As content signals have been devalued in Google over the last few months, and authority signals have gone through the roof, link building has arguably become more important than ever before... I've been building links for 15 years 🔗 Here's a 🧵 full of tips & techniques.
WARNING: I am a grey hat SEO who only does consulting, and doesn't do any client work. Whilst there is some level of risk to some of the techniques in this thread, it's minimalized by using common sense when carrying them out and using your initiative for when and how many.
Tip #1 - Learn Link Building First The worst thing you can do is jump into this without properly understanding what you are doing; You WILL get hit or your links neutralized by Google. Make sure you have a full understanding of building a campaign before executing one.
Tip #2 - Start A Site With Entity Stacking You need to build out a foundational layer of links first so that Google trusts your site and builds an entity out of your brand into there search index and knowledge base. Watch My Video For More On This 👇 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Tip #3 - Analysis First If you understand how to build links, you should understand how to analyze them; including competitors. You'll often find that money pages don't really need to have links built at them, and supporting content pages offer a higher value target.
This is because a supporting page usually internally links to considerably more money pages than a money page does, spreading the link equity better around the pages you want to rank. Negative links also only affect the page they're linking to so your money pages don't get hit.
Tip #4 - Niche Edits (Link Insertions) > Guest Posts In terms of power, cost and efficiency, Google's algorithm still seems to favour niche edits more than fresh guest posts, especially if you can get on pages with existing links and good direct traffic.
Tip #5 - Internal Link Guest Posts Whether you're buying guest posts or doing it the white hat way, asking site owners to internally link to your guest posts from their most powerful or relevant pages will dramatically increase the power of your link and its initial efficacy.
Tip #6 - Vet Sites Make sure the sites you're building links on are up to scratch! They aren't link farms, PBNs or any other site setup just to sell links and eventually get penalized. Analyze traffic, link profiles, domain age, socials, blog content, indexed pages etc
Tip #7 - Build Links At Link Bait Content One of the best things you can do in SEO is build and rank evergreen content that will attract links throughout the life of its ranking. This creates a compound effect that can massively scale a site's referring domains within a year.
Tip #8 - Export & Outreach To Competitor Links Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to export a competitor backlinks then classify the type of link (you can use an API, AI or VAs) and outreach to potential sites - This gets you on the same linkgraph that ranked competitors.
Tip #9 - Track Brand Mentions & Convert Them One of the easiest things you can do (especially if you're working for large brands) is track brand mentions and outreach to the site owners or journalists to convert them to a backlink for the site. Quick task repeated quarterly.
Tip #10 - Use HARO Alternatives For those with some serious skill and time, HARO is still a great service! But there are now a fair amount of international and geolocale alternatives, such as: - Qwoted - SourceBottle - Muck Rack
Tip #11 - Use 301 Redirects Where Suitable We've been using niche, aged domains to 301 at parasite pages all year to HUGE success but you can also do domain & site acquisitions to immediately juice up a site. Just don't do too many, as there is a limit.
Tip #12 - Keep Anchors Natural It's a lot easier to get it wrong by trying to figure out some einstein level equations for your anchor text ratios, but I prefer to just use branded for the root and completely white hat (page names etc) anchors for my inner pages.
Tip #13 - Image Link Building Is Easier Than EVER With the advent of AI and tools like Canva, it's now easier than ever to pump out image assets that you can use to build links at scale - Distribute via syndication networks, royalty-free image sites etc that all link back.
Tip #14 - Use Reverse Image Link Building If your site has a lot of image content, then reverse image search your most visited image pieces and find sites that are using your images. Outreach to the sites and ask them to link back to the page your image was originally from.
Tip #15 - Use Tiered Link Building Whilst tiered link building used to mean spamming your guest posts with automated link building software, nowadays it's much more about building multiple layers of quality and relevance. I use quality niche edits & PBNs on tier 2.
Tip #16 - Shop Around For Sites If you're buying links from vendors or link building services, then ideally try to buy specific sites and shop around to see who has the best deal. Best marketplaces: - WhitePress - FatJoe - NoBS And HighRise (in bio) can supply a LOT of niches.
Tip #17 - Quick Wins For FREE There are a LOT of backlinks out there that don't need to pay for, @ConnorShowler has been dropping some great sites you can get to build these links on X and has a newsletter for even more!
Tip #18 - Track Your Links Between sites going down, being hacked and owners removing your links after a couple months; It's always a good idea to make sure you're tracking if the links you've taken a lot of time or hard earned cash for, are still giving you that benefit.
Tip #19 - PBNs Still Work Despite what a lot in SEO will say, private blog networks have had a resurgence in the last few years as a very affordable way to build some of the most powerful links possible. I have a course (updated last month) here 👇 https://charlesfloatetraining....
Tip #20 - Use AI For EVERYTHING From ideation to getting data for digital PR to writing the outreach emails to creating the content for the links themselves... You can use your new found AI friends to make a lot of the tedious and drawn out work considerably faster.
And that's it! I hope you got a lot out of this thread! If you did, make sure to LIKE+RT the original post 👇 https://x.com/Charles_SEO/stat...
@Charles_SEO But Charles, links don’t matter !
@Charles_SEO Solid thread Charles 👍
@Charles_SEO Content signals have been devalued? I think bars were just raised significantly.
@Charles_SEO Wow! What a great thread. Nice one Charles, this is awesome 🤯
@Charles_SEO Charles the OG
@Charles_SEO Powerful sharing. Link building still contributes a lot to ranking on the searches and is something you must embrace if you want to maintain your rankings