2012 was a year of changes in the world of SEO. Google came out with
several algorithm updates that basically rocked the whole search engine
system. With updates such as Panda and Penguin, the once easy way of
getting a site ranked at the top of Google became a tough game of chess,
where highly refined strategies and not short-lived tactics are the
winning elements.
In 2013, with the rumors of Google launching a Penguin 2.0 update in
our midst, it becomes quite critical to design and implement a link
building strategy that won’t hurt your website’s search standing should
this rumor inevitably come to pass. I say inevitably simply because it
seems real enough that Matt Cutts and his team would follow up on their
previous algo updates with a few more just to lock down their new
rankings system and to mess with our minds a little bit more. Well,
let’s show those nerds from Google a thing or two by coming up with a
strategy that is at least two or three steps ahead of them.
Here are several link building rules and tips to keep in mind for your 2013 link building program:
Go Social
Google has never hidden its affinity for social media. Pretty much
anything that goes viral gets a special place in the SERPs. That has
been the case for the past two years or so. And, now that Google has its
very own social network, Google+, you can bet that Cutts and his teams
are paying more attention to social signals than ever before and making
sure that these signals affect search rankings.
The logic is simple really. Promoting your website or blog on social
media generates traffic for you. This means more people visiting your
site and possibly more people sharing and recommending your site or your
content to others. If that picks up, you will naturally get a
tremendous amount of social backlinks that Google will easily see
because, yes, they are always watching.
In 2013, focus your efforts on these social platforms for website or content sharing and syndication:
• Google+
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Pinterest
• Stumbleupon
• Delicious
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
Stop Obsessing About Site Authority and Page Rank
About one or two years back, the whole SEO world went crazy about
high authority links. At that time, Google held .gov and .edu domains in
high regard. This meant that if you had backlinks on sites with these
types of domains, you would have struck gold. Unfortunately, the frenzy
opened the door to link spamming thus, depreciating the value of most of
these domains.
The same goes with high PR or Page Rank sites. Post-penguin SEO saw a
surge in link building tactics aimed at dropping links on domains and
pages with high PR. While those kinds of tactics still seem to work
today, Google looks to be leaning more into a path where relevancy
becomes so much heavier than Page Rank or Domain Authority. This leads
us to believe that it would be more beneficial in the long run to post
content with links to your website to sites with low authority and low
PR but highly relevant to your niche as opposed to posting on
non-relevant high authority and high PR sites that have no relevancy
whatsoever. Besides, if you really think about it, you will realize that
the PR of a site or page naturally improves through traffic,
syndication and engagement. So, with just a little work, you can
actually have quality backlinks on relevant sites with decent PR.
Focus on Generating Traffic Not SEO Juice
Google has already changed the game in a way where the value of
backlinks has become overrated. The way it looks nowadays, Google wants
you to build links that will genuinely get you visitors as opposed to
building links only for the SEO value of the link. Some experts
speculate that Google will roll out future updates where traffic quality
will become more valuable than backlink value in determining rankings.
This line of thinking is actually aligned with the whole movement
towards social sharing and syndication.
So, what does this mean? Simply put, just shift to building links
that will get you more traffic and focus on that. Syndicate your links
on social media instead of building all those forum and Web 2.0 profile
links that many people don’t pay attention to. Be active on forums
instead of just spamming them with hundreds of dummy profile links
created with SEO software. Post content on sites that is relevant to
your niche and syndicate it. Use videos to attract and drive traffic to
your website (YouTube is a good platform for that). This type of mindset
actually helps you to be less dependent on Google for traffic, and will
make your site more adaptable should Google fully shift to this kind of
ranking system.
Stop Purchasing Links
Buy a backlink from a relevant site with high PR? Sure, you will get a
good boost in the SERPs. No question about that. However, eventually
Google will catch on and penalize those sites because chances are, if
they sold a backlink to you, they will sell to others. The high PR site
will later end up with a high amount of OBL or outbound lLinks, which
Google will view as spammy. They will penalize that site and the
websites linked to it. Drop this tactic now and remain safe come 2013
and beyond.
Anchor Links Naturally
The age of the keyword-oriented link building strategy is almost
over. Google wants your backlinks to appear natural and not forced or
spammy. This means over-optimizing your backlinks over a select few
keyword anchors is not a good idea anymore. Google wants to see more
backlinks in the form of raw URLs and your brand name as this is the
natural and organic way a link is shared online. Don’t worry. As long as
the keywords you want to rank high for are properly inserted into the
content on your site, you will be all right.
Don’t get me wrong – the occasional use of keywords as anchor texts
for your backlinks still works nicely. Just minimize it to about 20 or
30 percent of your overall link profile leaving the remainder reserved
for natural anchors like your URL and your brand or site name.
Conclusion
By now, you can probably see a trend forming. Google’s future thrust
is to rank websites based on traffic. The more traffic your website is
able to generate organically through mediums other than the SERPs, the
better your rankings will be. Yes, it seems a bit weird but that is what
many think Google’s nerds are hinting at. So, for 2013, focus on that
and not on the traditional way of link building.
Mark Marquardt,
Post from: SiteProNews
Five Tips for Link Building Success in 2013