Rae Hoffman wrote an excellent piece over at www.sugarrae.com on hiring link developers that could help many companies get it right. I know I’ve had some trouble finding and vetting good candidates and this article and it’s list of questions to ask a potential link developer is an excellent piece of advice.
Thanks Rae.
What kind of trouble have you had hiring link developers? Tell me below and we’ll compare stories.
I recently read an article by Patrick Altoft over at Blog Storm on how to get links that really helps you understand at link building from it’s core. Basically, you have to be like Wikipedia to get 135 million links, but while this may sound too difficult, we aren’t really expecting you to get 135 million links, but if you do what Wikipedia does, you can tons of links, read the article and I’m sure it will help you out. Click the link above “how to get links” or click here!
Do you think you would like to be more like Wikipedia? Leave a comment below and we’ll discuss it.
Link Building Best Practices wrote this great article
It’s a simple question, but plenty of people get confused by this one. There’s a huge difference between outsourcing your link building and buying links. One is a simple exchange of cash for particular links. It’s a straightforward transaction – you pay for a particular link; that’s it. I’m not saying that there aren’t many different types of links you can buy – there are.
Link buying is generally a pretty standard transaction. In most cases, you are renting text links from websites, but you could also be buying reviews or sponsoring a website theme. The key is that you are making an out-and-out purchase. There’s a cash transaction specifically for the link itself.
Outsourcing Your Link Building
Outsourcing isn’t about buying links at all. When you outsource your link building campaign, you are hiring someone to do all of the dynamic link building work you would do if you had the time and resources to do it yourself. It doesn’t mean making credit card transactions to buy static links or put up banners.
Outsourcing means you trusting your campaign to a link building service who will take the time to learn about your business, your goals and your vision. They will do in-depth research about your industry, your competition and your company so that they can create dynamic links that aren’t purchased. They’ll be doing the kind of interactive link building that creates real buzz in your industry.
If you find the right company to outsource to, they will invlove an industry researcher and a professional copywriter familiar with your industry who can develop articles, blog postings and press releases about what you do that will capture the attention of visitors to your own website and countless others.
They will be familiar with authority sites, industry sites, education pages and quality news feeds that you just wouldn’t have the time to research or the access to if you were trying to build links yourself. It’s this unique combination of skill and access that makes outsourcing your link building campaign a good idea for many businesses.
What Sets Link Building Apart from Purchased Links
Link building is inherently content-rich. It isn’t about just the link – it’s about what surrounds the link. Because the link is imbedded in some kind of content that has to justify its existence, it naturally has to be something interesting enough to be of value. It may be an interesting how-to article, a thought-provoking response on a popular blog, a press release that’s been picked up on an industry news wire, a YouTube video…it really doesn’t matter where the link is.
What matters is that the content is valuable to the reader, which makes the link more credible than a typical purchased link. It’s also why outsourcing your link building can be such a great investment – you aren’t buying links; you’re buying a team of researchers, bloggers, writers and industry experts who are doing what you would do if only you had the time and energy!
GrayWolf’s SEO Blog wrote this interesting article on links.
I really find scandals interesting because people who are on the ball, plugged in, creative, not afraid to take chances and stir up a little controversy can do really well.
Case and Point Playgirl Magazine offered Ex-Governor Elliot Spitzer 1 Million Dollars to pose nude.
It’s a win-win scenario for Playgirl. Let’s go with the most likely outcome and assume client 9 says no, playgirl generated a decent amount of press, links, and attention, for the cost of a press release and some PR work.
Let’s enter dreamland and imagine he goes for the deal, I have no doubt that it would turn out to be the highest selling issue of Playgirl, attracting a huge amount of sales and advertising, more than enough to cover the $1 million dollar paycheck.
I recently messed up bad by suggesting a friend should use Pay Per Post for some link building love. Well, what ended up happening is far from ever reaching a link building “How To” book.
I’ll make it short and sweet.
Poof, friend vanishes from page six and and top 100 search engine results pages too. They’re still in the index but no where near the top ten pages.
Here’s what I think happened. The same people who took the “post opportunity” the first time around, took it the second time around as well. Google noticed multiple links from not so relevant sites within 30 days apart from one another and punished my friend (thank the heavens it wasn’t a big client…lesson learned!)
So I write to Eric from StoneTemple.com the guy with all those Rambling’s About SEO and this is what he had to say…
“Hi Jean-Pierre,
Sorry for the slow response, but I am at SMX West in Santa Clara right now.
A couple of things to think about:
1. Is it possible that the pay per post links originally benefitted you, and
once they were detected and disabled, they simply stopped providing any
benefit? This is a scenario in which you would not recover, simply because
you were not actually penalized. Another words, in this scenario, all that
happened is that your paid links stopped adding value.
2. If you have in fact been penalized, and you have stopped buying links, I
would file a reconsideration request. Make sure you do this from within
Google Webmaster Tools. The standard advice for this is to keep it short
(no more than 3 paragraphs) and direct, admit your sins, point out that you
have cleaned it up, and ask for them to remove any penalty that may have
been applied.
Do NOT do this if you are concerned about what may happen to your site as a
result of a human review by a Googler. I.e. if they found some other
practice you have been using that they are not happy with, a reconsideration
request could make your situation worse. So make sure you are squeaky clean
before doing this.
3. With or without a reconsideration request, the process can take as little
as a few weeks, to several months. Unfortunately, there is no formula to
how quickly these types of things progress.
The other thing you need to think about, to drive your long term rankings
strategy, is what are you going to do to get natural links? These will be
the keys to long term success.
Hope that helps!
Eric”
Thanks for the great advice Eric, I appreciate it.
I think I will tough it out for a few more weeks though, considering we’re still in the Index and see what happens. If there isn’t an improvement soon, I’ll have to beg Google for forgiveness.
What do you think I should do? Apart from get my brain checked ofcourse…
