5 PENALTY PROOF LINK BUILDING TACTICS

Backlink building is a fundamental aspect of all SEO strategies, as a means to increase the site’s domain authority and make it easier to rank for almost any phrase. The best approach to build enough number of links without receiving a penalty from Google is incorporating a long term link building tactic that is free of penalties.

Link building is without a doubt one of the most frustrating and time-consuming tasks in SEO strategies. The first thing that one may ask is: is it worth the effort? The answer is a definite “Yes”. Lots of SEO studies clearly show how backlinks correlate with rankings much more than most other factors. Furthermore, even representatives from Google have admitted that their algorithms rely heavily on backlinks. So, yes, it is clear that having a link building tactic, despite how frustrating and time-consuming it is, is very important.

So, how do you build a penalty proof link building tactic that is long term and effective? The first general rule is to look for sites that have been around for while enough, that have actual value for users, a good amount of traffic, and most importantly, that are actually related to your industry. These sites can be found using normal searches in Google, with an aggregated news feed, or by analyzing your competitors’ link profiles with any free tool available out there. You should gather a list of all of these potential sources and then start to make requests for your links.

The second important step is to post as a real, ordinary person. If Google suspects for any reason that the link has been built through automation or by some scheme in order to improve your rank, you will be penalized. There’s actually no trick for this step: just make sure you post as a normal person, and don’t try to make it look like it is there in order to improve user experience.

The third step that we recommend for designing a penalty-proof link building tactic is to diversify the strategy. Try to include all the possible variations in every part of the process. First of all, try to diversify the sources. If you’ve managed to gather a lot of potential sources to pick from, use it as an advantage and change the sources on a regular basis. Try to never post lots of links of the same source at once. Secondly, try to diversify timing. It’s not a good idea to post all the links one same day of the week, or even one specific day of the month (that’s even worse!). If you manage to spread your links randomly in terms of time, and on random days, it will look more natural.

Even if you follow the guidelines mentioned above, it isn’t enough to guarantee that you won’t have a penalty. If you’re looking to keep your strategy’s quality and be able to catch potential problems way in advance, the best thing you can do is to audit your backlink profile regularly. The best way to do this is to consult a link-based search tool such as Open Site Explorer. There you will have the chance of seeing all links out there that are pointing back towards your site, and then analyze them for diversity authority, and appropriateness. You can ask the webmaster to remove links if you find them questionable or irrelevant.

Would you like some more detailed information about how to design a penalty proof building tactic? You can find a complete and detailed guide here.