Link Building vs. Straight Earning Links Discussion

BobGW

Hello,

I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content.

I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry?

Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach.

But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome.

Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing.

Would love to hear your experiences either way.

Thanks.

sarahwalsh

We highly recommend you earn backlinks; our copywriters spend hundreds of hours writing articles about garden buildings.

We now have our business on page one in Bath, England, because we built quality links, and written white hat blog posts.

NgEF

Hi Bob,

I've gone through the process of building and optimizing quite a few different websites and I've found that the best backlinks come from good content. I've also done paid (supposed to be a no-no) and outreach link building, so I think I've got a good perspective across all the different approaches.

My personal opinion is that at the very launch of a website, beyond just indexing and on-site optimization, it's a 100% must to have the site linked to on a few good directories or other sites that are connected. For every single site I've built, I've seen fantastic results with this initial push. I believe that all SEOs have a little cache of backlinks stashed away and we all use them sparingly whenever we need to give a new site that first push. With this little bit of a push, I usually see my sites begin to rank within 4 to 5 days on less competitive keywords. To be honest, I don't think that this initial paying for backlinks is an ethical issue or one that can be classified as 'black hat SEO'. I've found it practiced at the top level agencies and it's also something that's recommended in Rand Fishkin's book 'Art of SEO'.

After the initial launch, then comes the real work. How do we get quality backlinks consistently?

Reaching out to other webmasters in the same verticals has had some fantastic results for me as well. I typically do an outreach program that is personal and not a template-based spam fest. Oddly enough, I've had these outreach attempts even grow into marketing partnerships, and even business partnerships. I find that if you reach out authentically to other webmasters or business owners, they tend to respond much better.

I've competed in large markets and also small ones, and I've found that it can actually be a problem for smaller market segments or industries, that you run out of other sites to reach out to. In my previous startup, I found that the source of quality backlink partners ran out after 3 or 4 months of research. At that point, I set up google alerts for specific keywords, and stopped my outreach program and decided to focus on content creation instead.

This was where it really began to pay off in buckets.

For that business and as a startup, I was able to create backlinks from not relevant sites, but even government organizations looking to highlight a particular type of business (educational startups in this case). Creating content like infographics and how-to articles was an extremely good investment as well. We publicized what we deemed to be good content out across our social media, and I found that these continued to generate backlinks even years later. The main reason why anyone would want to link to your site, is that you have something interesting or useful for them to share. I even used myself as 'content', giving interviews to online news portals and blogs, always asking if they would kindly do me a favor and link to my site as part of the article. We also got lucky with one of our seasonal articles. This particular article was shared on our social media and a reporter at the local newspaper came across it. That eventually led to an offline article published about the company, and since offline content eventually gets republished on their site, it also led to a backlink from an incredibly reputable source.

I think that the reason why most SEOs tend to focus on paid or outreach programs is simply because of the amount of time it takes. Writing an email takes at most 10 minutes, while research, writing and creating the graphics for a good piece of content (video, written or otherwise), would take days and not have an immediate payoff.

All said and done, I feel that a solid linkbuilding program should be multi-faceted and not be overly dependent on just one aspect. If you depend solely on outreach as your main source of backlinks, then what happens when you no longer have time to write emails? Eventually, you will still need to focus on content creation.

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