Link Building… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for higher rankings.

Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke’s 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:

What happens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on “links=seo”. When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The pertinent questions:

1. Will link building still be very important for rankings in the medium term?
2. When will link popularity be devalued in favor of other algo elements (that are less tedious, from a webmaster’s point of view)?

The answers:

1. Sorry, but link building is still going to be the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future.
2. I wouldn’t hold your breath for search engine algorithms to place less importance on link popularity until the Semantic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new protocol. Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they’re going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn’t count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don’t fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that’s all (“Host your own Web Ring”?). Anyway, enjoy the update.

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a “101 list”. These get Dugg all the time, and often become “authority documents”. People can’t resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an “authority”.)

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It’s an accessibility thing.)

7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

16. Write about, and link to, companies with “in the news” pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Business Links

24. Join the Better Business Bureau.

25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

27. List your site at the local library’s Web site.

28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other’s business cards.

30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional “normal” links.

Easy Free Links

31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

36. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links… unfortunately, some will not).

38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

41. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

50. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

51. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

52. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

53. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned ‘PR’ (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

54. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. We recommend WeBuildPages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

56. In case you didn’t get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like Wordpress. Don’t forget the “Designed by example.com” bit in the footer!

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) “celebrities” in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem “real” in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Directories

72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post nothing but “me too” posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

Blog Spam

80. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

81. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

82. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

83. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

84. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

85. Don’t even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.

Garbage Link Exchanges

86. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

87. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

89. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.

Spam People in Person

90. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

91. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

Be Persistant

92. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

93. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

94. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.

Getting Links by Being a Jerk

96. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

97. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

98. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say “excuse you, jerk”.

100. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

101. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more “hilariously dumb” than it is a “bad linking practice”.

I have a very love-hate relationship with article marketing. On one hand I come from a public relations background, so I’m a big fan of focusing on building visibility and authority status in a niche. Article marketing does that. On the other hand I hate seeing the Web filled with spammy, rehashed articles that people obviously wrote only for the backlinks. Article marketing does that too.

There has been a lot of debate recently as to how well the traditional approach to linking campaigns is working with the current search engines. Many search engine optimisation experts think the most important thing is how many links you can get to your site, while others think it’s more about quality than quantity, and in this respect, social links can be one of the best ways to generate both back links and traffic for your website or blog. However, there is sometimes debate as to whether or not this is an organic or ‘white-hat’ method of improving your site’s rankings and traffic, or is spamming and is thus ‘black-hat.’ The simple answer to this question is that it depends how you’re doing it.

Linking in this manner is simple, but can be quite time consuming. It involves going to a popular site and finding a way to work your link onto that site somehow. The easiest targets for this are blogs, discussion forums or social networking sites such as Facebook where it is easy to post comments on the page; the more popular the target the better, but the success or failure of your campaign will depend entirely on the content of your comment.

The best way of driving natural traffic to your site from your promotional campaign – and to ensure that your comment isn’t deleted by the administrator – is to post something relevant and interesting or to start or take part in a discussion thread. This shows both administrators and readers of your comments that you are a real person and not just an automated spam-bot and this will hopefully lead to people clicking your link in order to find out more about you as well as hopefully encouraging the administrator to let your link stay on their page, thus keeping the backlink in place. Make it look spammy or worse, make it an automated process and put the same comment and link over a lot of blogs, forums and social network profiles, and your comments will likely be either deleted or weeded out by spam filters.

Implementing a linking campaign of your own, particularly in the blogosphere or on a forum or two, is both simple and can be a very entertaining way of whiling away a rainy Sunday afternoon or two while increasing your backlinks, your organic traffic and also the brand awareness of your site.

On the blogging side of things, chances are that your blog is on one of the many blog hosting sites such as Blogger, Wordpress or LiveJournal, which means that you already have an account which can expose you to many other popular and entertaining blogs, almost eliminating the initial research phase of your linking campaign.

Where an off-site link campaign for search engine optimisation purposes requires that you find your own sites or blogs to promote on, most of the popular blog hosting sites will list the top-rated blogs on their front page, easily directing you to the prime targets. If you are using linking in this way as part of a search engine optimisation campaign for either a website or self-hosted blog, you will need to do a little more research to find the right targets, but the principle is still the same – identify your target market, find a blog, discussion forum or website which allows comments and discussion relevant to this target market, and interact while putting the link to your site in your post. Most blogs will allow you to put a hyperlink to your site directly in your comment identifier and forums will typically allow signatures, so you don’t even have to put the link in the post to generate traffic and links.

Ultimately, linking in this way is definitely a ‘white-hat’ method of search engine optimisation and increasing organic traffic, but only if it’s done by a human being. Anyone who’s ever hosted a blog or moderated a forum will have seen the deluge of automated, non-sensical spam messages and links which crop up in threads. Don’t let your link be lumped in with these and this aspect of your search engine optimisation campaign has every chance of success.

Social Bookmarking

Following on from last week’s piece about social linking in the blogosphere, today we’re going to take a look at link building from the social bookmarking arena – does it actually help with your search engine optimisation or are you wasting your time by linking to your site in this manner?

There are an awful lot of social bookmarking platforms on the internet – the main ones being Digg, Del.Ici.Ous, Sphinn and the new kid on the block, Worio – and it’s easy to see why they are popular. They’re an excellent way to discover new content and to see what’s popular on the internet right now, as well as to share what you’re interested in with others.

These sites work by a user bookmarking (or ‘Digging,’ ‘Sphinning’ or whichever other term the platform uses) a webpage which they like. They will often then allow a user to write a brief description or post an excerpt, select a relevant category and then apply search-friendly tags to the page, helping people to find it. If more users bookmark the page, it will be pushed further up the rankings of the social bookmarking site, making them ‘democratic’ with their positions – almost like a mini-Google.

Link Building

So can social bookmarking platforms help your search engine optimisation with the real Google? Unfortunately, the answer is probably not. To prevent spam, Digg, Sphinn, Del.Ici.Ous and almost every other social bookmarking site all apply the rel=’nofollow’ attribute to submitted links, meaning that Google will not pass on any ‘juice’ or PageRank for your link – nofollow means no improvement in your SERPS. Or does it?

Although anyone with the Webmaster Tools Firefox plugin can see the nofollow attribute being applied to outbound links, there have been some statements made on the Digg blog recently that after a link reaches a certain level of popularity, the link receives the coveted ‘dofollow’ attribute. This means that if your site or page appeals to enough people, you could well see some linking power from this platform.

Traffic Generation

Of course, there is another aspect of search engine optimisation that social bookmarking – and indeed social media – platforms can be of invaluable assistance with: traffic generation for your site. Although they won’t do much for your backlinks and should certainly not be considered an essential part of your linking campaign, these platforms are very popular and many users sign up with the express interest of discovering new websites and pages. Having your site listed in these directories and bookmarking every time you make an update or add a new page greatly increases the likelihood that people will discover your site and who knows? They might just like it enough to add to your Diggs, Sphinns or Tags, passing the link on and increasing your traffic.

The link wheel is one of the hot topics in the world of search engine optimization at the moment, and there’s little doubt of their effectiveness when it comes to driving traffic to your site and increasing brand awareness, but what is a link wheel and how does it work?

Link Wheels

In its simplest terms, a link wheel is a series of independent, unique web properties, ideally with a high PageRank and degree of authority, which link back to your site. At the moment, this doesn’t sound too different to a regular linking campaign, but the next stage is where the wheel aspect comes into play: as well as linking to the target site, the sites in question also link to the site next to them in the wheel, creating a series of ’spokes’ which lead to the ‘axle’ or ‘hub’, which is the target site.

Outer Spokes

There are typically at least five ’spokes’ which link directly to the ‘axle’ in a good link wheel. These will typically be established, high authority web 2.0 sites including blog providers such as Wordpress or Blogger and also properties such as Squidoo, which are concentrated on user-generated content. Each of these sites will host unique content featuring the keyword you want to target. These keywords should be worked organically into the content and linked via anchor text with one leading to the ‘axle’ and the other linking to the next ’spoke’, passing the link juice to both.

The next stage of the link wheel is to create the ‘outer spokes’. These can take a variety of forms such as regular linking campaigns, social bookmarking, blog commenting, forum posting, other social media platforms or all of the above. These should target each of the internal ’spokes’, helping to improve their rankings in the search engines and their authority. By utilizing your search engine optimization skills on your inner ’spokes’, you help to build the power of the links which each of these unique properties passes to your site.

Maintenance

The results that this search engine optimization tactic offers are usually both almost immediate and long lasting, as they are utilizing unique, well written content on high PR sites, but unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Search engines appreciate fresh content and so you will have to continually maintain and update your link wheel with more fresh, unique content.

Unfortunately, due to all of these platforms being free, they are open to abuse by black hat SEOs who will scrape content from other sites automatically and utilize these platforms to spam the target site. Provided the content is generated organically and the wheel is maintained manually, this method should not lead to penalization, but it is certainly a labor intensive method of improving your SERPs.

As effective as link wheels are, they are a time and effort-intensive method of search engine optimization, which require high levels of keyword research and generation of quality, unique content on a fairly regular basis, thus are best left to the experts. If you’ve got the time and the know how, a link wheel is one of the most effective link building methods you can utilize for your site.