Link building

Link building in SEO is a huge topic. If you care about the high position of your page in Search Engines like Google – you have to take care of it.

Website where no one has worked on link-building has no chance to get a high position in search engines. The exception are the pages with a very long history, dating back to the first years of the 21st century. Google rewards them for reliability. But here, too, there is a condition: such a website has to be updated, it has to be responsive to mobiles and tablets, it must be in line with new trends in programming.

The reason of those websites position is also the fact, that they already have their own links, because for several years they have been collecting them in a natural way.

Why is link building important?

In another post we compared Google to an “sophisticated newsmonger”. Such a person must have his information in order to pass it on. And that’s what linking is about. Having a link to your site you give the Google the information, that there is something going on. When something is important, people talk about it, right? The same is on the Internet. If you have important content on your website, other websites have to “talk about” it.

What are wrong links?

What are good links?

Good links are natural. When you write a good article, post a useful tool or have an interesting product and random users will link to it – Google robots will sense that traffic is natural. And they are good links.

What are popular links?

Natural links from regular websites are good. But imagine that your product is linked by a very popular blog… Or that your article interested the owner of the most read news magazine… This parameter of the tested links is called Citation Flow. A website is popular when it has more users and when other websites have links to it.

What are reliable links?

There are many tools for monitoring the quality of links. There are websites that are valuable and of no value. A good example are websites containing pornography. They may be popular, but search engine robots don’t consider outgoing links to be valuable. However, if a link comes from NASA’s website, Google will know, that it’s fully reliable.

These are, of course, extreme cases, but they reflect the meaning of the factor called Trust Flow. Google trust NASA and don’t trust pornography. Check out the excellent Majestic SEO tool. Comparable is also HREFS. Unfortunately, both are paid.

What are adequate links?

If you sell swimsuits and NASA posts a link to your product, it makes little sense, unless NASA has a program to send swimmers to the still undiscovered water on Mars.

You do not need the link from NASA as much as the one from a swimming pool, from a swimming club or from a popular Olympian.

What are the best links?

The best links are adequate and have high volume of both Citation and Trust Flow. The Google website as reported by Majestic, has a volume of Trust Flow 99 and Citation Flow 100. That is of course the best possible result, unless you were disturbed by this one missing Trust Flow point.
NASA is an interesting domain, because it has a higher Trust Flow (90) than Citation Flow (72). This is the specificity of the .gov (government) and scientific websites. Too ambitious to be widely quoted by ordinary users 🙂

Pandagroup.co website has today Trust Flow 13 and Citation Flow 21. Well, this result leaves a lot to be desired, but it results mainly from its relatively young age – it was founded 29 Nov 2016. The previous domain of our company had a much higher ranking, and we are working on the new one 🙂
Imagine that one day the google domain instead of Google-Doodle image will place a link to a product of your shop and write much about your topic. You will have an adequate link from a site with parameters 99/100. Cosmic result. This is the best link 🙂

Where to get super links from?

Well, there is a lot of way to get links. Let’s not mention non-elegant and unethical methods, especially that smarter and smarter robots severely punish such practices. They can even completely block the website, i.e. apply manual punishment! You have to make a lot of effort to take it off later.

We will focus on methods that pay off the most in the long run.

• The first method I’ve already given: focus on the best possible content of your website. Try to make your products interestingly described. Try to describe them adequately, but also in an original and understandable way for your customers. Post the best possible pictures of these products. In some industries you may try to be controversial. In others try to be funny. In others you can inspire reflection in users. This way you have a chance to get natural links to your website.
• You can build your own websites, which will be the “back office” of your proper website. This is quite a popular method. You can run a special website with tips that are not always related to your industry, but are “around” the topic and will be interesting for ordinary users. Do you associate websites with tips, possibility of commenting, willingly visiting websites without the ads? They are the “back-office” sites, which are used to link-building to the right domains. The “back-office” websites must be located on another server.
• It is worth taking care of social media. Login as a shop and publish posts, comments, be active. Remember, however, that the Facebook link is not a link with a value of 99/99 (volume of Trust and Citation Flow reported by Majestic). For some reasons the search engine robots ignore links from Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
• You can hire someone to do this work. There are SEO agencies, which will take care of both the content on your website and the professional link-building by placing links on their back-up sites (sometimes they have dozens or even hundreds of them…?)

There are still a few technical issues like link strength (if a website has a lot of links, their strength is proportionally weaker). There is an attribute of nofollow, which also weakens such a link… We will write about it another post.