Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Look, I’m not going to be like SEOmoz and tell you that all you need to do is create more high quality content.
Just post lots of high quality content and make your site pretty so as many people link to it as possible. Create lots of sexy link-bait and your rankings will sky-rocket.
No, and you know why?
All of that stuff is crap. Maybe, some time in the future (5 or 10 years) ranking in Google will be 100% content and social based. You’ll rank depending on how popular your site is and how popular individual pieces of content are.
Even though, that’s not going to happen for a long time; you should work on creating high quality content and ‘socializing’ your site. That’s the only white-hat thing I’ll teach you in this post.
Right now however; ranking is all about link building. It’s practically 100% link building based. If your site got hit, it was most likely because you screwed up your link building strategy. To find out the first 3 post-penguin link building principles, read this post.
Here are the other 3 strategies:
Principle 1: Automation
If you want to create conventional backlinks automatically with zero work: use a tool like Senuke XCR or Ultimate Demon. They are cheap and very effective at what they do. Just remember that the links they create aren’t as safe or as high quality as manually built links.
So… post-penguin; link building automation is important for a few reasons. Mainly because link profile diversity and anchor text diversity are the core reasons for being penalized right now.
If you’ve been hit; it’s probably because you had an over-optimized anchor text profile. So, if you’ve been building links manually or purchasing backlinks; you’ve probably been using too much exact match anchor text.
The EASIEST way to diversify your anchor text profile as well as your link profile is to use automated link building tools. Using Senuke XCR or Ultimate Demon, you can create a high quality spun article and schedule the software to build 10 to 100 links/day for 30 days straight using 100s of different keywords as anchor text.
There’s no easier way to diversify your anchor text profile. As long as the spun content isn’t TERRIBLE; you have nothing to worry about.
Post Penguin 2.0. Automation Downfalls
There are 2 downfalls to automatically building links right now. One, sites are becoming better and better at detecting users that were created by software and deleting them along with anything they ever posted.
Second, Google is getting better and better at identifying spun content on the web. So using software tools to create links is working for now, but maybe some time in the future it won’t be. If you don’t want to use automation tools to diversify your link profile; there is one other option.
Cheap content + manual submissions. You can spend $50/week and have 50 unique articles written for you manually (via Odesk or wherever). You can then use 50 articles to create manual web2.0s, article directory links and wikis (or even guest blog posts).
Properties that might actually rank on Google and send you some traffic because their content is well written & unique. The cost to create unique manual backlinks isn’t that high. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for traffic. So it’s not the end of the world when we can’t use automated link building anymore, but it’s a long time away.
If you’re just getting started, have a lot of time on your hands or don’t want to risk using automated tools: create all your content & links manually for tier 1 backlinks (the ones that point directly at your site).
Linking Principle 2: Link Distribution
To be honest there really hasn’t been that much research into link distribution and how it affects rankings, but we know it does. This is your distribution of links over your site. What percentage of links you build to your home page and what percentage you build to internal pages.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →The best rule of thumb is to only build links to pages you want to rank. A natural link distribution for an authority site is like 30% of links to home page, 70% to internal pages/posts. With that said you can really be loose about this as long as you follow the anchor text rules.
Link distribution is important post-penguin. Spammy sites that Google are targeting have a HUGE percentage of total links pointing to their home pages. Since they’re generally sniper type sites they don’t build out a lot of internal pages. Create hundreds of internal blog posts and pages, rank them all.
Linking Principle 3: Link Boosting
Link boosting means boosting the power of your backlinks by building more backlinks to them. So you build high quality backlinks that link to your money site, and you build lower quality mass backlinks to your high quality backlinks.
Links pass Page Rank or ‘link juice’. So if you build 1 web2.0 blog with a link to your site, it will pass a little link juice and give you a tiny ranking boost. If you then build 50 bookmarks, 50 wikis and 500 blog comments to the web2.0 blog; the link juice will double or quadruple.
This is a universal link building principle that has always worked. If you are not using software, DO NOT attempt to build these tier 2 links manually. Manual link building is effective on a tier 1 level, since the links have a huge chance of sticking (not ever being deleted).
With all the links you build manually, you should put them into your favorite SEO tool and blast mass wikis, web2.0 profiles, bookmarks and blog comments at them. Automation tools are crucial for link boosting.
The anchor text you use isn’t so important for tier 2 links, just make them somewhat relevant and extremely diverse. Penguin 2.0 was all about targeting spammy sites with spammy link profiles. High quality backlinks generally have links pointing to them i.e. tier 2 backlinks. Boost your tier 1 links and you’ll boost their overall quality and in turn boost your authority.
In prosperity,
David Wood
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Comments
tessandjoon1 says:
Thank you for sharing as always! So much to learn, but you’ve made it so inspiring and fun! See you in the meeting!
TyronneRatcliff says:
Nice post Dave. Creating solid content for your Tier 1 backlinks is definitely a great strategy for people who have a lot of time on their hands.
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google penguin 2,
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One correction: the 30/70 home-page-to-internal split described here as “natural” isn’t a documented Google metric anywhere, it’s a personal rule of thumb presented as one. Worth knowing before anyone builds a link plan around a ratio nobody’s actually verified. The automation-tool argument is more interesting and I’d rather discuss that.
Priya’s right that the ratio’s made up, but even the made-up version assumes I have hundreds of internal pages to distribute links across. I’ve got twelve posts and a night job. This whole principle doesn’t apply below a certain size, and the post never says what that size is.
What’s missing here is any mention of what happens to your time if Google catches up to the spun content, which the post itself admits is a real risk. With clients I separate “what could scale my results” from “what would end the whole project if it goes wrong” before touching either one. Which category does mass automated link building actually belong in, for you?