The industry of search engine optimization has certainly changed dramatically in the past few years. Much more weight used to be given to article submissions, blog comments, forum posts, Web 2.0 sites, and reciprocal links. Now, all of those methods of link building have lost a lot of power, and the links that matter most are related, one-way, high-PR links. That doesn’t mean self-created links don’t still help, but you need a wide mix of those links and must make them as high quality as possible. For example, you must gradually submit unique, quality articles to a wide range directories in order to get the most value from that.
What strategies do you guys use to acquire high-quality links from related sites? The best techniques I’ve come across are link baiting, achieved by creating high-quality content and sharing it through social media in the hopes that bloggers will see and link to it. I’d love to learn about other ways though!
I am still following the traditional method of link building - forum posting, blog comments, article/directory/PR submissions, social media optimization etc. It’s working quite good, keeping everything natural.
I still use traditional methods that you mentioned too, but social bookmarking, particularly twitter can be good for getting the word out if you get the right followers and boomark the right content.
Are you guys talking about the direct links from blog comments or social networks or the subsequent links that high-profile people would give you from seeing that content via those links? I’m looking for ways to get those kinds of high-quality links, and I know in most cases there is more to it than simply linking through a blog comment or social network. I can see that with Twitter, if you have the right followers or you are retweeted by the right people, then you could acquire some very high-quality links that way.
[FONT=verdana]Nobody’ s mentioned the most obvious - and the only really useful - technique: Develop high-quality original worthwhile content that people will want to link to.
I know it’s has been said many times and is sounding like a worn-out gramophone record*. But, really, there’s no substitute for it. By all means, go for forum postings, blog comments, article submission, etc. if all you want is high-volume low-value links that are at the mercy of the latest search engine algorithm change. But if you want to attract real people who are actually interested in what you have to say, then you’ve got to give webmasters a reason to link to you. All the blog comments in the world won’t do that.
Mike
* For those who don’t know what a gramophone record is, ask your parents (or grand-parents).
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And nobody has mentioned this: many webmasters and bloggers are using “nofollow” on links nowadays and you will get no link juice benefit from those links. Yes, even webmasters who like sites enough to link to them are using “nofollow” links.
Nofollow was a stupid, stupid idea in my opinion. One of the dumbest things Google ever did was to create that.
You know what really sucks? When you get an incoming link from a high-ranking, good-PR page and it has “nofollow” on it! :mad: They liked my page enough to link to it, but I get no SEO benefit! :mad:
i think doing good quality of seo can help you to acquiring high quality links. what you have to do is to perform work on high pr website which give you some high quality backlink.
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You make a good point, Cheesedude. But the reason that so many blogs, forums, etc. use “nofollow” is precisely because of the attitude expressed in the original question here. It’s because so many people regard blog comments and forum posts merely as a mechanism for promoting their own sites via backlinks. So they spam these places with their links, rather than using them for their intended purpose, which is to share information and take part in a community.
I suffer from “nofollow” links as much as you do, but I can’t blame the webmasters who use them.
That’s not the “traditional method”. That’s most likely a spammer method that Google will see through right away.
Think about it logically for a second. Why would Google view your site as better than your competitors because you’ve posted a couple of links on a forum or because you’ve posted links alongside other spammers on a blog without the sense to make all user-generated links nofollow? The answer is they wouldn’t, so thinking that this is a legitimate SEO tactic is painfully wrong and a total waste of your time if you really want to see some gains in traffic.
“Nofollow” has been used and abused beyond its original purpose. And to be honest, I’ve used “nofollow” on external links myself in years past on a blog I had (I don’t anymore) because I was a afraid Google would devalue my site for having lots of outgoing links. Lots of webmasters have this fear, rightly or wrongly.
I think there could have been better methods to combat forum and blog comment spam links than “nofollow”. Google could devalue those links internally without “nofollow”, I imagine. Also, bloggers could just disable the posting of URLs with comments.
What Google did is basically trash the entire concept of using a link as a “vote” when they devised “nofollow”. I had/have an incoming link from an article on one of those high-ranking sites like about.com or ehow.com (I forget which one). The link is “nofollow”. While the writer of the article found my content worthy of linking to, and actually using a list of data I compiled directly in the article (non-copyrightable data), I get zero credit for compiling the information because of the “nofollow” link.
Even worse is that when searching for the topic of the article, that site outranks my site in Google even though I am the original source of the information! :mad:
The entrie point of nofollow is to stop user-generated links from contributing to your linking strategy, as taken from the W3C:
The nofollow keyword indicates that the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page, or that the link to the referenced document was included primarily because of a commercial relationship between people affiliated with the two pages.
Sure, content farms will abuse this for their own gain, but they probably won’t offer much for you anyway. Ultimately, these are the sites that Google don’t want to see on the Internet and over time we’ve seen many of them crash and burn. Ultimately, if your content has been used and has been linked to you’ll probably still get traffic and will potentially have others link to you anyway.
The cases where it is abused are so low they’re not even worth worrying about. I love the nofollow attribute and would happily use it where it is supposed to be used.
It is better not to discuss more about do-follow and no-follow. Do follow website help us to get good ranking but at the same time no follow site is helpful to put traffic on your website. No follow is used by webmaster because they feel reluctant to share the link juice and it helps to reduce the link spamming.
Well, you make a good point by what you say in that post. But, getting those kind of links that you are talking about is not easy, although they are strongly recommended by Google. The advantage of those links is that they tend to carry lots of weights in the eyes of search engines.
Those links work well with niche sites, what if you have a corporate site would it be possible to use that link building methods?
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A corporate site is no different from any other in this respect. You still need top-quality content that peope will want to link to. You’ve got to be offering a product or a service that is of interest to the world, and that people will talk about, recommend to their friends, etc. If you can do that, you stand a good chance of getting the links.
