Link Building

Link building is a complicated task, you need to understand who you are building the links for and what the goal of any project should be. Making sure you seek out and build the correct mix of links and doing so in a way that is safe and reliable can be quite a challenge.

Links used to be a numbers game but nowadays you need to gain the right type of links that will pass the value you need for the success of the content you are linking to. Link building requires an intimate knowledge of the place of your content in the link graph and what a natural link would look like in that context.

To effectively build links that improve and grow the trust and performance of your domain we need to inhabit your niche. This means understanding every person, place and site in your marketplace. By understanding and recording these it helps us to define what the correct campaign solutions are for your domain and your link profile.

In some cases the links needed for success are the hard to gain, typically things like powerful national coverage links gained through traditional PR techniques and pitching those stories and building journalist relationships. In other cases the links needed for your content to win are the simple metric driven links from real sites within the niche you operate. Most link building agencies specialise in one or the other, we take the view that we need to be specialists in building the right links for the situation, regardless of whether they are hard or easy to obtain.

Often the required links are simple to attain, there is a mutually beneficial arrangement between the linking site and your content. It’s simply a matter of respectful and direct communication to negotiate the link placement. Sometimes the links needed for a project will span links that are much harder to attain, that can mean redefining the way we approach or finding ways to pitch or build a relationship with the people and places that control those sites. By building those relationships, identifying those targets and pitching those angles, those links can be built and in many cases this is what will separate you from the competition.

As part of Google’s efforts to negate the manipulation of their search results through link spam they use a part of their ranking algorithm called ‘Real Time Penguin’ to ignore those links that they detect as possibly manipulative. When doing a link audit its important to not just look for risks and issues but also to work out what Google is still counting and what they may now be choosing to ignore. By conducting an audit and finding the links that still count it allows us to make much better decisions about where to spend our time and resources in building new links and it feeds into our decisions on internal architecture and linking from a technical SEO perspective.

Google has become hypersensitive to how powerful links are for powering SEO rankings and so they have spent the last few years developing ways to ignore and penalise those links that they believe have been placed with the intent of manipulating rankings. With every choice of link you build you need to balance the benefit and power of those links with the contribution to that intent from Google’s perspective. We have more experience than nearly any other company on the planet in what makes a good link and what makes a link problematic. By choosing the right balance and being open and transparent on what links should and can be built we make sure that we gain the maximum reward for the minimum risk. Anyone telling you that there is no risk in intentionally growing your link profile really doesn’t know what they are doing. Relying on links just appearing naturally also means that you will be out competed by those competitors who know how to truly leverage the power of links.