Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Editor notes: This post was published in 2011, so the information and links it may have may be out of date, or this post was made to try to predict an outcome that no longer the reality; please view at your own discretion.
The other week, Google released their second major penguin update; Google Penguin 2.0. Just like the first update, it was supposed to impact about 1% of search results. The forums and blogs of SEOs said something very different.
Just like penguin 1.0, this update has a major impact on most SEOs’ websites. SEO is no longer one of my primary marketing strategies. I’m more involved in paid traffic now.
However, throughout all of these updates, my sites have never been affected or taken a hit. It’s all because of a few link-building principles I follow. If you follow these principles, your site will not be hit, and you will be able to rely on SEO for months or years to come.
Linking Principle 1: Frequency
Sites that build backlinks every other day or every other week do not look natural. If you set up a site & blast 1000 links at it, it may well reach page 1 of Google the very next week. But if you stop building links right there, Google will see that it’s unnatural link-building and may even penalize your site.
If you built 1000 links/week every Sunday, it would look unnatural. If you built 142 links/day, it would look natural. The frequency or rate at which you build links is critical.
Rule number 1: Never abruptly stop building links. Once you start building links, you can never really stop, or your rankings will eventually fall. However, more importantly and an easier rule to stick to: never abruptly stop building links.
You have to start slowly and work your way up to more and more links per day & week. Start at as little as 5-10 links/day, then increase up to 100+/day (you really don’t need to build more than 100 links/day in any niche).
When you get up to a high rate of link-building, you must slowly decrease it if you want to stop building links. After a year or three of link-building, and you’ve built up a powerful authority site, its rankings should stay safe for a very long time, with or without new link-building.
So if you are going to stop building links once you’ve attained all the rankings you desire, slowly decrease the number of links per day, 100/day down to 80/day, down to 60/day, and so on until you’re at none. The cool thing is most sites will automatically get new links every now and then, so the linking never really stops. A good link progression/plan to follow is:
- Monday: 10 Web2.0s
- Tuesday: 10 Articles + 10 PDFs (Save each article as PDF/embed link and upload to document-sharing sites)
- Wednesday: 20 Wikis
- Thursday: 20 Relevant Blog Comments
- Friday: 20 Social Bookmarks
- Saturday: 10 Web2.0s
- Sunday: Bookmarks + 2.0 profiles to all of the other backlinks. Best to use software like Senuke XCR or Ultimate Demon to do this (not worth doing manually with manual content).
If you follow that plan, you will keep your link profile looking natural and healthy. If you add 2-5 high PR links per week, it will balance out the profile and skyrocket rankings.
Linking Principle 2: Anchor Text
This is the second most important link-building principle. If you do this one wrong, you will get penalized every time, period. Ever since the Google Penguin update, Google has been watching anchor text like a hawk. Your anchor text is the text you use to link to a website.
In SEO, we use our target keywords as anchor text to get the biggest boost for them. However, if we use an unnatural percentage of exact keyword anchor text (i.e., the exact keyword we want to rank for), the hammer will come down on us. Think about it… When you link to a website normally, or you see people reference websites on popular blogs, what words do they use to link to sites & pages?
- Click here, link, website, this page, site
- Naked URL i.e. http://domain.com/the-page-url/
- Brand name i.e. Work With David Wood
- Relevant anchor text (if our keyword is ‘google penguin 2.0’, and we have a great blog post, other people in the SEO niche might link to the page
The 3 Fundamental Post-Penguin Link Building Principles | David Wood’s MLM Marketing Prosperity Blog
Comments
Zephyr Montoya
This is really insightful! I had been wondering why my rankings kept dropping after I stopped building links. Thanks for the clarification!
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Emily Clarkson
This is a fantastic post! I’ve been struggling with keeping my SEO results steady, and your tips on link frequency really helped me see where I’ve been going wrong. Thank you for such valuable insights!
Peter Malek
I’m having a hard time believing that such a strict approach to anchor text could make such a difference. Do you have any specific case studies or examples where this worked?
Lily Martinez
Thanks for the detailed plan on link-building! I’m curious, though, do you recommend using the same tools like Senuke XCR for all niches, or should certain industries focus on more manual approaches?
Michael Rowen
While I agree with the need for consistent link-building, I feel that the post underestimates the importance of content quality. Links alone aren’t enough to sustain long-term rankings in highly competitive niches.
Sarah Olsen
Great post, David! It’s been a while since we caught up—how have you been? I’d love to meet up and talk shop about SEO over coffee sometime!
Daniel Cooper
I’ve had the same issue with Google penalizing my site for unnatural link profiles. After reading your post, I’ve realized I was using too many exact match keywords. I’ll try diversifying as you suggest.
Amy Ling
Thanks for the post! I’ve also been using Majestic SEO for tracking backlinks and it’s been a great complement to some of the tools you mentioned. Maybe worth a look!
Jason Patel
I really appreciate the in-depth look at how link frequency and anchor text can affect rankings. I’ve been struggling with SEO for a while, and this article cleared up so many misconceptions I had. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
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The bit about never abruptly stopping is the one that’ll actually save someone’s site. Simple rule, easy to ignore when you’re busy.
Pete, that’s exactly the rule I’d break, honestly, I’d research the “right” way to ramp up link frequency for two weeks and never post a single one. The advice not to stop abruptly assumes you’ve actually started, which is further than I usually get.
Davey, I built the exact week-by-week schedule from a post like this four years ago. Week one was fine. Week three was where it fell over, because twenty wiki links a day takes longer to do properly than the post makes it sound, and I started faking quality just to hit the count. That’s the part nobody warns you about.
The daily link schedule here is really a habit-formation problem wearing an SEO costume, and worth treating as one. Five to ten links a day is a habit anyone can sustain, a thousand in one single week is a stunt, and burnout is why most schedules like this die by week three, not because the underlying theory about looking natural is wrong. If you want to actually test this instead of taking it on faith, try tracking just the days you skip over a full month before you touch the anchor text ratios at all. What pattern shows up in which days fall off first?
Fine, the frequency logic holds up. But the whole post rests on “my sites have never been hit,” which is one data point wearing a principle’s clothes. Survivorship, not proof.
Tracking which days I skip would be every Tuesday, because Tuesday’s the day everything else in my week collapses. The schedule assumes a spare hour daily that isn’t there for a lot of us, so it’s less about which links matter more and more about which twenty minutes actually exist.
What Simone’s describing maps onto habituation research more than SEO, a fixed daily behaviour is easier to sustain than a large irregular one, which is well documented well outside marketing entirely. The interesting gap in the post is that it never actually says why a hundred links a day is the ceiling rather than two hundred; that number reads more like folklore than a finding.