Check Your Link Building Strategy For 2014

Check Your Link Building Strategy For 2014

By admin February 7, 2014
Blog, Digital Marketing 0

Google has become strict in recent years about penalizing sites with unnatural links. This presents a problem for traditional methods of link building. Google’s strict action against unnatural links over the past few years has raised the question: “Is link building dead?” Google’s penalties can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue to online businesses. Google is quite strict in defining an unnatural link:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

Google has doubled down on penalizing sites that participate in link schemes with its Penguin updates. All this might suggest that link building is a futile activity. However, the truth is that link building is alive and well. What is needed is that link building needs to be done in an authentic, legitimate and justifiable manner.

What will get a site in trouble are links from websites containing a malware or virus. Links from link networks or sites that have low value themselves can be dangerous and need to be removed. Instead, links should be relevant.

Having good content on a website’s blog is a good way to attract links. Guest blogging can be effective as well if done correctly especially with the recent comments made by Matt Cutts. Commenting on different blogs and leaving the link to your site or blog on the comment is a logical way to build links as long as you follow the blog commenting guidelines of the blog where you are commenting. Media sites typically get a lot of traffic.

Social Media shares are a great tool for link building and search engines value such social data as well. So produce
great content and actively share it on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, and +1 on Google+. When the articles are liked by readers, they spread further on Social Media via Likes, RTs and +1s which mean that more and more people are reading the content. This is a natural way of link building where humans are involved in the process versus traditional link building methods.

Create viral content to generate authentic links. While there’s no rule that can guarantee what sort of content will go viral, you can observe the trends in terms of what’s popular at a given moment in time. Consider the tweet about Fox by Hillary Clinton during the Super Bowl that went viral or Ronan Farrow’s tweet that also went viral.

Using smart Infographics can be a great way to attract readers. Humor can be cleverly used in Infographics and even in image captions to attract readers. Lists are perennial reader favorites too. Listing your site in high-quality local and industry-specific directories is a useful way of building links.

Link building is a long term process and is also part of a broader strategy of content marketing. It should be pursued in all seriousness for a sustained period of time to achieve meaningful and long-lasting results. If you are looking for any general advice or help with your link building, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital.

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