Being A SEO Expert, Everything You Need to Know About Link Building

It is undeniable that Google has greatly improved its ability to semantically process human language. Since Hummingbird came out in 2013, Google is more responsive to user questions. But the link building is still working. And that means that to establish the quality of a website and place it at the top of the SERPs for certain types of queries, the algorithm has no choice but to measure the authority. And when I talk about authority, I mean the way we SEOs understand it: based primarily on the quantity and quality of external links you receive.

It seems that this will continue to be the case for a long time unless Google takes an evolutionary leap and begins to understand the contents of a website as a human would. Until our eyes see that day arrive, we have link building for a while, and if you feel like you can read about the effectiveness of link building.

For this post, I have decided to create this small guide, which will help you to have an overview of link building, its evolution in recent years, the main techniques, etc., to position a website with external links. If you already know the topic, you can skip the first sections

What is link building?

In the introduction, I have already given some important hints. The English expression means “link building”. Link building is based on a fairly simple intuition: when something is liked because it is considered useful or valuable, it receives links. And the more links a site receives, the more authority Google attributes to it. The higher the authority, the better a site ranks in search results. The concept is very simple.

Getting links to a website drastically influences its positioning. And whoever does not believe it, can always do experiments for himself.

Being A SEO Expert, Everything You Need to Know About Link Building

How does it work?

The authority flows, and a part of that force that a page receives is transferred to those sites to which it links. That is why in SEO we talk about link juice, or “link juice”. One way to take advantage of that flow of authority is to distribute it intelligently using internal links. For example, if we manage to position a page of our domain, and there we have placed a link to the main page, it will also receive a part of that force.

On the other hand, there may be pages within a domain that we are not interested in positioning because they only contain a contact form or the privacy policy. In that case, we use the “no follow” attribute so that the link juice is not transmitted, and it concentrates on the pages that we do want to rank.

Google had a more or less reliable indicator of authority known as PageRank but decided to wipe it off the map. Nor is it such a significant loss, because what counts is the indicator used by Google daily. In addition, SEOs have other ways to measure it, such as Page Authority and Domain Authority, from MOZ.

The evolution of link building in recent years

The chronicle of link building in recent times could be summarized as Google's attempt to get rid of anchor text and reduce its importance in SEO. The anchor text of the links that point to a site provides information to the search engine about the keywords that were important for the site, and the exact keywords, they worked! That gave rise to SEOs abusing this resource. But since the launch of Google Penguin in 2011, link building based on exact keywords in the anchor text can be very expensive. The off-page SEO landscape has changed a lot since then. Now what works is:

• Alternate keywords with apparently casual expressions, such as “follow this link”, “click here”, etc.
• Add several words that accompany the keyword in the anchor text so that the links seem natural.
• Place the links within the body of the text.
• Often use the brand name or the URL.

Use a no-follow link if you have a network of support blogs.

Use cocitation, which consists of putting two links, one to the website to be positioned and the other pointing to another on the same theme, so that Google understands that they are related by theme.

Take co-occurrence into account; not only do the keywords of the anchor text matter but the words that are in the context of the link (in the same paragraph, for example) are also taken into account by Google.

In addition, now the number of backlinks matters less than their quality, and it is better to place them little by little so as not to fall under the suspicion that we are trying to influence organic results. The fact that the theme of the page that links us is the same, or is closely related, has also gained weight.

Main link-building techniques to build a link profile

There are many ways to get external links and build a link profile that improves our SEO. Some of them are real strategies, and they involve thinking big, investing a lot of effort, and taking risks. Others are tactical, specific actions, and are within the reach of any blogger or webmaster without specialized knowledge in search engine positioning techniques.

Agreements between Webmasters

We refer to:

1. Buy/rent links
2. Link exchange
3. Sponsored posts
4. Guest blogging

In all these cases, two webmasters are involved (and in some of them, an SEO or an agency acts as an intermediary). It is a win-win. Everybody wins. One receives a backlink. The other gets compensation, whether it be money, another reciprocal link, a payment for the sponsored post, or free content. Link exchange is not very stylish anymore, because it doesn't seem exactly natural, and it's easy to spot.

Press releases in the media should also be added here. The domains of digital newspapers and news portals usually have a lot of authority, and getting a link for the publication of a press release can be very beneficial for the SEO of a website. Although in this case, it is not a webmaster who agrees to the agreement, a journalist who saves himself having to look for a topic to write his article.

Other times, more than an exchange, it's a favor done by someone you like or because they hooked you up first (or just because). But remember, we are talking about link-building techniques.

Satellite Blogs

This tactic consists of creating blogs around the money site, but independent of it, to reinforce it through links. It is one of the most basic techniques that exist, and unlike some that we will see below, it does not have a specific or complex structure.

Link Wheels

This technique consists of creating several blogs on free platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, etc. Once created, articles must be added to each of them, with links to another of the sites in the wheel, and to the money site, or web page to be positioned. Normally up to two or three wheels are created.

Alex Navarro>, who controlled this technique to perfection, recommended not closing the circles. In other words, at the end of the wheel, one of the sites should not link to the next so that the chain would not be so obvious. Currently, this technique is easily traceable by the Google algorithm and its use is discouraged.

Tiers or link pyramids

A little more sophisticated, link pyramids consist of creating three levels (tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3). Links from level 3 point to level 2, and in level or tier 1, the links go to the money site. The good thing about this technique is that it allows you to automate tasks and create lower-quality links, which saves a lot of work. But let's see in more detail what the three levels consist of:

Tier 1: is made up of blogs with good content, blogs from newspapers, universities, etc. With extensive and well-thought-out posts, images, or even properly optimized videos. At this level, quality takes precedence over quantity.

Tier 2: At this level of the pyramid, made up of blogs, forum comments, bookmarks, etc., the quality is not as good, and the number of links is higher. The links, as I said, point to tier 1.

Tier 3: This is where some SEOs go wild with the black hat, and start placing automatically generated links, from directories, bookmarks, forums, pingbacks, etc.

The advantage of link pyramids is that they keep the money site relatively safe from penalties because the separation between levels serves as a filter. Still, one way to save yourself trouble can be to avoid spam in tier 3.

Private Blog Networks (PBN)

The PBN, “Private Blog Network” for its acronym in English, is a network of blogs that serve to support a money site with links. These networks are usually made up of high-quality blogs. Often, free platforms are dispensed with and the domains are their own, hosted and created with different accounts. The good thing about PBN is that you have all the advantages of tier 1 in the link pyramids, without the brown that comes with level 3 tiers.

As they are blogs with good quality content, you remain "safe from pingüinazos". Often the only way to detect these networks is indirect, not algorithmically (usually). And in these cases, the only recourse that Google has is to apply a manual penalty.

To create the blogs of these private networks, expired domains that used to have a good authority are usually used, which can give a big boost to the money site.

Link baiting

You're a good boy? Then link baiting is for you. It is about creating valuable content and sitting down to wait for them to link to you. It is the safest way to build a link profile, but it has two problems: it is a slow process, and nobody guarantees that they will recognize the value of your content.

In any case, valuable content is very useful, not only for link baiting (which can be combined with other techniques we have seen) but also because it is a very important asset when looking for webmasters who are willing to put us a link.

Of the techniques to do link building that we have seen, in the first and the last you depend on other people. The others have the advantage that you only depend on yourself (and that is very useful in case you have to resort to the Disavow tool to get rid of a penalty).

The riskiest techniques, such as link wheels and tiers, are often used to position affiliate websites and similar projects, in which the objective is to rank quickly and obtain maximum profit before a penalty takes the site down. When it comes to a corporate website or blog, you have to think things through more carefully and weigh if it's worth it. For most projects, it is not necessary to create networks with dozens of blogs and other types of link sources to rank well in search engines.

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