Backlink Strategies: What Works After Panda and Penguin
It used to be that backlink strategies for SEO are fairly straightforward. You just find websites that are do-follow and have some page rank, not related to your website and then just build a link. This was the preferred method for many years. Types of websites that you can do this include Web 2.0 websites, forum profiles, guest books, blog comments and posts, “about the author” article sections, in-article links and many others. Indeed, the only limit to the kind of backlinks that you can build as part of your backlinks strategies was your imagination.
Penguin and old backlink strategies
Rightly or wrongly, Google has put an end to much of these practices. Thanks to Google Penguin, you can’t just use the same small group of keywords and blast backlinks to your sites. Google is smarter than that now. If it sees that if you are always linking to your site in a certain way, Penguin will give you a penalty. What Google is looking for is natural backlinks. Google is looking for signs that people are naturally linking to your site. When people link to content, they don’t always use the keyword for that page or even always use the name of the website. Some people just use “click here”, “click this” or “this”. Others just use a direct link. See, that’s how natural linking works. It is how natural people who are in a hurry, who don’t really care about SEO link to other sites. That’s what Google is factoring in as part of the Penguin update.
After all, Google wants to deliver the best results to its users. If you type a keyword into the search they want the most relevant be on the top. This way Google helped to answer the user’s question – not if there are texts on the top of the results which don’t deliver the right answers.
Panda and the impact of social media
After that, Goole came out with another update: The Panda Update. The Panda Update looks for social signals. So even if you get a lot of backlinks from the Internet, but your website doesn’t get much links or mentions from Twitter, Facebook or other social media and network sites, Google will view that as a red flag that you are doing something weird to get high rankings and will penalize you accordingly. So as mentioned in the article about Twitter Marketing it is best to participate and share your content naturally.
Classic quality-based backlink building
So what works after Google Penguin and Google Panda? Interestingly enough, the backlink strategies that used to work in the past work even better now. These backlink strategies are strategies that focus on content quality. They can all be summed up into this sentence. Build quality from quality content. The most obvious way to do this is to find highly targeted and highly discriminating blogs that focus on your niche. Talk to them directly and try to get them to publish a guest post that has a backlink to your website. Additionally, you can find article directories that are very discriminating and focus on your niche. Have them publish your article that has the backlink to your website. The big difference with current backlink strategies that work from those that no longer work is the editorial factor. Google is looking for some quality control for backlink building. It is trying to step away from automated or instant approval methods and now more geared to quality control. It is going to get tighter in the future so you need to get your act together now and focus on quality content from which you can build quality backlinks.
To be honest, I would not buy any link packages at all. I’d take the time and do some backlinking myself. Comment on some related blogs, write some guest posts on blogs in your niche and answer questions in your niche on Yahoo Answers. Whatever you do – everything seems to be done better manually than by asking someone to do it for you. I know it is a work we all don’t like much but in the end you’ll be rewarded because you know that your backlinks are not spammy.
If you want to learn more about backlink strategies, join the Living For Mondays Academy and I’ll show you exactly how to choose the right keywords and rank in the top results of Google.
Filed in: Blog • Internet Marketing
About the Author (Author Profile)
I'm Monja, the owner of several websites, amongst others Digidesignresort.com and CMDacademy.de. I make my money online since 2011 and as a teacher I love to teach others how to do the same - personally. You can connect with me here and on Google +Subscribe
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Very interesting post…
Great – thanks for confirming that about backlinks. It can be hard to keep up with the latest “what to dos” and “what not to dos”! 🙂
Backlinking is just one of the strategies which boost our site’s SEO. There are many things which the white-hat seo specialists do to get higher ranks. And yes, as you mentioned it is better to build our backlinks manually without making use of any automated systems. I believe that along with backlinking the content should also be equally good in quality so that other people naturally link to it.
Some people suggest that we have to make use of free resources and platforms online to write some short content and then build backlinks through them. They advice to have an anchor text and deep links to our site’s content. I think along with backlinking if we focus on content as well we can get genuine traffic as well.
Thanks.
Hi Monja, I really like your statement above: “I would not buy any link packages at all”. Yes, I do agree with you. I prefer to building backlink manually with my own hands.
Nice article.