Link-building – stop buying them and do the hard work

You’re probably aware of the recent black hat JCPenny fiasco.

Before I get into a couple of basic and easy “white hat” link building tactics, I want to add some thoughts on JCPenny.

Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts loves these stories – it gives him an excuse to make an example out of somebody big, smack them down the search results and make them pay for daring to try to trick Matt and his team.

JCPenny fired the responsible search agency hoping it might be off the hook. Tough luck, it’s buyer beware out there.

There are plenty of well respected agencies in Australia which recommend paid link strategies (I’ve seen the paperwork), so even when you think you’re speaking with someone reputable ask them how they intend to build links to your website.

It’s not just paid links that get you into trouble with Google. Spammy blog and forum comments to create links can get you burnt badly by genuine communities that participate in those spaces.

If you come into a forum as a newbie and try it on, building a nice “followed” link to your website wrapped up in a non-helpful comment, you’ll most likely get flamed nine times out of 10.

Well respected SEO expert Jim Stewart regularly comments about the morons who try to post links back to their websites from his blog.

In some cases Australian-based SEO agencies have outsourced their link-building efforts offshore. Those offshore guys then post on Jim’s blog in an attempt to build a link to the agency they’re working for – one of Jim’s competitors.

Honestly.

I think the saddest thing about the JCPenny affair is the fact that Google didn’t detect the black hat paid link stuff on its own. It needed a canny reporter from the well-respected New York Times to call Matt Cutts for a comment before anything was done about it.

The same thing happened with BMW Germany.

I’m still seeing sites ranking well in Google results with the “old white text on white background black hat trick” and they have done it for years (you know who you are Big Boys Toys). It’s almost as if Google’s spam detection filters are turned off.

Enough ranting. Let’s finish this thing with some positive and useful advice.

One of my favourite and useful link-building tools is the SEOMOZ competitive link researching tool, which we use for all SEO clients because it allows us to see where, say, two competitors have managed to get a link but our client hasn’t.

If there’s one website that’s linking out to two competitors and not to our client there’s a strong chance we should be able to get a link from there as well.

On many occasions we’ve recommended that clients become members of professional organisations, simply because we’ve discovered that their competitors are receiving very powerful links back to their respective websites from the organisation’s website.

Of course don’t forget to ask suppliers, friends and family for links to your website too.

Finally, make sure the link text reflects or is relevant to the content on the landing page.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.