Favorite Link Building Methods?

August 9th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor | 29 Comments

Yesterday Raj looked at a tool which helps organize manual link building and discussed the pro’s and con’s of paid link building with such practices as sending out emails asking for links.

While emailing bloggers may work for some companies, other link builders find more value in paid anchor text friendly editorial linking, others in mass submitting to directories. Link baiting and social media participation also tend to bring in loads of links, from natural blogs to high authority sites (for example, to my surprise Move.com linked to one of my blogs the other day).

Which form of link building has worked best for you and which is your preference? (No need to spill all of the beans here, vague answers in the comments are fine).

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Comments

29 responses so far ↓

Micky Ward on Aug 8, 2007 at 12:54 pm

SMO and email relevant sites to build links are my favorite. A few message forums I belong to I always have my relevant link in my signature.
10668844 on Aug 8, 2007 at 1:43 pm

Forums/Comment sections have worked best so far.

But, what do you do when you have a client that has little to no online community? It’s a mid-sized corporate that deals with such a specific niche that there are no extra communities to get involved with.
stubsy on Aug 8, 2007 at 1:47 pm

Forums and buying them

Link exchanges = Hard work to mess around pasting links and then check people are still linking
CVOS SEO on Aug 8, 2007 at 2:00 pm

Stumbleupon can bring excellent long term traffic.
10668844 on Aug 8, 2007 at 2:43 pm

who are the best link brokers? thanks to anyone who offers that information up.
Everett on Aug 8, 2007 at 2:46 pm

I’ve found that creating linkbait content with a specific social media site in mind (i.e. hugg.com, digg.com, stumbleupon…) and then submitting or getting someone to submit to those sites works best for getting quantity and quality. You just have to be sure what you are submitting is link-worthy in the first place. All SMO does is get your content in front of people who might want to link to it. If the content sucks, they still aren’t going to link and you will have wasted your time and put a dent in your SMO profile.

Directories still provide a decent boost for new sites, especially on MSN.

I stopped commenting on forums awhile back, but it sounds like people are still seeing benefit there so I guess I’ll have to start joining some discussions again. …with thought-out and valuable comments, of course. ;-)

As for the “best” links, I’ve found that approaching webmasters directly with a proposition is most successful at getting high quality links.

I tested out a few of the many link brokers out there and none of them really did much on the tests sites. They tend to be low quality links that are no better than what you could get for free from the thousands of directories out there.

Presell Pages are a great resource if you can find someone who still does this. The original man behind the concept doesn’t do it anymore so…
James on Aug 8, 2007 at 6:38 pm

Just like people looking for a “magic pill” to help them loose weight without a proper diet or exercise. There are scores of people in the SEO world who will offer shortcuts to link exchanging. And the bottom line, unfortunately, there simply aren’t any.

To garner height in search engine ranking you want to exchange links with industry related sites that provide unique content, clean code, and well-written meta-tags. What’s the best way to find these sites? Spend time looking around and qualify the sites you want to exchange links with. That’s it. You don’t want to waste time and energy exchanging links with sites that offer you nothing, or worse get you penalized for some black hat technique they may be employing on their site.

Yes it’s boring, yet it takes a considerable amount of time, but in the end it will work. And yes Virginia that applies to both link exchanging and, for some, exercise.
Discount Designer Perfume on Aug 8, 2007 at 7:12 pm

Submitting articles to directories used to work best but the response from it seems to have gone down for us. Now we prefer creating blogs with quality content, getting links automatically and using some social bookmarking.
Alderin - From Water For Life on Aug 8, 2007 at 8:08 pm

Another good way to build some quality links (if done professionally) is to leave comments on dofollow blogs :) That seems to be popular these days, and if you are reading them anyway way not contribute!
Dollars Blog on Aug 8, 2007 at 8:30 pm

I use a variety of ways to keep Google on it’s toes. I don’t think you should do one method. Some methods are much more efficient though. In the end though 90% of traffic building is more about tons of content on your site and networking, than just Pagerank/backlinks.
Pozycjonowanie on Aug 8, 2007 at 8:31 pm

About 2 years ago i was using exchange but now i like blog comments !
waterslide on Aug 8, 2007 at 10:25 pm

I think comments and lots of blogs are the best
LJ at YourFranchise.com on Aug 8, 2007 at 10:28 pm

Using directories, specially paid ones… I heard that it was a great method to building links.
Webdesign Ivorius on Aug 9, 2007 at 12:44 am

In Czech Republic is the best method registration at free directories and exchange links for searcher Seznam.
Presell Page Man on Aug 9, 2007 at 3:51 am

Everett, whom do you refer to with the “original man” not doing presell pages anymore ?

Not sure if you mean Jim Boykin who is now offering that inside his link ninja program only, or the “presell page” man :-)

anyway, as far as I’m concerned, I’m still her, and I’m still doing it … clients just got a nice San Jose 2007 party special last night.

thanks!
presell page man
Leipziger on Aug 9, 2007 at 4:09 am

I think a good mixture of the first 5 points is best. Link exchange does need too much maintenance.
Mukesh on Aug 9, 2007 at 10:34 am

Paid links are the easiest way to SEO ;) provided the links are brought manually and not using a network. Internal page intext links cost you very less too as compared to buying links on the homepage of a site which is generally cluttered with links and often gets very less traffic as compared to other pages.
Nickel Plating on Aug 9, 2007 at 10:43 am

Comments ,smo and creating a blog network are my favorite. Of course getting solid links from a webmaster and buying selective links are also good.

Here is a tip for commenting. #1 I always read the post and comment something usefull. Sometimes I will read the post and have nothing solid to add so I won’t even leave the comment.

Also, very important, if you want to make sure you are not wasting your time when commenting, use a tool to make sure that the comments do not have- No-follow -. I use a tool from iweb.

Great post here. Thanks for the info
Website marketing in Ontario on Aug 9, 2007 at 10:55 am

Even though Yahoo Answers uses the nofollow tag, I still find those links coming up in my Google Webmaster account. Some people do very well with it.
egorych on Aug 9, 2007 at 11:53 am

Methods 1-6. Link exchange does nothing usefull at all. And “others” (you mean spam I think) is usefull only for doorways and useless for “white hat” projects.
Loren Baker, Editor on Aug 9, 2007 at 12:05 pm

egorych,

Others does not mean spam, just other ideas :)

Really, you don’t find link exchange to be useful? Why not?
Loren Baker, Editor on Aug 9, 2007 at 12:07 pm

Ontario,

Excellent point on Yahoo Answers & Link Building. I did a write up on this a while back with some excellent tips : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/marketing-your-site-on-yahoo-answers/4509/
Sujan Patel on Aug 9, 2007 at 6:19 pm

I prefer to use Linkbaiting and social media along with commenting and old fashion link exchanges . I use a mixture of them and it seems to be working for me.
Free-Loops on Aug 9, 2007 at 7:50 pm

I think a complete mixture of all is helpful. Newsletters where not mentioned.

Not sure what Linkbait is but ill take a look and see.
Oakland Athletics on Aug 9, 2007 at 10:53 pm

I do blogrolling on some of my blogs. I realize that reciprocal links aren’t see too highly in the search engines as one way links. I’m still trying to figure out whether in the end if I should just drop the whole blogroll idea on some of my sites(some of my sites really need them) or just keep them. I don’t really want my traffic diverted and they are ugly looking too, so im not sure how well of an SEO effect and if the pro’s outweigh the cons?
Matt Keegan on Aug 10, 2007 at 1:17 pm

I think #8 or “Other” is my favorite as it is the most mysterious… Other than that, comments is good and I’ll have to remember to linkbait you in a future article on my blog.
Arnie - Link Building Pro on Aug 11, 2007 at 7:18 pm

Just to chime in… we have had good luck with blog comments and Yahoo answers. But some of the best links still come from good old fashion press releases.
Mark - London on Nov 14, 2007 at 6:08 pm

Like investing - need to have spread in your portfolio. For every quality/authority link you can afford to have some lowergrade directory links or blog networks or link buying.
Link exchanges - may be downgraded because reciprocal but if from similar industry create strong authority.
Don’t waste time getting reciprocals from weak sites. Use tools like SEO FireFox and SEO Quake to find high PR/high IBL pages that are linking to competitors. Then make a targeted list - so you are only exchanging with equal PR sites or better (e.g. I only target reciprocals where links pages are PR3 or better).

I think the biggest “other” is creating your own mini-network of 5 to 10 websites - or more (on seperate IPs, not all in the same Google Webmaster/Analytics account!) - promoting those with all ten methods - but then have them all push up your main site with heavy linking content/text linking (i.e. in the middle of articles) to your main site.

Blog commenting and forum commenting certainly. Forum commenting is sometimes better - as some forums have been around for yonks and you can find PR5 up to PR7 pages.

Suprisingly I’ve had decent traffic on forum comment signatures and blog comments (as well as PR boost).
MSN hacker on Jan 31, 2008 at 1:28 pm

There are much of other ways to make links. The less I do is linkbait. Because of the fact I don’t know how to do.