Let's Talk About Link Building

Webmaster Discussion
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#1

I was reading this article on Moz.com…

https://moz.com/blog/backlinks-google-study

And basically it says that you can’t rank without links. So while link building is frowned on these days, links are still really important. In fact that study says links to rankings has a correlation factor of 0.3, which is one of the highest correlations of any of the 200+ “signals” that Google has in their algorithm.

So how do people do link building? Personally my take on it is that most affiliate porn sites probably don’t pass PageRank because they have so many crawlable paid (commercial) links. So I’ve almost never been up for “link exchanges” with other webmasters and I’ve never really seen anyone succeed when they did link exchanges.

Back in the day I think rawtop.com got a bunch of decent links from all the Blogger sex blogs that were popular a few years back. But that’s not really an option anymore. Few people are maintaining sex blogs.

Personally I’m thinking social media might actually be a link building activity. Not Facebook or Google+, 'cause you can’t link to porn sites on those, but definitely Tumblr & Twitter.

For example, if I post stuff on Tumblr and they get hundreds of shares, assuming I’ve put source links in, that means hundreds of links back to my sites. AND since Tumblr closes blogs that are overly commercial, and they don’t use NoFollow, then all those links do pass PageRank. The only downside is that there’s typically only one root domain (tumblr.com) that those links come from since few people set up CNAMES for their Tumblr blogs.

Twitter does allow commercial links, so I haven’t a clue how Google would know when to pass PageRank and when not to. Clearly they’re gonna let some Twitter links to pass PageRank, but which ones and how much?

Do you think posting to tube sites and sites like MyVidster could be seen as link building? How likely do you think it’d be for those to pass PageRank? Or would Google see those links as “low quality”? (Which seems odd considering how well those sites rank.)

But that does give a different perspective on social media. It’s always a bit frustrating to see how little money social media takes vs how much time you put into it. But if it’s actually also a link building exercise, then helps justify the time and money since more links = better rankings in the SERPs = more high quality traffic.

So how do you guys approach link building these days? Does anyone have tips on how to get tons of decent quality links other than via Tumblr and possibly Twitter?

#2

Re: Let’s Talk About Link Building

Does not social bookmarking and link sharing count as incoming links? I bet it does, at least some of it.

I stopped trading links entirely 2 or 3 years ago. I’ve been thinking of doing some again but just unclear if it’s pointless, could it do more harm than good… And the obvious question that popup in my mind is, do I need to if I doing ok without them?

#3

Re: Let’s Talk About Link Building

I’m with Bjorn on this.
I stopped trading links a long time ago, and I stopped trying to get links too. Things seem to be going okay without it, and I do believe that people should really be focusing on natural links generated by people genuinely wanting to share your content. Creating content worth sharing should be the focus in my opinion.

I’m not sure how social links fare when it comes to ranking and juice, but I do know from my own experience that when people share links to my pages I often see spikes in organic traffic soon after. I do believe (at least for the time being) Google recognizes social media as an instant factor and applies that automatically for specific content.

That seems to make sense too, given that so much of Twitter is about current events. It seems to me Google would have worked out a way long ago to associate your links when tweeted to popular hashtags. So, if there’s an adult hashtag people are using, and you have a page related to it, tweet a link to that page using that hashtag and you should see organic benefits too. It shows your content is relevant to current events in that subject.

#4

Re: Let’s Talk About Link Building

I believe all Tumblr links are no-follow, except for when you share a link. If you share a text or a photo and then add a link as a source or in the description, they make it a no-follow link. Or has this changed?

#5

Re: Let’s Talk About Link Building

I just checked and Tumblr source and image links do NOT have a nofollow. Not on the original blog posting it and not on the blogs that reblog the image. Tumblr does use nofollow on some other links, but not those. In fact there’s even a non-nofollow link to the blog you reblog from. So Tumblr’s prettty smart about nofollows – they use them intelligently and seem like they’re a decent a potential source for link building.

#6

Re: Let’s Talk About Link Building

One other thing I’ve been thinking about is which pages I’m linking to when I use Tumblr, Twitter, etc. Right now I link to the source blog post or tube site video page URL. I should be linking, at least in some cases, to things like tag pages. I think I’m spreading my links out to too many different pages on my site. What I want to rank aren’t my blog post pages, but category and tag pages.

So no one can think of other sites that offer decent opportunities for “organic”, “natural”, “social” link building? That is the nice part of Twitter and Tumblr. You may put the link there, but it takes other people sharing it for it to really do some good. And since things can go viral there’s a lot of potential if you put out the right kind of popular content.

#7

Re: Let’s Talk About Link Building

[QUOTE=rawTOP;160496]One other thing I’ve been thinking about is which pages I’m linking to when I use Tumblr, Twitter, etc. Right now I link to the source blog post or tube site video page URL. I should be linking, at least in some cases, to things like tag pages. I think I’m spreading my links out to too many different pages on my site. What I want to rank aren’t my blog post pages, but category and tag pages.

So no one can think of other sites that offer decent opportunities for “organic”, “natural”, “social” link building? That is the nice part of Twitter and Tumblr. You may put the link there, but it takes other people sharing it for it to really do some good. And since things can go viral there’s a lot of potential if you put out the right kind of popular content.[/QUOTE]

I did go looking for ways to build links through social media a while back but didn’t find much. The only things we use is Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. But I use social bookmarking heavily for my users which I’ve convinced myself builds incoming links (i base that on pure fantasy and wishful thinking). I actually cleaned up my linking profile earlier this year and blocked some sites using Googles Disavow tool.

The only other way I’m considering to startup again is writing a single blog post for a site in return for a link back. Not sure if its going to work, or if anyone will be interested. But again I’m a bit hesitant to start doing link exchanges since it’s worked out fine for me so far.

However, I can tell you that I still regularly get emails from people wanting to buy links representing major tube sites. They are obviously still using blackhat SEO and thriving from it.Makes you wonder if most of what Google says is just bullshit.