still focus on quality over quantity, and the best way to get high-quality backlinks is still guest posts to other sites in your niche and related niches. (But keep reading for why that might not be true in 2014.)
The Penguin update seems to have penalized links coming from outside your niche, so 2013 is the year you stop making directory submissions or otherwise encourage random strangers to use your content. Focus on getting targeted backlinks.
You may also want to be careful about your go-viral strategy. Although a few days of high traffic can be a great payoff, unless that traffic converts well, you could end up with a bunch of low-quality inbound links which will eventually look to Google like paid backlinks.
Instead of investing in content which may go viral, look at the costs involved in targeting very high page rank sites in and around your niche. You may need to pay someone a fair amount of money to produce a completely top-notch guest post, webinar, infographic, or other piece of content to get on your target site, but a single backlink from one of the highest ranked sites in your niche can significantly improve your ranking.
RIP: The Link Wheel
The link wheel debuted in the Warrior Forum a couple years ago as a whitehat/greyhat link building technique. It offered a simple method to quickly build natural-seeming links:
1. Create a bunch of free accounts on blogging sites.
2. If you were whitehat, post mediocre content to your free blogs. If you were greyhat, post spun and other low-quality content to your free blogs.
3. Occasionally link the free blogs to each other.
4. If you were desperate for a better rank, occasionally link the free blogs to your main site. If you were less desperate and more worried about Google penalties, occasionally link the free blogs to about three cutout sites you controlled and then link the cutout sites to your main site.
The link wheel seemed like a cunning way to fool Google, but its popularity was its downfall. As various SEO outfits began to systematize the link wheel and use lower and lower quality content, Google eventually wrote an algorithm which reliably detects link wheel content.
Some SEO companies still claim their link wheels work—and they may be telling the truth. But those link wheels are automatically built by computer programs who don’t mind registering for hundreds or thousands of accounts. Spending hours of your time trying to create a link wheel sophisticated enough to fool Google will probably not be a good investment of your time. The link wheel is dead.
Commenting Like Its 2009
Just in case you haven’t been keeping up, hiring someone at a ridiculously low rate to post comments linking back to your blog doesn’t work anymore. Every blog content management system uses rel=nofollow for comments these days and almost nobody clicks comment author links.
Comments can still be a viable strategy, but you will need to take the time (or pay someone the money) to write blog comments which attract the attention of the author of the blog. My favorite way to do this is to find a noteworthy error in the blog post—if the author agrees that it’s an error, they’ll often update the blog and link your name to your site in the update notice—giving you a real link.
A more reliable commenting method is to simply use comments to build a relationship with the blog author before your offer to guest post on his or her site. But this too requires high-quality comments.
(So please stop hiring people to post low-quality comments on everyone elses blogs.)
Google Authorship—Does It Change The Game?
Google Plus Authorship—the little picture of you Google puts next to your search engine results—is leading Google’s next-generation spam detection engine.
Right now, Google authorship is a novelty which may help you get a little extra traffic. But soon it may be practically required.
Google wants to know who wrote what so it can promote content from high-quality writers over content from anonymous people who are probably spammers. We can debate the privacy implications elsewhere, but the implications for backlink building are huge.
Google Authorship, or a similar system from other search engines, will eventually massively devalue unattributed content. That includes guest posts—if you post to a site and there’s no authorship information, Google will not give the backlink to your site the same value as other links from that site.
A site which never includes authorship information may have less effective links than a site which does include authorship, even if both sites are in the same niche and have the same pagerank.
Conversely, getting a highly-searched author to write for your site (provided you add authorship information) may help boost your ranking.
As I write this in July 2013, it’s still too early to tell what will happen. The first thing to wait for is how Bing and other search engines reply to authorship. The next thing is to see how many significant websites adopt authorship. Finally, we need to see if blackhat types can scam it.
But if everything works out for Google, expect 2013 to be the last year unattributed guest posts work as a backlinking strategy.
Even spam use gravatars these days, there’s no guarantee that gravatar would make your comment look good, One sure thing for 2014 according to Matt Cutts is that Guest writing is dead, you can’t get the same quality backlinks from guest posting as it used to be, nice articles BTW
Peter Mason recently posted..How You Can Get a Job Using Social Media
Thanks mitz fot the tips. I read that guest blogging is dead now(see Matt Cuttis), I wonder what is next, comments on blogs?
It’s not important to build a tons of backlinks, You must pay attention to build some quality links. There are lots of black hat techniques are available; but you can use it then you never stand in the market. One of the best way to build links in white hat. It’s take time to rank you but you can stay your ranking for long time.
Nikhil recently posted..Web Design Company
Milica Pantic
you told us how we create white hat backlink.if any back link are bad when we do for that backlink..
I guess you have to monitor your own backlinks as we can get done for any backlinks pointing to our sites. It does not seem fair though to create all that extra work for a webmaster when the internet is such a big place. I just bought Screaming Frog to check backlinks. check out this article on how I use it to find details about inbound links. It is expensive for me at $187 a year! One of the most expensive tools I have bought!
Backlink is one of the most important factor in SEO. But today, social media signals also play important role in SEO. Every blogger need to build their social reputation in social medias to gain more visitors and get high position in google.
Werry Adnan recently posted..Olahraga Teratur Terbukti Menurunkan Kolesterol Jahat
Hey Mitz, Great insight. Its really a great post to understand that link building should be done wisely and not blindly.
Thanks again
Pankaj Chauhan recently posted..45+ Free Brochure Templates PSD Download
So I’ve spent 10 minutes trying to find an error to tell you about and failed…
I’ll just have to write something worthwhile instead I suppose?
One thing I slightly disagree with – your point about nofollow links in blog comments…
Some comment plugins automatically nofollow them but blog owners do have the opportunity to remove this for certain people.
By showing a blog owner you can leave comments that are useful to the cause they may mark you as “safe” and you benefit from a dofollow link from that point on.
Mark Ford recently posted..5 Twitter for Business Rules You MUST Follow
Hey Mitz, A Very Happy New Year!! nice article on whitehat guide… Yes it is very important to comment for back links…
Aktar recently posted..The Keys to Successful Networking for Introverts
Enjoyed the article, as I do most of your posts. I’ve started the move to add Google Authorship. Hopefully it will lead to better results over time. 2014 should prove to be an interesting year for well thought sites.
John recently posted..Rare Quarters of the Twentieth Century
Hi John
You should get yourself a gravatar first! Otherwise you look like spam!
Thank you Milica for a very informative post. There is so much misinformation out there on how to succeed online, including the right ways to build links, that it can be confusing and frustrating for those new to the scene. I am very glad Google is taking steps to ensure quality online.
Pau recently posted..Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
Mitz very interesting post about the future of linking. I have never been much for guest hosting as I never have time to write my own stuff let alone write for another. I have always stayed with clear white hat methods as that is really the only way to go. Thanks for your perspective.
Thank you so much for this post. Man did I need it. Without knowing, I’m sure I could penalize myself. First I realized I liked 34 times from my main sites footer (on every page) to my landing pages. I fixed that. However, on my company blog, after I posted my clients advertisement/blog, I put a backlink to myself. So now I have 16 backlinks from my blog to my main site. In Nov/Dec, dropped from 3/10 to 0. However I still populate great organically. Anyway, I need to focus on long term backlinks in my same industry. Can be hard. Thanks again.
I have been through many page rank drops and I just go out and build more content and more links. the page rank comes back.
you said Create a bunch of free accounts on blogging sites. but how ??
can you explain this case more??
thanks for this usefull article .. please send more posts like this!!
Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr.. they are all free blogging platforms where you can create mini blogs and get links back to your site.. You need to update them though to keep them alive..No point getting links from a dead page.
Mitz,
Is it possible for a given blog to have his own Google Authorship rather than an individual blogger?
I asked is because we would like to be able to have our company blog post in its own name (i.e. Enviro Equipment Blog) rather than in the name of employees of art to write articles as is the case at present. However, we can’t seem to find any information on how to give our blog its own Google Authorship. Do you have any ideas or resources we can read that will make this happen?
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Thanks For this post. I was curious about link building things. I also enabled Google Authorship for my blog after reading your post.
munna recently posted..How to Install Flash Player on Android Devices
Thanks Milica Pantic for this wonderful post on building links the white hat way. Never really thought of that Mitz, searching for error and alerting the admin through comment to correct it.. it’s a wonderful method, but surely, most bloggers would just say thanks in the comment and wouldn’t link back!
Thanks for the post though, i really love it.
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