Leaving Work Behind

10 Link Building Methods Revealed And Reviewed

Tom Ewer

I have been doing this niche site building lark for well over six months, and have learnt plenty of important lessons in my time. Regular readers of the blog have hopefully been able to benefit from my experiences and learn from my mistakes.

With the end of the year approaching fast, now is as good a time as any to give you a full breakdown of my experiences with link building, including what has worked for me, and what hasn’t. I will be ramping up my link building strategy in the New Year based upon what I have learnt, so now seems like a great time to review my findings to date.

The Purpose Of This Article

Some of the strategies I discuss below have benefits beyond that of high SERP rankings, but given the focus of this article, I am putting those to one side. That does not mean that I do not recognize or appreciate those benefits. For instance, I wouldn’t want you to think that guest posting is only good for SEO!

And one final thing, before the SEO purist lynch mob comes after me – I am fully aware that some of the methods described below are not “organic”. I make no apologies for that. I am here to report my findings on the effectiveness of the below methods – it is up to you to decide whether or not you want to implement them. Be warned – Google is a mercurial beast, and any link building strategy that incorporates black hat SEO carries an element of risk.

Any links to products on this page are not affiliate based – I do not get paid a commission if you buy any product that I recommend. If you would like to know why this is the case, check out my article: Why I Am NOT Trying To Make Money From This Blog.

Read This First – Link Valuation 101

If you are exploring link building methods, you should have at least a basic understanding of the way in which Google values links. One link is not necessarily as valuable as another. I go into great detail about how to value links in my free guide: Keyword Research & Competition Analysis Mastery. Given that you are interested in SEO, you should be reading the guide anyway. Get your free copy now!

With all of that out of the way, let’s get onto the list.

1. Forum Profile Linking

In my experience, if a link is easy to build, it often holds little value. Forum profile links are no exception to this rule.

When you sign up as a forum user, there is sometimes an option to add a link back to your website. Although this can give you an easy link, there are few reasons why I wouldn’t recommend this method:

I would only ever build these links if I were doing it as part of a larger strategy of attracting people to my site via forum commenting. Which leads us to…

2. Forum Commenting

Most forums allow you place a signature under your comments. Sometimes, you can include a link back to your site in this signature. However, this method shares many of the shortcomings of forum profile linking.

On the positive side, the pages upon which your signature is placed are quite likely to be indexed (search engines like forum posits). On the negative side, many forums prohibit “promotional” links in signatures, so you could go to all of the trouble of signing up, setting your signature, and leaving insightful comments, only to find that your link is removed.

3. Blog Commenting

This is a wildly popular form of link building. You can’t swing a virtual cat around in the blogosphere without hitting a blog comment that has been submitted for the obvious sole purpose of providing a link back to a site.

But I don’t believe blog commenting for links is worthwhile, and there are two main reasons why:

If you are leaving comments on a blog, they should contribute to the value of the post. That means you should read the article and leave a considered comment, which takes time. The return on time invested is either minimal, or non-existent.

If you are interested in blog commenting, take a look at these articles:

4. Social Bookmarking

In my opinion, this is another “too easy to be worth it” method of link building.

Social bookmarking sites, as you might have gathered, allow you to store bookmarks (i.e. URLs) online. It doesn’t take too much of a logical leap to realize that you can build links back to your site by submitting them to social bookmarking sites.

There are a few shortfalls with this method:

One thing social bookmarking sites certainly are good for is getting sites indexed. For instance, if you build plenty of web 2.0 sites, linking to them via social bookmarking sites will typically ensure that they are indexed.

Given that I don’t follow this strategy myself, I don’t have a big list of “dofollow” social bookmarking sites for you to utilize. The best source I found online was this post from Caroline Middlebrook’s blog. It was last updated in April 2011. If you know of a better resource, please tell me!

5. Web 2.0 Sites

Here’s the good news – building web 2.0 sites and utilizing them in the correct fashion can positively affect your main site’s SERP rankings. But the bad news is that it takes a fair bit of work.

Although I have separated web 2.0 sites, article marketing, and backlink pummeling, they operate best in tandem. Setting up a web 2.0 site alone will not be of great benefit.

But before I move on, there are a few things you should bear in mind. The sites should be created with unique content (I typically use manually-spun versions of articles on my main site). They should look like “real” sites in their own right – not just a bare shell. Add a couple of written posts, a video, some images…make the place look lived-in.  Essentially, you are trying to shield your site against Google’s suspicion. You don’t want to build 500 links to a web 2.0 site, just to find that it has been de-indexed.

If you want to know more about building web 2.0 sites, I recommend these resources:

One final thing – following these methods can quickly get overwhelming (it certainly did for me). Don’t be afraid to keep it simple – you can strip it down to a two step process:

  1. Build web 2.0 site with unique content and media.
  2. Link back to your site.

Here’s a list of web 2.0 sites to get you started (please note, I cannot personally vouch for every single one, as I have not used them all):

If you know of any others, let me know so I can add them to the list!

6. Article Marketing

Article marketing follows the same tack as building web 2.0 sites – it gives you a link from an established domain.

However, there are a couple of differences to take into account:

Once upon a time, Google liked articles from sites such as EzineArticles. However, they got hit hard by the Panda update back in February 2011. Having said that, coupled with backlink pummeling, article marketing still has a useful role to play for small-medium competition keywords.

My go-to article marketing sites are EzineArticles and Goarticles. If you want to branch out from these, check out this post: 11 Article Marketing Sites To Try In 2011.

7. Backlink Pummeling

This is a tactic that combines well with web 2.0 sites and article marketing. The concept is simple – pummel your “anchor” sites with hundreds of low quality backlinks. Those sites, which are hosted on high-authority domains, will be able to take the volume of links without alerting Google’s suspicion, and the huge volume of links will increase the site’s/page’s authority, which will subsequently be passed onto your main site.

A sizable proportion of the mass links that are created don’t get indexed by Google, but with this method, it is definitely a case of quantity over quality.

I won’t go into great depth on this method as it has already been well covered. I was originally introduced to it by Joseph Archibald in his 40 Day Challenge on the Warrior Forum. His method was popularized by Pat Flynn in his widely popular post, THE Backlinking Strategy That Works. There are various resources out there with which you can build huge amounts of links with little work. I personally used Unique Article Wizard, and had reasonable success with it.

There is a lot to be said for creating plenty of web 2.0 sites and articles that target various keywords for your site(s), then pummeling them with backlinks. It is a tried and tested method that still has a place in my toolbox today.

8. Article Syndication

Article marketing and article syndication often get confused, but they are in fact two very different beasts. We have already discussed article marketing, so let’s move onto the latter.

Article syndication is simply the process of publishing your best content on article directories, in the hope that other website owners will want to feature it on their sites, complete with a link back to yours. In my (admittedly limited) opinion, it is more trouble than it is worth. You absolutely should not be creating unique content for article directories. However, there is absolutely no harm in re-purposing your best content on the top article directory sites, in the hope that it gets picked up. At worst, you can treat it as an experiment.

Many people have a fear of duplicate content penalties by Google. Under these circumstances, I believe there to be little to no risk. After all, you are hoping for these articles to be syndicated (i.e. duplicated), aren’t you?

9. Blog Networks

This is the method I have been following primarily for the past couple of months. I have almost exclusively been using BuildMyRank, but have recently switched to two new services: Linkvana and RankJumpers.

Whilst I am not in a position to judge the latter two services yet, I happily and openly endorse BuildMyRank. It is solely responsible for some of my best rankings in Google.

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of blog networks, it is very simple. The above services grant you the ability to post to blogs on a network of hundreds (or thousands), with a link back to your site from each post. It is a bit like guest posting, but with no real vetting service (and to be honest, no one is going to be reading the posts either). This is link building at its most pure. It also happens to be highly effective for low-medium competition keywords.

A word of warning though – you need to be very careful with how you go about building your links. Make sure that you vary both the anchor text and target URLs. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

10. Guest Posting

I left the best method until last, and it is no great surprise that the best link building method of the bunch is also the most labor-intensive.

Guest posting essentially allows you to place a link back to your site from someone else’s. Typically, that link will be hosted on a relatively high-authority and relevant site. Those two factors combine to provide you with a very high-value link.

If you are in a niche with plenty of other active blogs, guest posting should be your number one priority. It’s that simple. I will be going into great detail on guest posting strategy in the future.

That’s All Folks!

I have personally tried all 10 of the above methods, with varying success. If I were to suggest a generic strategy for link building, it would be the following:

I might also sprinkle in some blog commenting on relevant sites and also participate in forums, but I would primarily do so for reasons other than link buidling.

What do you think about my strategy? Do you agree or disagree? Do you do something similar for you own sites, or something completely different? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons image courtesy of Bruno Furnari