Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

Inspired by post about link exchanges on a business forum, I thought I’d knock this together – nothing new here for seasoned SEOs, so feel free to move along, but those new to the industry may get some use from it.

Link exchanges have had a bad rap, but generally aren’t as effective as they once were.  Even so, exchanging links on a small scale with related sites as part of a larger link building campaign is fine and won’t hurt you.

Think about it this way – your site links to the BBC, then some time later the BBC run an article about your business (with a link to your site) – as far as Google is concerned this is a “reciprocal link”.  But it isn’t as cut and dry as that is it?  You also link to loads of other people, and other people link to you – the same goes for the BBC.

What is bad for search engine optimisation (or rather, ineffective and a waste of time) is exchanging links with anyone who will accept them.  As has been mention, if you link to blatantly random sites then it won’t help (and they link to you), it won’t help.

Another example of legitimate link exchanges are blogrolls – this is the term used to describe “related blogs” links on blogs.  Many bloggers know each other (within their own industries) from various networking medium (forums, conferences, trade shows, etc) and will happily link to each other.  There is still some effectiveness there (for SEO and for generic traffic / exposure).

Other methods of link building have varying levels of effectiveness:

Directories
Less and less effective these days – basic link directories are easy to create and there are literally hundreds of thousands of them out there.  Search engines tend to favour directories that have some form of editorial control – ie, they don’t let in any old riff raff!  Examples of good link directories:  DMOZ, Yahoo directory, BOTW, SevenSeek, etc

Articles
Writing articles for your subject area and getting them published on related sites (with a short bio and link at the end) is a great way to build links and get some good traffic.  However this shouldn’t be confused with mass article distribution (via article directories), which clone your article and allow anyone to publish them – this is less effective (mainly because the quality of the sites publishing them tends to be lower, and the subject area is more broad).

Press Releases
Pretty much same issues as articles.

Link Baiting
This is the term used to writing great articles (or information) for your own site that is so good that people will want to link to it naturally.  The hard part is getting people to find out about it in the first place, so its a lot easier to accomplish if you have a good user base on your site (people read new stuff you post and link to it from other sites they know / own).  You can also use news style sites to promote the article (places like Digg or Slashdot), but you face community moderation on places like this (ie, your article has to face the public “vote” in order to be really successful).

Forum signatures and profiles
Great way to build links, but it is important not to spam.  Read the forum rules first – for example, some forums only allow one or two links per signature and others don’t like you dropping URLs in posts, using affiliate links or encouraging people to “contact you” privately.  I run a few forums and I have no objections to labelling a company as a spammer for link dropping on the forums!

Conversely, if your posts add quality information to the thread then not only do you get the link benefit, you also could get the traffic and business benefit as well.   In terms of SEO forums links aren’t brilliant – threads get buried several pages deep over time which lowers the impact of the link.

Just ask nicely
Sometimes if you ask nicely enough, people will be happy to put a link on their site to yours without a link back.  Brilliant!  These are good links.

Stuff to watch out for…

3 way link exchanges
This usually occurs when someone asks you to link to their site (site A) and offers you a link back from another site (site B).  Usually it is a SEO agency trying to build “one way” links to their client (site A) and linking back from a quickly created directory (site B).

This holds no value for you whatsoever.

It surprises me how often people try this and in fact how many big brands let their SEO agencies get away with it.  I run 15 of my own sites just now so I get a lot of junk mail – I’ve had major UK job sites asking me for 3 way link exchanges…

Blog comment spamming
When you comment on a blog you can usually include a link in a post (it is similar to writing a forum post).  This used to be a way that unethical SEOs would generate links using automated programs to post comments on blogs.

To combat this, most blog software now uses the tag rel=”nofollow” on any URL posted in comments.  This tells search engines to ignore the link (and it gives the site no benefit).  The tag was originally used so people who sold text links (for SEO) didn’t get penalised by search engines (ie they had to sell the “traffic benefit” instead).

MG