Jane Copland - Link Building for highly competitive markets

Preparing Link Building Campaigns for

Competitive Markets

Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing| a4uexpo Europe, Munich, May 2010

About this Session

I’m Jane Copland

I work at Ayima, an Internet marketing agency in London that specialises in organic SEO

Prior to that, I worked at SEOmoz in the

United States.

This session is about planning link building campaigns

Q&A starts now

This shouldn’t be me standing lecturing for an hour!

Jane Copland | Ayima Search Marketing | a4u Munich, May 2010

Five Most Common Link Building Mistakes

1. Building links too quickly

2. Building too many links to competitive internal pages

3. Creating an over-optimised backlink profile

4. Not creating a diverse backlink profile

5. Focusing entirely on one method of link building

6. Not thinking of Google as if it were human


This morning, I’ll cover the following…

More pre-link building research

1. Researching a site’s existing backlinks

2. What to do if a site’s previous owners were spammers

3. How much can you rely on a site’s old links?


I will also cover…

Building Links Too Quickly


How do you get Google tocredit your site with the benefitof all these new links but notnotice the unnatural rate of growth?

If this sort of growth did happennaturally, you don’t need to worry inmost circumstances.

Building too many competitivedeep links


It’s usually unnatural if too many competitive links point to internal pages and not enough point to the home page / root of the domain.

There are notable exceptions, but most commercial sites aren’t an exception.

Creating an Over-OptimisedBacklink Profile


This is not the backlink profilefor creditcard.com.

Source: SEOmoz Linkscape

The first “brand mention” is the34th most popular anchor text.

Smaller sites usually make this mistake far more often than bigger brands.

Do this instead…


This is the backlink profile of egg.com. Egg.com is the highest ranking root domain (not domain.com/file.html) for [credit cards] in the UK.

Source: SEOmoz Linkscape

The best part is, this is easier to create! Why? Because it’s what happens “naturally”.

Links Domains IPs Networks5426 548 527 4832356 529 492 456654 207 192 186136 111 109 107582 88 85 80203 69 68 6662 49 48 4794 48 46 45136 45 45 43

Creating a diverse backlink profile


People tend to look at this column Google tends to look at this column

“Diversity” covers a range of different things…

Site-wide links have their place, but you can’t rely on them for link building

Google also notices when a large number of you links come from sites hosted on the same server as your site.

Use multiple methods of link building


Relying on only one method can severely limit your success

The most successful link building campaigns make use of every avenue available to them.

Who created Google?


Who works at Google?

(Actually, they probably don’t. But let’s pretend)

So who does Google think like?

It thinks like a person. What you can’t fool a person with, you may not be able to fool Google with.

Link building differs depending on the domain


How you build links and what type of links they are depends on what has been done tothe domain in the past.

Backlink analysis is vital BEFORElink building commences .

As with types of link building, use all the options and resources available for backlink analysis.

Oh, crap.


The person responsible for building links to the site before you was an idiot. Some ofthese are yours

Or maybe a competitor bought loads of awful links for your site?

1. Ask for removal! Although some people will ask for money to do this.2. Getting nowhere? You may find that Google has already discounted the links.3. Find yourself penalised / not ranking as well as you should and think it’s these links’

fault? File for reconsideration.

This is not an admission ofguilt! However, be aware thatsomeone might look at the site closely…

How much can you rely ona site’s old links?


Google wants to be able to “reset the clock” for a domain when it sees thatit has been purchased by a new company or individual.

Google is a registrar and thus has access to domains’ histories.

If you haven’t been doing so already…


Please start asking questions!

Please look more interested than these guys. Please.

No hands up:This makes me sad

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Jane Copland - Link Building for highly competitive markets

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