Link Building Strategies, updated for 2012

Here’s some link building  strategies that I decided to write up to address questions (and concerns) from people who purchase certain link building services then ask for strategy help, or want to know what my tips or “secrets” are for using these tools and services to maximum effect….

 I rewrote this page on 3/4/2012, just after a late February/early March Google Panda 3.3…

I call its the sins of the Father algorithm update because it seems to be an algorithm update that devalued  backlinks based on a historical pattern of uniform anchor text linking.

Also, Private blog networks don’t really gets slapped  a lot, but what DOES get hurt over and over and over again are the group of people who come to rely too much upon only just one service, one anchor text, one backlink type, one backlink service

Nowadays your 2012 link building strategies should include the following

• Multiple anchor text used when link building (click here for a service that writes and submit for you using this method for 20 urls and multiple keywords at once)
• Good article marketing content, very well spun…for backlinking fodder (click here for a service that writes and submit for you using this method for 20 urls and multiple keywords at once)
• Social media backlinks and signals (click here to read a review on the best social media/social signal service I’ve tried)

The educated consumer is a powerful and happy consumer, so let’s get started with some terms you should be familiar with and their roles in effective SEO…

• (External) Tiered linking, AKA Getting Links to your backlinks
• Profiles links AKA Angela links, AKA Xrumer-like spam links
• Web 2.0 – and it’s role in link building
• Money sites
• Satellites, parasites

Money sites and main sites- these are ALWAYS , ALWAYS,  ALWAYS your priority when striving for top rankings.

You don’t want your articles on article directories outranking content on your money sites, and same thing applies for any tier 2 entities like Web 2.0 hubpages, squidoo lenses etc….

Remember this as it is crucial to your SEO success!…

Your goal is not to have your content on other’s virtual properties out-ranking your own, but to get your own content self-hosted on your own sites ranked highest (at some point).

This is not SEO “theory” merely common sense…. I know that you want to see some high ranked articles and such when you’re first starting out, and trying to create some article marketing traffic, so YES it is OK if you rank your articles first, as long as they link to your money site in DoFollow manner and if you keep in mind that your money sites allow you more freedom with your content therefore more conducive to making conversions and earning those dollars.

Tiered linking: there’s external and internal tiered linking and most searches I’ve done for the term tiered linking referred to internal cross linking on sites, or site architecture, but in this particular space, tiered linking means external linking patterns, AKA the design and organizational structure of your inbound linking profile, AKA your link juice build up, AKA your… ok that’s enough “AKAs” I hope you get the point here.

Traditionally, link building meant direct linking from one entity to your main site, your money site, and article marketing was the primary whitehat way to do this, aside from reciprocal linking, but with the advent of all the “Web 2.0″ sites that soon became authority sites trusted highly by the search engines, these became great places from which to obtain links from, and also a great place to send backlinks to (more on this later…).

The smart/intermediate/proficient link building knows that direct linking to one’s money sites is a rather self-limiting exercise because you will end up running out of entities to direct link from, unless you find other entities to direct link juice towards.

When doing external tiered linking you’re doing something like the following:

Shitty links >>> crappy links >>> less crappy sites linking to >>> your money sites

Tier 3 and 4 and 5 Shitty links – Xrumer, WPMUs, LFE urls, low level article directories——

Tier 2 entities- hubpages, squidoos lenses, good article directories like articlesbase, goarticles, ezinearticles, guest posts on relevant highly trusted sites

Web 2.0 sites – First off I gotta rant a little bit about the term “Web 2.0″, which was originally a type of technology, which came to have a certain design associated with it, then it became associative with certain kinds of sites, which then became known as Web 2.0 sites, but I’ll play along here and continue to call the following types of sites, Web 2.0 sites, to name just a few: HubPages, Squidoo, Vox, Twitter, wordpress.com

The role of Web 2.0s in link building- Most of the tier 2 Web 2.0s you want to be creating are on high Page Ranked domains but more importantly, are aged, trusted entities that enjoy high search engine trust, and most importantly to the end users, they’re easy to create, and publish content to.

Since these are entities that can contain your keywords you’re targeting you can create keyword optimized “web 2.0 sites” to rank for certain terms, but you can also funnel link juice through them, on towards your money sites.  That’s what you want to do at some point when your understanding of how link building works goes beyond the minimal direct linking and advances beyond that towards what could be considered the next step in your SEO-volution.

Let me re-emphasize that it is SOLID SEO to direct link to your sites form the more trusted entities first, (at first) then once your site has enough of these trusted links pointing to them, to then consider expanding outwards into doing crappier links to your tier 2 entities and money sites…

But for now let’s just expand outwardly, slowly and consider as hypothetical fact that you:

• have a money site
• have some Dofollow Web 2.0 entities built
• are linking to money sites form the Web 2.0s

So, let’s say you build some lenses and hubs and other DoFollow entities, how do you pass link juice to them?

Well, that’s where, the lesser quality links and sites come into play.

Blog networks are chock full of lower quality sites, but in many cases the sites linking to you are related niche sites so they can we used for direct linking to money sites and towards the Tier 2 entities.

But for those blog networks that have all the posts in general categories on sites whose purpose is solely to link farm out to others’ sites, then it’s best to use these to link from here to your tier 2 sites, but there’s no harm in direc tlinking to money sites either.

Hope this last part doesn’t confuse you, I’m just stating what BEST practice would be, whilst also adding that there’s no penalty for direct linking to money sites from crappy blog network sites.

Parasites and WPMUS - parasites are basically places you place links on or place content fo rlinks on for sole purpose of obtaining backinks.

Guestbooks, fake hreferrer spam (if you don’t know what this is, you don’t wana know), forum profile links, WPMUs… these are all pretty much parasite entities since you’re creating accounts there to bleed off the link juice and authorit yof the sites, not add quality to them.

WPMUs are wordpress multi user sites, a particular type of WordPress installation that allows fo rremote registrations on a subdomain, a new blog installation on said domain and these are used for either

1- adding quality content to that particular community

2- adding content there for sole purpos eo f”parasiting” (most used practice, really)

What makes parasites low quality, low level entities for link building is they basically become quasi link farms that contain crap spun content and link out to whatever they can link out to (when used by ahem.. “SEO spammers”).  since there’s no quality content on these WPMUs usually, and no real attempt to interact with the readers, these entities end up becoming link farm-like creations as I mentioned earlier; linking out way more than they get linked to, and used mostly for pushing and funneling and harvesting link juice as part of the tiered linking mechanism.

NOTE: There’s a TON of parasite entities out there, and these are definitely not restricte dot just WPMUs but they’re a pretty good example of parasites.

Parasites are to be used for linking to your backlinks and while some people say it’s best practice to NOT link directly to money sites from here, you can and will get away with it once you’ve established enough quality backlinks already.

When doing external tiered linking you’re doing something like the following:

Shitty links >>> crappy links >>> less crappy sites linking to >>> your money sites

Tier 3 and 4 and 5 Shitty links – Xrumer, WPMUs, LFE urls, low level article directories——

Tier 2 entities- hubpages, squidoos lenses, good article directories like articlesbase, goarticles, ezinearticles, guest posts on relevant highly trusted sites.

Why all this talk about tiered linking and linking to your backlinks?

When using article syndication services, AKA blog networks to syndicate content for purpose of direct traffic and backlinks, you will at some point have your content hosted-and-posted on the same sites, therefore it just makes sense to have another ring of optimized web entities to direct your links toward.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

• Try not to get overwhelmed here with all this talk of tiered linking, thinking that you need 100s of thousands of links to do link building effectively.
• If direct linking from article directories and blog networks does the trick for you then do ONLY THAT.
• If you have more tools at your disposal and need to create more link juice from/to more web entities then expand outward as needed.