It’s important to have a good understanding of the types of links that you can build, as well as understanding the technical aspects of links. This will give you a solid grounding so that you can assess the value of different types of links, and work out which ones are the best for you to pursue.
Let’s start with the basics when it comes to the technical side of links. We’ve already touched on the anatomy of a link, so let’s go into detail and learn a bit more.
The vast majority of links that are created online are done so without someone having asked for them. As mentioned before, they form a crucial basis for the web and connect websites together, so they are usually created because someone wants to be helpful and link to something that someone should look at.
When it comes to SEO, getting quality links that you didn’t ask for is the goal for all of us.
But it’s hard to achieve.
Big brands can do it relatively easily, but that’s because they’re a big brand. To use an extreme example, Apple doesn’t have to ask for links when it releases a new iPhone. Journalists, writers, and bloggers will write about it and link to Apple because, well, it’s the iPhone.
Not all of us are so lucky!
For the rest of us, these kinds of links are often generated over time because you’ve made your product and/or website content link worthy and it’s gotten the attention of enough people, some of whom have the ability to link to it. It isn’t impossible to do this, you just need a very strong focus on creating something that is so, so good that people can’t help but link to it.
These are often the links that will stand the test of time and be valuable to you long after the link is placed.
If you can do this, you relieve a lot of pressure on yourself when it comes to manual outreach and promotion of your website.
These types of links can carry the same weight as editorial links that you didn’t ask for, but come with the slight downside that you have to work hard for them and go get them. For example, you may create an industry survey and promote it to journalists who find the insights interesting enough to write about and link to. This is an example of an editorially given link, but you’ve actively promoted the content to the journalist.
Not only do you need something that is link worthy enough and able to grab the attention of the people that you’re promoting it to, but you need to be able to find the right audience for that content and promote it in the right way. We’ll talk more about how to do this later.
While not always the case, these types of links are often from sources that are of a low quality and, generally, are the ones that Google does not want to count. This is because they’re created by you, and you’re effectively endorsing yourself, which isn’t what Google is looking for when figuring out which websites deserve to rank best.
Due to these links not being editorially given, they inherently carry less weight than the other types of links. In the past, they’ve been useful for some SEOs working on certain websites, but you should use great caution in their implementation now. Many techniques like these are the ones that have been targeted by Google over the years and websites have been penalized for overdoing it.
A few examples may be:
Blog comments that are not moderated
Press releases with over-optimized anchor text
Article directories
Guest post signatures with over-optimized anchor text
Advertorials
Embeddable widgets
Infographic embeds
User profile pages
Guestbooks
Forum signatures
Directories that are not moderated
The types of links you choose to pursue with your strategy should depend on your existing link profile, but in general, you should avoid links that aren’t editorially given. Instead, you should focus on the tactics that will give you editorial links that add value to your website and business.
"We track the number of links earned, the type of links, and the Domain Authority of those links and differentiate between the links that we earned through pitching and the ones resulting organically.
We also keep tabs on nofollow links and co-citation links (which we define as links to the coverage of our content rather than the content itself), because we believe all of these are signals of authority to Google."
There is an attribute that can sometimes be applied to links called "nofollow". If added, you won’t notice any difference if you're a user. But, if you look at the code of the link, it will look slightly different:
Note the addition of rel="nofollow". This tells Google not to pass any PageRank across this link to the target URL. Effectively, you're telling Google not to trust this link and to discount it from consideration. Therefore, it shouldn’t help the target URL to rank any better (though Google may still use it — more on this below.) This is different from other links that are often referred to as “follow” links. Note that “follow” is not a link attribute, it’s more of a colloquial way of describing links that pass PageRank.
The main reason a site might use nofollow relates to scenarios in which that site lacks total control over the links that are added to its pages. In other words, they don't want to show Google a vote of confidence when they don't know whether or not they actually are confident. This is more common than you'd expect — here are a few examples of types of websites that use nofollow often on external links:
Forum posts
Blog comments
Guest book comments
Editable Wiki pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
Yahoo! Answers
Quora
Guest post signatures
Users can freely add links to each of these places, and because of their size, it isn't really practical to moderate every single one of those links. So, in order to deter link spammers from taking advantage of a site's PageRank, the site will often choose to apply the nofollow attribute to all links posted by other users.
Another use for the nofollow attribute is for advertisers to use it on links that have been paid for. So, if you buy an advertising banner on a website that links to you, Google says that the nofollow attribute should be added so that they know not to pass any PageRank across that link. The idea here is that your organic search results shouldn't benefit from buying advertisements that include links on other websites.
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In the past, this meant that links with the nofollow attribute applied to them would not have an impact on organic search results — they were basically ignored. This didn’t mean they were completely useless. As we’ve talked about, there are other benefits to links, such as someone clicking through to your website, which is still the case with a nofollow link.
This position changed slightly in 2019 when Google announced that they would be widening how they interpret links with the nofollow attribute, as well as introducing two new attributes:
rel="sponsored" — this could be used by webmasters to signal to Google that a link was placed because it was paid for, such as an advert or advertorial
rel="ugc" — this could be used by webmasters who run things like forums or within blog comments
Alongside introducing the two new attributes, Google said that they would treat all three attributes as “hints” about which links to include or exclude as part of organic search rankings. Effectively, Google went from saying that nofollow links would not count at all, to saying that they may count.
In terms of how this affects your work, it shouldn’t be something that you obsess over because there is value beyond these attributes. For example, if you get a chance to place a link on a high-traffic, super relevant website that may send you customers, you wouldn’t say no to this because the link will be nofollow.
Having said that, you do need to be aware of the attributes and do your best to build a variety of links to your website. Where possible, prioritize your efforts so that you’re targeting plenty of websites who are able to give links that are likely to pass value.
If you’re looking to quickly identify whether a link uses the nofollow attribute or not, you can do this using the MozBar, which will automatically highlight these types of links on any page.
There are also links that may get you into trouble with search engines if they’re generated using tactics that fall outside of their guidelines. Major search engines have teams of people whose focus is to find websites that manipulate their search results with underhanded tactics. Here, we’ll talk about different approaches to link building from a risk perspective and give you some examples of different tactics.
Safe link building tactics are those that are very low-risk to carry out and usually fall well within the webmaster guidelines laid out by Google and Bing. Using these tactics means that you stand very little chance of running into problems with the search engines when it comes to losing traffic because of a penalty.
A few examples of safe tactics that are within Webmaster Guidelines are:
Creating your own unique, insightful, and quality content
Building a genuine, engaged community that interacts with your website and each other
Promoting your website to relevant people in a genuine, personal way by writing personalized messages
Using approaches that are scaled, e.g. emailing ten individual people who are relevant to your message, rather than spamming 1,000 with a generic message
Pros include not having to worry about getting yourself into trouble with algorithmic or manual spam penalties from the search engines. These tactics usually work best for real users, too, and can help build long-term assets that are strong and unlikely to disappear overnight.
Cons include having to focus on the long-term goal rather than short-term gains. These tactics can sometimes take some time to have a big effect on your traffic and revenue because they are less aggressive.
These tactics seek to exploit loopholes in the search engine algorithms and rank websites higher than they actually deserve to be. They’re often explicitly called out in Webmaster Guidelines as tactics that aren’t approved and may result in action taken against websites that use them.
A few examples are:
Buying links: paying someone to link to you
Injecting hidden links into a website you do not own by exploiting a security flaw
Overuse of keyword-driven anchor text in link building, especially if done at scale
These tactics don't work in the long term, because the search engines are always looking to stop them from happening. This means that traffic and rankings can drop pretty much overnight if you're caught using these tactics, so we strongly advise steering clear.
You’re building a business online, and chances are that you want to compete online for many years to come. If you want to do this, then you need to carefully choose the tactics you're willing to use and make an assessment of how risky those tactics are. As with any business (offline included), there are tactics that carry a certain amount of risk with them. For example, an offline business may carry out some kind of PR stunt to try and build awareness of the brand. The inherent risk is that a stunt can misfire, negatively affecting the brand and deterring potential customers.
As a business, you need to weigh the risks and benefits of any marketing activity.
This is why white-hat strategies are so important to a website: they pose the least amount of risk and are very unlikely to lead to you being hit with a penalty from Google. Also, just as importantly, white-hat strategies focus on adding true value to the Internet, your industry, and your customers' experience. If you want to build a loyal customer base that not only buys from you but happily recommends you to friends, you need to focus on tactics that give the customer a great user experience. Providing them with genuine, useful content is one way to do this.
What works today may not work tomorrow, and where might that leave you? Many spammers will replace their former ways with other shady techniques, and the cycle starts again. The problem is that this is not good for most businesses. Most businesses can't afford to take risks with their websites, or constantly be looking over their shoulders, waiting for the day the search engines finally catch up with them.
If you contrast this with tactics that fall outside of Webmaster Guidelines, you know that you're building for the long term, and while some efforts will yield better results than others, you won't need to be looking over your shoulder or worrying every time you hear there has been a Google update.