When you’re in a crowded conference room, there are usually two types of introductions. You might be wandering about and see someone you greatly admire. You pluck up the courage to approach them and introduce yourself with a statement like, “I love your recent book on marketing, especially your thoughts on the future of AI in marketing.”
Then you wait. The other person may strike up a conversation or respond politely and move on.
Another type of introduction is when a mutual friend introduces you to someone they already know. These are truly valuable introductions because the other person is much more likely to respond favorably, thanks to the reputation your mutual friend built with them already.
Link building is much like networking, except instead of a crowded conference room, you’re wandering the world wide web. External and internal links for SEO connect you to other sites, growing your network and reputation based on the linking website’s established reputation.
While link building can create valuable networks and boost your ranking, unethical practices can cause your ranking to plummet.
Traditionally, marketers refer to these SEO strategies as white hat link building and black hat link building.
What Is Link Building?
Link building practices create a network of SEO links pointing to your website. These links are like introductions from friends. They can build bridges to bring traffic to your website, and they recommend you go to Google.
When another site links to your site, they give their stamp of approval for your brand and content. If that site is already well-established and an authority brand, you can benefit from that site’s authority.
Think of it like shopping for toothpaste. You have generic brand toothpaste that blends in with the competing brands. However, you also have toothpaste with stamps that say “Recommended by dentists.” Because you trust your dentist, you trust their recommendation and may be more inclined to trust that brand.
In the same way, when brands link to your site, readers and Google see it as their recommendation stamp on your site.
The more links you generate from outside sources, the more Google will see you as an authority. Quality links can increase your search visibility by as much as 534%. When you establish yourself as an authority in Google, you are more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages, generating more traffic.
SEO link building is just one of several factors Google’s algorithm uses in ranking. It is also one of the most critical factors for building authority and trust with Google and your readers.
Because link building plays a crucial role in ranking, content creators are always trying to crack the code. This often leads to unethical marketing practices that generate more links, but hurt the site in the long run.
Traditionally, marketers define ethical and unethical link-building as white hat and black hat practices.
When you watch an old-time cowboy movie, you can always identify the good and bad guys by the color of their hat. The good guys always wear white hats, while the bad guys tend to wear black hats. No one knows if this is the true source of the terms, but it’s a fun way to remember the phrases.
Today, marketers are starting to move away from those terms and simply refer to white hat link building as ethical SEO and black hat link building as unethical SEO.
While we are about to cover some of the best ethical backlink practices, you should first understand some of the unethical practices to avoid at all costs.
Buying Links
This practice has existed since the beginning of search engine optimization, when links started playing a role in ranking. Content creators realized they didn’t need to wait for others to link to them. They could simply purchase fake spam links and automatically jump in ranking.
That didn’t last long before Google penalized spam links while rewarding high-authority links. If you do this practice today, you can easily find yourself cut from Google search rankings.
Joining a Private Blog Network
A private blog network is a connected group of websites or blogs that all agree to link to each other. Websites do not always offer valuable content. Instead, they exist only to link to other blogs and increase authority. Google might not always identify private blog networks, but if the algorithm suspects you are requesting or purchasing links rather than earning them, it will penalize your search engine ranking.
Using Unnatural Link Profiles
Google looks for patterns when analyzing websites for authenticity. Websites with unnatural patterns often signal unethical practices.
A natural link profile will be varied since each person linking will have unique content. However, if you pay for links or create all your links yourself, your anchor text tends to sound similar, or most of the links come from the same place, signaling that all the links were not naturally generated but created to boost your brand authority.
If you do want to link to your own site from third-party sources, be sure to create a variety of link sources and anchor text.
Gray Hat Link Building
Not all link-building practices are black and white. Occasionally, you’ll stumble upon gray areas. For example, link swaps are considered a gray hat method.
You aren’t purchasing links in link swaps, so it doesn’t fall entirely under black hat practices. However, you also aren’t earning those links since you are making a trade, which isn’t entirely ethical either.
While gray hat practices are easy to ignore and continue using, we highly recommend not using these methods. Even if Google doesn’t penalize them yet, it may catch up one day. To be prepared for that day, always focus on the most ethical practices.
5 White Hat Link Building Best Practices
Switch out unethical link-building practices for these five ethical, white-hat link-building strategies for your SEO content.
1. Target High Authority Sites
When creating a link-building strategy, you want to focus on generating links from high-authority websites. While all backlinks can be beneficial, those high-authority blogs will have the most significant impact.
You can begin by linking to those high authority sites in hopes that they might reciprocate with links to your site. You can also offer to guest post on their site or introduce yourself, especially if the site often does top product or service lineups that you could be featured in.
Image from SEMrush
2. Use NoFollow Links Strategically
NoFollow links are links to your site that Google doesn’t count toward your site authority. These tags help weed out links that aren’t beneficial or quality.
You can use NoFollow linking to avoid being penalized by Google for unethical links. For example, social media links are often NoFollow links, allowing you to link frequently to your website to drive traffic without negatively impacting your brand authority.
3. Create Content Worth Sharing
The most effective way to generate links is by creating content worth linking to. If you have original research, unique ideas, and share-worthy snippets, others are likelier to add a link to your content or cite your data.
Quality content not only attracts backlinks but also increases your Google ranking.
4. Link Back to Your Page
While waiting for others to link to your website, you can create your own links.
Linking to your website on third-party sites can easily cross into gray link-building practices, so be careful with how you add those links. Links that you add just for link building are not ethical. Those links don’t add value to the third-party site but are only for your personal benefit.
Instead, use links in your content where they add value to the site—for example, linking to statistics you published on your home site.
You will also want to diversify your links. A natural link pattern has a balance of follow and nofollow links and comes from different content formats.
Image from SEMrush
5. Diversify Your Links
Not all your links have to be used to generate authority with Google. You can create links to increase traffic. That increased traffic, in turn, will help boost your authority.
Some places you can add links back to your site that may not help with authority but will increase your traffic include:
Blog comments on other websites
Social media profiles
Directories
Google My Business page
Build a Quality SEO Link Profile That Will Bring in Consistent Traffic
Backlinks are a crucial part of creating SEO-optimized content. At Express Writers, we create content with value-packed internal and external links that contribute to your link-building strategy.
Contact us to place an order for SEO-optimized content to start link building today.
Hyperlinks are easily one of the most important tools on the Internet. Linking to credible sites that back your site up may give your words a little more heft in the eyes of readers. Getting linked to by a legitimate website is a great way to get new viewers (and if that site is a business you look up to then you might get a little ego massage).
For users hyperlinks are even more important. They are the basis of search engines. Without search engines the Internet simply comes to a halt. We’d even venture a guess and say that most of the people reading this right now found this blog post from a hyperlink, not by typing in the website.
Not only are hyperlinks indisputably important, many people (users especially) consider them innocuous. Most people don’t even consider them as possible copyright infringements.
“Wait, wait…” we hear some of you saying, “Did you just say hyperlinks are ‘possible copyright infringement’?” Yes we did. For those of you who haven’t heard, there have been cases going back to the late 90s about whether or not hyperlinking was considered copyright infringement and, depending on the type of use, some of them were ruled one way, some the other way.
There are Types of Hyperlinks?
Indeed there are. It’s not just underlined text that you click on. The types of hyperlinks are defined largely by the things the users can’t see. Regular links, like this one that links back to our home page, has been protected repeatedly. Honestly, most of the time regular links do not come under question at all. Most of the disputes you’ll see in courts are regarding deep linking or inline linking.
Deep linking links into the site somewhere. The main difference between the two (because neither search engine rankings or HTTP sees it as any different) is that it’s avoiding a lot of the site that you may not care about. Rather than forcing the user to go through the home page and search through the site, you can just link them directly to what they were searching for in the first place. It’s the difference between taking the subway from one building to another building versus driving through the city yourself.
Inline linking is when you use an “<img src=” tag to link one page to another page. It can be useful for visual cues (as opposed to linking through a description) as well as image search engines.
Copyright Laws and Linking
Deep Linking
Deep linking is a huge deal to some businesses for a few reasons. One of the main qualms that companies have with deep linking is that it can bypass advertisers and some sites even consider it a trespass (as if you were breaking and entering into someone’s house). In Ticketmaster v. Microsoft a judge ruled that Microsoft’s site Tickets.com did not infringe upon any copyrights when deep linking into the Ticketmaster website and that bringing users to relevant content was more useful than harmful.
On the other hand, in eBay v. Bidder’s Edge, Inc. it was argued that Bidder’s Edge’s (which is a weird possessive noun to type, by the way) deep linking to eBay was actually detrimental to eBay, according to Linuxinsider.com. Have you ever seen a celebrity get hounded by reporters and paparazzi after a scandal? They hop in the back of their car and it gets swarmed by photographers and microphones to the point where they have a hard time moving? That’s what Bidder’s Edge did to eBay, but with search bots instead of paparazzi. The court ruled that, in this case, the hyperlinks were actually a detriment to eBay and slowing them down. Just think, if they had used a captcha then the entire case may have been completely different. These two cases essentially set the precedent that hyperlinks could be used with impunity as long as it didn’t directly hurt the site (even if the link bypassed some possible advertising revenue).
Inline Linking
There are a few cases related to inline linking, but the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier, end-all-be-all, case which all other inline linking cases will be brought back to is Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. Contrary to the idea that the name of the case might give you, Amazon doesn’t matter in this discussion. What matters is another company that Perfect 10 was trying to sue in the same case: Google. The court ruled that Google’s inline linking to their images was not an infringement of hyperlinks copyright because a copy of the image was not made and stored on Google’s servers (whereas when Google does cache a page then sites have the right to have it removed by contacting Google). The court basically set the line where the FBI warning at the beginning of movies does. It’s fine to watch a DVD with a friend but it’s a crime to copy the DVD and give it to your friend.
The European Union’s Decision
Recently the European Union decided on a case originating in Sweden regarding whether or not hyperlinks infringe on copyrights. This case is slightly different than any American case due to the way the laws work in the EU. In the EU the rights holders and producers have exclusive rights on how their works are made public.
The case originated when a site called Retriever Sverige (an aggregator site like Google News or the Flipboard app) began linking to published articles on the Göteborgs-Posten website in a way that may have implied that the content was that of Retriever Sverige. This caused two questions to be raised:
Does hyperlinking constitute communication with the public?
Can a site link even if there may be confusion about who is providing the content?
The EU ruled that hyperlinks can be used without permission and in any way that the linker desires without the permission of the linked site. The only exceptions to this rule was if either the linker charged for the linked site’s free content or if the hyperlinks circumvented a pay site’s registration (although they could link to a place that redirected to a registration page).
Lessons to Learn About Content Production
1. Use Your Own Content
Hyperlinking and referencing are, in the vast majority of cases, not going to be a problem but the best way to avoid it altogether is to have people link to your top-quality, authoritative content rather than you having to link out to anyone else.
This doesn’t just mean that you’re wording other articles in a different way either. After all, you don’t want a Vanilla Ice vs. Queen/David Bowie situation on your hands. Be sure that when you’re making your blog posts or web content that you’re providing your own spin or analysis because people go to sites for original web content and according to Kissmetrics.com, repetitive content will hurt your rankings. And, even worse, if you’re just using a competitor’s ideas then your potential customers will wonder why they’re not just going to the company with the real ideas.
2. Content Farms Are Bad
While you want to avoid plagiarizing other companies it’s important to make sure that your site is worth plagiarizing. If you look at your site at the end of the day and think, “If this wasn’t my site, and I was an unsavory rapscallion, I would be tempted to steal this content” then you’ve done something right.
Content farms are a vaguely defined concept but it’s best to do all that you can to avoid being called one. They are full of original content that has absolutely no substance or quality control whatsoever. You may be thinking to yourself that sites like YouTube can be, in a way, considered a content farm due to the fact that it lets anyone upload videos and content without much restriction.
While it’s true and YouTube does allow anyone to upload at any time there is quality control at play. There is a view counter (that is analyzed at 301 views to determine if the views are legitimate), ranking systems, and a host of other ways that they subdue useless content, promote quality content, and have directed content based on related views. They also have a habit of promoting fresh content rather than allowing any content to be promoted at any given time. This allows for a very democratic content farm where people with interesting ideas or presentations can succeed while people who are simply recycling content are usually blocked from getting too far.
As many updates to Google algorithms have been aimed (implicitly) at content farms there seems to be little or no reason to make one at all anymore. In fact, penalized content farms can hurt other businesses by making a legitimate site become associated with penalized sites.
3. How to Use Links
Because hyperlinking can be subject to costly, and just painful, litigation processes it’s important to know how hyperlinks can work for you and how they will get either hit with PageRank penalties or get hit with complaints from other sites.
The Good – Good hyperlinks to and from your site count as votes for PageRank algorithms and are essentially rewards for quality original content. They are a good pat on the back but they will also allow you to quickly gain more visitors without having to resort to shady, or copyright infringing, tactics.
Legitimate hyperlinks, in and out, can also be helpful because they can help readers and search engines be able to categorize your site. Without this help you may just be lost in the shuffle of random, uncategorized sites, which won’t help your links at all. Although linking excessively or irresponsibly may be considered bad form and may incur penalties, it likely won’t be seen as illegal.
The Bad – Let’s talk about link farming. Unlike content farming, link farming is a fairly well defined idea. Essentially, it is when a company buys up several domain names and puts up fake “content” to provide links to their central site. Although this isn’t illegal it will easily get hit with penalties for low quality content and fake links.
4. “Free” Linked Content Costs You Control
If you’re looking for ways to have content with very little work then you’re out of luck. And if you think that simply linking to other sites is a free way to get rankings then you’ve never heard the phrase “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Providing quality original web content to your visitors will allow you to set your own pace and create serial content that will keep visitors coming back for more. If you just grab links then you have no control over the quality of the content or how it is distributed. And having all kinds of articles from disparate sources from across the Internet may become confusing and make you seem unreliable.
Quality content is the food of your website. It fuels you. And if you cook it just right you may have the best steak and lobster meal in the world. If you’re just grasping around the Internet then you’ll just end up with jelly beans and broccoli stuffed in a duck. In other words, you’ll have an incongruous mess on your hands.
Another aspect of your site that you lose control over is the all important call to action, according to Rightmixmarketing.com. Sure there’s a call to action but it’s not for you, it’s for someone else. And it’s quite likely that the point of your site isn’t to advertise for other companies so you may as well have your own call to action. You’re not a billboard, don’t act like one.
The How-To Guide to Original Content
If we’ve convinced you that original content is better than shamelessly hyperlinking around the Internet and risking (sometimes) frivolous lawsuits then that’s great. But now you have another problem: how do you create original content? Lucky for you there are plenty of ways to go it alone and have others do it for you. In the latter case, just remember that you get what you pay for and if you’re outsourcing to other countries to write content (even English speaking countries) you may find that you have some serious editing to do to fit it into your regional dialect and make it sound natural for your market.
Rewrite the Site
They call them “fixer-uppers” for a reason. They can be fixed up and salvaged. If you like the heart and soul of your landing pages or blogs then there’s no reason that you can’t hire a good writer or editor to make sure that your site conveys the message you want to send in the best possible way.
Guest on Other Sites
Your original content doesn’t have to only be on your site. It just has to be your original content. Speaking of content syndication, don’t shy away from being the one paid to guest blog or write somewhere else. Just make sure that you’re getting links back to your site.
Figure Out What’s Popular
Original content doesn’t mean anything if it’s not content that visitors want. Finding out what your specific market is into, what they’re talking about, and what they’re reading will allow you to stay one step ahead of the game and have links coming to you instead of hyperlinks going outward.
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