Imagine a steadily growing link profile as your ranking foundation. Imagine not having to worry about link building, Google’s algorithms or penalties. You’re on one such website right now. We receive thousands of free, contextual, organic links each year. A proof that what we do for our clients works for us too.
Paying an agency for link building is no longer a thing. There are many reasons for this. Web pages of value receive numerous inbound links naturally and search engines use that as one of many measures of that page’s popularity. Link building companies are paid to simulate those signals in hope that a search engine will mistake an ordinary website for a great one and rank it higher than it deserves. This used to work well for many years but we’ve reached the point where risk outweighs the reward and Google’s algorithms keep improving their link scheme detection capabilities.
The problem with this model is the dependence on the supplier of links. Once the relationship ends, your link acquisition stops as well, allowing your competition to quickly catch up. This is if you don’t receive unnatural link penalty from Google in the first place.
The links which are easy enough to get are also easily replicable. Your competitors can scan and copy your link profile, wiping out all your competitive advantage.
Natural links typically occur as a result of a combined effort of various marketing activities including outreach, SEO, SEM, branding, PR, advertising, email, events and social all with content as a central item. By focusing on link building only you may be missing the opportunity to create something of value instead of tricking search engines to believe that you provide value.
We have conducted extensive link research in order to discover how and why people link on the web naturally. Our findings show that editorially given links differ from links created for SEO purposes, no matter how clever they may be. Natural links are typically based on a relationship, engagement or value of your content and are hard to replicate by competition.
The best links are the ones you didn’t ask for.
John told us about an internal discussion at Google about link building and added that they understand that communication between webmasters is a perfectly normal thing, but he believes that hiring an agency with a link building team to purely email people and ask for links is not the best idea.
“It’s not the case that I’d have a link building team that would go out and email everyone to try to get links to my clients websites”.
John believes agencies should find the right balance when promoting their clients online.
“I think there’s some middle ground there where finding the right balance makes sense.”
The above is our guiding principle, a common-sense approach to online promotion. Our primary purpose is to make you and your brand stand out as being extraordinary. Links, like many other signals will follow organically as a by-product of your popularity and not as our primary deliverable.
Duane Forrester, senior product manager at Bing explains how links should happen:
“You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from.”
He doesn’t deny the fact that links are a valuable ranking signal but sees them as a part of a bigger picture:
“Links are part of the bigger picture. You want them, but you want them to be natural. If an engine sees you growing them naturally, you’re rewarded with rankings.”
Duane warns against link manipulation stating that any link which hasn’t been earned organically may attract a penalty:
“If they see you growing them unnaturally, you’re rewarded with penalties.”
First step is to learn about your business as much as we can and explore and document all possible opportunities available to you.
Once we gain better insight into your business and the industry we form a plan of action which involves two components:
High quality links contribute to more than just your rankings:
We believe in working smarter in order to provide the best value for your investment and have implemented our own practices and methodologies to maximise our performance.
