There are different kinds of links in the internet. Different methods to acquire them. Different attributes that go with them. There are links that we look down on – and these are the links that I would like to talk about in this entry. What makes these links worthwhile?
Nofollow Links
- Downside: Nofollow links do not pass link juice like how a normal link does. It simply makes a backlink useless in terms of helping you rank in Google. I’ve already written previous articles about nofollow links and about how I think it is a waste of time investing in these kinds of links.
- Bright Side: The original design and purpose of a link is to let people travel throughout the web. It is intended for traffic and not for search engine rankings. So what if a nofollowed link doesn’t pass link juice? If it gets the right people in your site, then it sure as heck does help!
- Also, nofollow links still pass on trust juice – which increases your webpage’s trust rank. It is still useful. Sure, direct dofollow links does all these and more, but it doesn’t mean that you have to disregard all nofollow links altogether.
Blog Comments
- Downside: Blog commenting has been used, abused and trampled on by spammers. It has a bad ring to it because it is the playing field of automated linkbuilding tools and black hat spammers. Most blog comments are nofollowed and don’t pass on link juice. Rarely would you find good websites that allow good link juice to flow within their blog commenting sections.
- Bright Side: Commenting wisely on a good blog gives you recognition to the community of people following that certain blog. You get to showcase your knowledge and expertise and at the same time help out people who are looking for information about a certain topic. It leverages your namesake as a blogger and as an expert in your niche.
- There are also some blogs that allow dofollow comment links. These are generous blogs which are read and visited frequently by people and by linkbuilders alike. It works both ways for them – give and take. It’s just how life works.
Reciprocal Links
- Downside: Link exchange became popular a long time ago. There were lots of websites willing to trade links even with unrelated websites. They didn’t care – most websites had a dirty links page where they placed all their reciprocal links in. This dirtied the idea of reciprocal linking.
- Bright Side: Organic reciprocal linking ain’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, if the website you are pointing to has articles you deem valuable and informative, you can sure as heck link to that. And since you do, chances are, the website will collaborate with you in a humanly fashion that they will also reference an article of yours that they find interesting and worthwhile.
- There are tons of valuable information that can be found in every site. You just have to find those gold nuggets and link to them. Chances are, the owner of those golden nuggets will notice you and perhaps link back to you too.
Directories
- Downside: There are tons and tons of directory websites in the internet. Most of them are pretty useless since there are search engines to automatically serve you the most relevant results in the web anyway. Almost all directories accept any site passed on to them just to rise above on data with another directory. They chunk in so many sites that they chunk out so many links – therefore giving your site little to no link juice at all.
- Bright Side: The good news is that not all directories are crap. There are some that really filter out their data. If you go through all the crap directories, chances are you just might get to find a certain directory that would give you a good link juice boost.
- Some directories give out good traffic – these are the ones worth investing in. Choose the ones that don’t have too much outgoing links, otherwise you’re just another ant in the anthill. All in all, you have to be the one to go through the pile of directories and sift out the best ones. Directories aren’t altogether useless. Most of them are, but not all.
Unrelated sites & anchor text
- Downside: Anything that is not related to your website won’t help in ranking you – either the website itself is unrelated or the anchor text that they used for your link is unrelated. Since these sites don’t give you link juice, what’s the use?
- Bright Side: Remember that search engines get suspicous too. If your links are too head-on and are too perfect to be true, you just might arouse the curiosity of the search engine’s spam team. Search engines look for the most relevant site with natural backlinks.
- If your backlinks are too perfect, it just might attract unwanted search engine attention.
These links are generally looked down on when it comes to the SEO community. You definitely shouldn’t use up valuable time trying to invest in these kinds of links. But if ever you do, or if ever you have slack time that you want to invest in trial and error, keep these things in mind.
There’s a bright side to every link. Even if these links doesn’t help you rank, it helps you in some other way that you might have not considered.
Tips for Keeps: Always look at the bright side :)
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About Sean
Great post! I get, like I’m sure you do, people trying to spam links on my blog everyday, but it’s not a huge problem since I have to approve them anyhow.
Cheers!
Hey Steven!
Thank you :) and yes – that’s why we have to moderate each and every comment nowadays. Can’t be too careful
I agree with the thrust of this article. There are positives and negatives for most link categories. It is always good to remember the search engines know you can’t always control inbound links so they are likely to be generous in their interpretation of them. To paraphrase the Monty Python song … they always look on the bright side of links. Search engines may become concerned when they can’t explain why the numbers change rapidly.
The issue in link acquisition is always effort vs reward. How much effort is required to attract the links? If you acquire some of these lower value links as a by-product of acquiring the higher value links then you can be very satisfied. If the core of your strategy is based around generating quality content that will naturally attract links then it’s hard to go wrong.
Hi Sean, I couldn’t agree with you more! When it comes to the word “do” and “no” follow, it’s very confusing in terms of link building because you might think it is useless to create backlinks with nofollow compare to dofollow but as a matter of fact in my own experiment with nofollow, i’m still find it useful for traffic as long as you know how to handle it properly. Remeber that facebook and twtter use nofollow links but still a lot of business establishments use them because they build natural traffic link building process as google saw it.
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I see so many comments about the benefits and disbenfits of nofollow and other less favourable links.
Your analysiis makes sense to me for the long term as the mix of links itself will work like a bit of insurance agaisnt a day Google might start to look at backlinks even more closely.
An element of ‘scattergun’ may help avoid the risk of being seen a gaming the system.
So just avoiding real trash seems to be a good and sensjble strategy.
This is probably the most user friendly and understandable explanation of the different types of links and linkbuilding I have yet come across. Kudos, my friend. It;s such a pity that all the “BlackHat” strtegies that are available on the net have eroded the value and influence of a lot of great link building strategies, purely to make a quick buck.
Great post Sean and you are spot on about everything. I particularly agree with what you say in Section 4 about directories. I have recently been working on two new projects for a client who has never pursued any backlinks via directories. Yes, there are a lot of crap directories out there. In fact, most of them are crap. And even worse than those are the “lists” that you find when you search for high PageRank directories in Google, etc. They are almost all inaccurate and outdated, often saying a directory has a PageRank of 7 when it’s really only a 3.
I got so frustrated when I was weeding through these lists that last week I made my own list. You can check it out here: http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/03/high-pagerank-web-directory-listings.html
I double-checked PageRank and pricing information for each directory on the list. I hope that’s helpful to some of you who had the same frustrations!