Todays Link Building Strategy

[dee]

I have a geo that i'm developing, and wondering what the best way forward is these days with link building strategies ? How do some of the experienced members on here approach it these days if you don't mind sharing some mojo ? Obviously gone are the days where you just throw a bucket load of rubbish links at a site and it'll stick.


For instance. Specific question. If I was looking to catch a domain that might help, should I be looking at amount of domain referrals over quantity of links ? And how about trust flow etc ?

Any advice appreciated.

 

[Edwin]

Does your geo have obvious competitors? Because that would be the place to start, assuming that what you've developed is genuinely as good as or better than them.

Armed with the list of competing sites, you can reverse engineer their backlink profile and try and identify likely candidate sites that might link to you too.

As potential candidates go, you're looking for good quality sites that seem to have been updated reasonably recently. If in the specific context in which they link to competitor(s) it would make sense for them to link to you too, it's well worth dropping them a brief email to see if they'd be willing to.

It's probably as elusive as a unicorn, but the ideal niche is one with lots of sites competing badly for it, AND lots of other sites linking to those badly-competing ones. Because then you can strut in as bigger and better than the status quo, and start grabbing those links and mentions.

All of the above is predicated on having a high quality site to begin with - if it's just a few pages of reheated Wikipedia content or similar, then forget it!

 

[dee]

Does your geo have obvious competitors? Because that would be the place to start, assuming that what you've developed is genuinely as good as or better than them.

Armed with the list of competing sites, you can reverse engineer their backlink profile and try and identify likely candidate sites that might link to you too.

As potential candidates go, you're looking for good quality sites that seem to have been updated reasonably recently. If in the specific context in which they link to competitor(s) it would make sense for them to link to you too, it's well worth dropping them a brief email to see if they'd be willing to.

It's probably as elusive as a unicorn, but the ideal niche is one with lots of sites competing badly for it, AND lots of other sites linking to those badly-competing ones. Because then you can strut in as bigger and better than the status quo, and start grabbing those links and mentions.

All of the above is predicated on having a high quality site to begin with - if it's just a few pages of reheated Wikipedia content or similar, then forget it!

Thanks @Edwin . Makes sense

 

[Edwin]

BTW, the material's not been updated in over 10 years (naughty of me, I know!) but you might still find some of the info on http://www.incominglinks.com/ of benefit. If there's a directory that's in your niche but it's dead, you could try http://www.archive.org/ to see if they still have a copy. Directories can be very useful not just for getting a link, but for tracking down other competing/similar sites so that you can then examine their link profiles.

 

[DomainManage]

Does the Yahoo directory thing still carry juice - and DMOZ.. I remember.

 

[Edwin]

Does the Yahoo directory thing still carry juice - and DMOZ.. I remember.

Nope. But the archived versions of Yahoo Directory can be a good place to hunt around for once-established sites that are also gone. Their backlink profile can be most interesting.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/dir.yahoo.com

 

[Carlos]

Does the Yahoo directory thing still carry juice - and DMOZ.. I remember.

Directories are so unused now that you haven't noticed that Yahoo directory closed about two years ago.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-closes-211784

I think nowadays a DMOZ link doesn't have that extra boost that it used to, but still counts. The problem is that listing reviews can take forever.