Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Over the past few years link building has really been shaken up. SEOs thought they were invincible and their rankings would last forever.
Google was cooking up their evil updates which they unleashed upon the SEO world in the hope of clearing up search results.
Did they improve the results with their pandas and penguins?
Ever so slightly, you do see fewer awful websites ranking for high volume money keywords now.
Even though things have been shaken up, the fundamentals of link building have remained the same and most of the old strategies still work. The unnatural link warnings and other Google happenings have scared off a lot of SEOs.
Many are saying they should stop link building altogether. The reality is that while good content alone will attract links, most of the time it’s not that simple. Most of the time good content requires a kick start, manual intervention in order to “get out there” and pick up momentum.
After all the Google trouble in the past year, many SEOs are lost, they have no idea what works anymore. This is why I decided to put together a short list of golden link building rules.
Rule One: Awesome content on an attractive website will gain attention, whether it’s from social media, natural backlinks, forums, or people talking about it off of the Internet.
I thought this should be the first golden rule of link building. Why? Simply because it’s extremely true and you can’t fault it. If your website kicks ass, has an awesome design and you publish epic content, you’ll attract visitors.
If you keep posting epic content on your awesome site, referral and social traffic will pick up. You WILL start to build momentum and links will eventually come, even in the smallest numbers.
Rule Two: Bad Websites Need More Attention
This is a fact, if your website sucks and isn’t visually appealing; the content you publish will need a lot of help getting out there. Naturally, if you have bad ass content and enough people read it; you’ll gain backlinks and shares. However, getting those initial people to the content can be tricky if your website sucks.
Rule Three: Never Rely On Link Building
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 →SEO is volatile, you should never rely on it as your number one traffic source. If you are, you’re setting yourself up for failure. We’ve all experienced the Google updates, the pandas, penguins, and the crackdown on blog networks. What happens when Google targets one of your core link sources?
The lesson is to diversify the way you build links and diversify the way you get traffic.
Rule Four: Be Very Selective Over Links
Many SEO companies go after one link at a time. Their link acquisition strategies are 100% whitehat. Going after one link at a time can be very time-consuming. Make sure every link you go after is worth your time and effort. Whether you’re getting the link through bribery, guest blogging, or a cash payment or even asking for a link.
Rule Five: When Using Black Hat Tactics; Have A Backup Plan If You Get Penalized
Over the last few years SEOs have used some really dirty black hat SEO only to get penalized months or years later. 99% of those penalized were furious and literally left with nothing. If you do plan on using strategies that aren’t exactly white hat; have a backup plan.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more link building tips, tricks, and strategies.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Garry Harper, November 2, 2012, 02:29
g,day were is the infinite symbol?
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Rule three contradicts rule one if you draw it out: ‘great content attracts links naturally’ as input, ‘never rely on link building as your main channel’ as constraint. If content alone were sufficient the diversification warning wouldn’t be needed. The article wants both to be true and they’re in tension.
Tomas, I don’t think it’s actually a contradiction so much as two different timelines colliding. ‘Great content attracts links naturally’ is the long game, the thing that’s true if you’re patient and lucky enough to survive long enough to see it. ‘Never rely on link building as your main channel’ is the risk management for all the years before that long game pays off, if it ever does. I spent six years watching people in this space bet everything on one channel because they believed the long-game story completely, and then watched a single algorithm update or a single platform policy change wipe out the one channel they’d bet on. The caution in rule three isn’t inconsistent with the ideal in rule one. It’s insurance against not reaching the ideal in time, which is what actually happens to most people who try.
Small correction: guest blogging isn’t really a ‘link acquisition strategy’ comparable to bribery or cash payment the way rule four groups it — done properly it’s disclosed, editorial, and above board. Lumping it in with paid links is exactly the kind of grey-area framing that gets people penalized without meaning to be doing anything wrong.
If good content ‘requires manual intervention to get out there’ per rule one, what specifically counts as manual intervention that isn’t just link building by another name?
Look, ‘manual intervention’ is just link building with better PR. Four rules pretend there’s a clean line between earned and pushed content, then rule four admits you can pay for it.
Ivy’s question lands differently out here. ‘Manual intervention’ in a town of four thousand just means calling the three people I actually know who’d share something, there’s no bigger version of that available to me. So rule one collapses into rule four pretty fast out here — it was always going to be selective outreach, just a shorter list than most people are working with.
Lonnie’s version is the honest median, not the exception. Most small operators never get a content-goes-viral option.
The strongest defence of black-hat-with-a-backup-plan, rule five, even now: if the expected value calculation genuinely favours the risk — short-term gain outweighing the probability-weighted downside — then having an exit plan isn’t reckless, it’s just proper risk management applied to SEO instead of finance. I don’t fully buy it myself, but it’s the version of the argument that has to be answered rather than dismissed.
Rule five is really a risk-tolerance question wearing an SEO costume — a backup plan for getting penalized only matters if you’ve decided the upside is worth the exposure. What would losing that ranking overnight actually cost the business, in real terms?