SEO One-way Web Links
I've only seen five strategies that really work consistently for
getting hundreds of links.
Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies
Yet there's perennial interest in alternative linking
strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much
potential as the five major ways of getting links.
Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass
themselves off as viral
marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme:
you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone
else, and on and on down the line. Link farms can get you
delisted from search engine indexes, so don't even try them.
Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use
affiliate software that links directly to your site rather than
through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing
all their affiliate links in redirects of their own invention,
to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply
apply to the program themselves to get a discount.
Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way
inbound links, but they'll only have search-engine value a small
percentage of the time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use
search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically
encase links in script, or use robot instructions to prevent
spiders from following links.
Many one-way inbound
linking strategies fall into the
great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as
winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website
just for being so great.
Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the
this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as
offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange
for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty
links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply
chain.)
Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of
one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all
have more potential than some of the more madcapped strategies.
Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to
understand all five strategies in order to really gain a
distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.
1. Waiting for Inbound Links
If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound
links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are
an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you
cannot rely on them, for two reasons:
Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long time.
Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can't get search engine
traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet
without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone
going to find you to give you inbound links?
2. Triangulating for Inbound Links
Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links
if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website
you offer in exchange a link from another website you also
control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of
defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest.
If you have more than one website, you probably are already
employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:
You need to have more than one website in the same general
category of interest or the links won't be relevant.
The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify
compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated
to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.
As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is
that the links are mostly on "Resources" pages that are just
lists of links. There's only a small chance of getting
significant traffic from these links. Plus, any "Resource" page
may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if
that hasn't happened already.
3. Submitting to Directories
They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing,
no-fee-charging, and actually well-run directories of relevant
links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO acquaintance tells me
he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head. Plus, there
are other kinds of directories: directories of affiliate
programs, of websites using a certain content management system,
of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of
websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.
Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it's a good
deal if you can get it. But let's say you do get links from all
200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche
directories--now what?
4. Paying for Inbound Links
Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has
become big business. Buying good traffic-generating "clean"
links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising, which
confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of pitfalls of
relying primarily on paid links for SEO:
The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial
search engine traffic can become prohibitive.
As soon as you stop paying, you lose your link--you are
essentially renting rather than owning, with no "link equity"
building up.
Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links on
rankings, as revealed in various patent filings. A website can
try to mask the fact that the links are paid, but how well it
does that is out of your control.
Given Google's mission to dampen paid links' effectiveness, paid
link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential paid
link partner is "passing PageRank." But identifying appropriate
PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in itself.
Google also has a stated mission of dampening the value of any
"artificial" links. Having most of your links on PageRank 3 or
higher web pages would seem to be a dead give-away that your
links are "artificial," since the vast majority of web pages
(note: not necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1
or lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have so
little impact on a site's PageRank that it would not be worth
the expense.
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