Link Building

International Link Building Tactics & Strategies

I wanted to start off with a quick overview of international SEO to make sure that you start your international link building campaign with a solid foundation.

Make sure to target a specific country instead of a language with your international SEO campaign. The reasons for this are that countries may use differing terms to describe the same thing (for example a “pickle” in the US is a “gherkin” in the UK). Also, countries have specific indexes in Google as opposed to languages. I have been noticing that Google is putting allot of emphasis on localized results and this seems to be especially true for International SERPs. A few things to consider when targeting a specific country are as follows;

1. Get the specific Country Code Top Level Domain (CCTLD) of your target country
2. Get your site hosted in the target country
3. Localize your site for your target country (instead of translate)
4. Make sure your URLs are written in the target Language
5. Get links from sites located in your target country.

Having links from sites that are located in your target country is a great way to show Google that you are highly relevant for queries within the country.

When validating an international link, check to see where the site is hosted. Also look at the CCTLD of the potential link. You should also consider getting links from sites that are written in the same language as the language spoken in the target country.

International link building is very much like traditional link building with the added element of focusing on getting geo-targeted links. All of the major link building elements are the same, focus on quality over quantity as well as relevant and authoritative links. However, you also have to add links from within the target country into the equation. As you may have guessed, this greatly reduces the opportunities to get links. Since the options are so constrained, sometimes international link building will utilize some otherwise outdated link building tactics.

Do a backlink analysis on your international competitors that are ranking ahead of you and start looking at their quality links. Define which of those links are from sites within the country and look at each site to determine if it is a viable place to get links. This will often reveal social media sites, blogs and forums to comment on, directories, article sites and many other local sites to get links from. This also shows what your competitors are up to from a link building stand-point and allows you to assess your chances of catching up or surpassing them. One such analysis that I did recently, revealed that my client’s competitor had a significant amount of reciprocal links. So this otherwise outdated tactic still seems to be helping sites rank number 1 in international indexes.

The use of local directories is a great way to acquire geo-targeted links. Many times you will find these through your analysis on your competitors’ links. Also get Links from other countries but in the language from the country you are targeting. (So links from Argentina going to a Mexican site.) A few sites that I like are http://cv.com which is hosted in France, (I actually found this site from this blog and noticed that it was hosted in France.) I also like http://www.folkd.com which is a social bookmarking site hosted in Germany.

Next, get high authoritative links from the same places you would get links from if you were doing standard link building whenever possible. Some authoritative directories have specific regional areas like http://botw.org/top/Regional/Countries/ http://www.ezilon.com/ http://www.dmoz.org/World/ . The yahoo directory has a regional area but I would suggest submitting your site to the country specific yahoo directory i.e. (http://fr.dir.yahoo.com/) sometimes it’s free which is different from the US specific yahoo directory which will run you $199 a year or so.

This about covers the basics, I hope this post is helpful.

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Post by David Isaac Lewallen of CybernautSEO

If you would like to learn more I write a blog focusing on international SEO and link building issues. Feel free to contact me there regarding any specific questions or follow on twitter; I also work at BusinessOnLine which is an enterprise level SEO agency.

Tagged international link building, Link Building, seo

Create Resources For Links In Your Industry

12 Comments

May 7 | Link Building | Ryan Clark

For those of you in an industry that is a little behind the times when it comes to marketing online, then it’s time to take advantage. I’ve had a big client that unfortunately started to run out of quality places to get related links. This gave me the idea to plan out a long term strategy that would help grow his business as well as bring in quality links. Some of the options I’ve covered here but who doesn’t like a nice little list to go over?

So my client has his site and I’ve been link building on it for 5 months which has netted us just over 300 quality links from related sites, social media and through linkbait. This has proved to be effective enough to destroy the competition and make it tough for anyone coming up to catch up. My client didn’t want to stop there even though I reached the ranking goals, and me wanting to make more money I obliged.

His site was just a usual static html site with no social aspects, and defintely no blog. Since his industry was void of any sort of social media site, or industry resource, I suggested we create 4 seperate sites over the next 6 months. This would allow him to do a few things like have strong links back to his company, get more exposure and have assets that are worth something in the long run.

So a lot of this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of you, but it is something to think about. It requires a lot of work and then the waiting for things to kick off in the coming months. So how many of you have gone out and done something like this? Has it worked out to your benefit? If you’re still wondering what resources I’m talking about I was talking about these:

Social Video Site
Web/Business Directory
Blog
Industry Podcast
Industry Forum
Classifieds

These are just a few examples of seperate sites that can be created on a seperate IP or server. Obviously we wouldn’t put all this effort into it just for a link, but it gives you such an advantage over your industry, and you can control the links going to competitors because you’re the webmaster. So again, nothing ground breaking here but just something to think about if you’re in a quiet niche.

Tagged Link Building, marketing, social media marketing

Dangers Of Nofollow On Whiteboard Friday

9 Comments

May 1 | Internal Link Building | Ryan Clark

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Dangers of Nofollow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Tagged Internal Link Building, Link Building, rand fishkin, seomoz, whiteboard friday

Content For Links & Go Compare

6 Comments

April 30 | Link Building, News | Ryan Clark

There has been a lot of talk lately about companies offering content for links and there are people on all sides of the fence, including myself. I just read an excellent article by Linktank(must read blog btw) entitled The Content For Links Debate, and I completely agree with what he has to say in regards to going about this tactic. A lot of the chatter has been revolving around the Go Compare fiasco which has seen them up and down in Google.

If you haven’t heard about it, then let me fill you in quickly. They were basically sending out mass emails saying they’ll write content for your site and include one simple link back to their website. This method can work out great but I can see how a lot of people didn’t like the way they went about things. Mass emailing a template to webmaster’s is not a great way of doing things. I however think that this is a great method of link building if done properly, and by properly I mean getting personal in each and every email. I also read that they were offering around 400 word articles as content, and to me this doesn’t come close to cutting it. If you’re wanting that link from the other site you’d best be writing at least 2000 words on something new and fresh, not rehashed. Spend the time doing the social media marketing to attract links to that content, which will in return pass on quality link juice.

Now it isn’t clear that they(Go Compare) received a penalty mainly because they bounced back quickly. If you’ve done link building in a tough niche you’ll know that your rankings will fluctuate all over the place. You also don’t want to be too aggressive going after one keyword because that’s going to get you notice and slapped.

I could go on and on about this subject but i’ll let you folks write me some comments with your thoughts. I’m also going to link to a bunch of great posts already talking about what I’ve covered here and then some. It’s a touchy subject, and link building is a mine field of an industry so it’s fun(hard?) to keep up on things.

How to Determine a Search Engine Penalty – Jonathan Stewart
Go Compare Penalized Again – Patrick Altoft
The Content For Links Debate – Linktank
Content For Links – Kieron Donoghue
Link Building In Ultra Competitive Niches – Red Cardinal

Tagged content for links, gocompare, google penalty, Link Building

Love.com At A Glance

1 Comments

April 30 | News | Ryan Clark

I wasn’t aware of Love.com until I read Aaron Wall’s post “Does Google Love.com Spam?” which lead me to peering into their backlink profile and more. Aaron is the man when it comes to pointing out the crazy things companies will do and AOL is redefining content scraping. Now most sites wouldn’t have lasted this long but when you’re AOL you have a little bit more sway that others. I don’t want to get into the ethics of it all, but instead take a peek at their backlink profile and how they’re abusing social media.

Love.com Backlinks:

So far they’re blistering along in the search engines with nearly 150,000 pages indexed in just Google. Aaron tweet’d that he’d give away some SEOBook prizes if anyone could guess the date this would start dropping, and honestly I’m not sure if this will happen quickly. Love.com is going to at least have a grace period mainly due to the age of their domain name, and when you see their backlink profile you’ll shit a brick. Before I even ran them through LinkVoodoo’s Backlink Analyzer I expected to see a lot of AOL owned sites providing most of the juice. Well as of today I’m seeing just over 1000 backlinks with 93% of them being dofollow which is quite rare in a backlink profile, but I was right in guessing most of them would be from an AOL owned site. Also as expected, since most of the sections are on their own subdomain a lot of the links are coming from those.This also means that 93% of the links are pointing to their root index.

So far this has been working out in their favor and I can see the pagerank is flowing around to a lot of the Love.com subdomains. So all in all despite the crazyness this site is going to bring out in the SEO world it is worth the behind the scenes look at how you can manipulate the search engines. I’ve attached the .csv file from out private beta version of the LinkVoodoo backlink analyzer in case you’re wondering how I’m getting reports. It will be out soon so don’t worry, we’re still testing and fixing some bugs so this report may not include all the backlinks but it will be damn close.

Download: Love.com Link Analysis

Love.com’s Twitter Usage:

Everyone is using Twitter these days and it didn’t take me long to see how Love.com was making use of it either. It’s a great way to get traffic, but they’re seemingly taking it to the next level. If you do a quick search for Love.com on Twitter you’ll see what’s going on here. Tons and tons of seperate Twitter accounts based on niche feeding in news from the site. It is too early to tell if this is working out great for them but it’s interesting none the less.

What do you folks think about this?

Love.com’s Alexa:

I know Alexa isn’t the best for measuring traffic volumes but it will do fine just to see how things are progressing so far. As you can see the Scraping + Domain Age + Link Profile is bringing in the traffic so far, but I can’t wait to see the results a few months from now. I think Aaron’s guessing game is a great idea and I think I’ll make my bid.

Tagged Link Building, love.com, scraping, twitter

Matt Cutts On Google’s Link: Command

8 Comments

March 25 | Link Building, Link Building Tools, Link Building Videos | Ryan Clark

I always see a lot of people asking about the link: command in Google and why it doesn’t show all your backlinks. Matt Cutts talks about that as well as some other interesting tidbits, and why Google has chosen to take that route.

Tagged google, Link Building, link:, matt cutts

Podcast Link Building And Marketing Resources

4 Comments

March 22 | Link Building | Ryan Clark

I know a few others have already posted on link building with your podcast, so I’ll try and present some new ideas as well go in depth into others. A lot of people have had great success with a podcast alone, but there is another obvious benefit, and that is the one way link.

I don’t really like the Odiogo method because you’re essentially cluttering the web with the same content, and no one really wants to listen to a digital voice either. If you do a podcast properly within a niche that you care about or already an authority in, then the listeners will flock to you. I used to do an audio podcast that was music related a few years ago and it lasted about 6 months. The one thing I learned was that it was hard to maintain updating on a regular basis.

If you do happen to be podcasting for your company, niche or blog then there’s no harm in building strong links while attracting more listeners. There have already been lists of places to submit your podcast for links so I’m going to cover a few less mentioned ones that have popped up in the past year, and as well some oldies but goodies.

Adding a podcast to your online web presence which adds more credibility and substance to your overall “web pie”. Adding media like this is a great way to jump ahead of other people within in your niche, and will no doubt help with your rankings. If you’d like to do more to become a strong web presence look into making your website mobile, or adding a forum which lets the world(and Google) know you mean business.

PodBean.com is one of the webs largest podcast directories that has been around for years thus packs a lot of link weight.Once you’ve signed up to PodBean, you can then setup your custom podcast page with your feed, some content and of course dofollow links within the profile. If you keep up a regular show schedule it will help immensely in getting your podcast page indexed and pass on the much needed link love.

BlogTalkRadio.com is a really cool site I frequent for personal pleasure, not just lurking around in the dark like most link builders. The site has been around for a couple of years now and has seen a lot of growth lately in traffic and users. You get your own profile here and they are of course indexed by the search engines, but you have to be an active podcaster for this to be worth your time. Your episode guides can also contain links to important things you mention in the show, and they’re dofollow.

PodcastPeople.com is new to me and I scoped it out hours before writing this post, which makes me one of those link builders lurking in the dark. This site offers a whole suite of amazing tools at your podcasting disposal. On top of getting a dofollow link within your profile, you get your own subdomain to go along with a very content rich podcast page. With your page you get a sweet audio player for your podcast, comments from users and of course archives. The site’s setup is allowing some great internal linking so the pagerank is being siphoned nicely.

MyPodcast.com has been around for a few years and is another great source to spread your podcast. The podcast pages are a little messy and remind me of Myspace, but regardless you can build up a strong page with your content. You can write essentially a blog post with each episode which can include dofollow links, and your sidebar has a place for links to your resources as well.

Podomatic.com has been listed in other people’s posts before but I’m going to mention it still because it is a great site to host your podcast on. There are a lot of active listeners that take part in the site which gives it a huge bump in my mind. Remember that there are tens of thousands of podcasts already, so you want to make sure your page stays indexed. Putting up that great content and getting user interaction will almost guarantee it. Each podcast post can have links in it as well your get a place in the sidebar to link with, and both are dofollow.

Podnova.com is one of the cleanest podcast hosting sites I’ve seen on the market and its of course 100% free. The site has very little advertising on both the site and your podcast page, leaving you with a lot of room to put good content down. The format follows the same route as most others and allows dofollow links within the episode content and within your show profile.

Blubrry.com was new to me and caught my eye with not only a cool name, but a very clean minimal design. Your users podcast page is very clean with just the goods, each podcast episode with a nifty easy access iphone feature, and a guestbook for users to leave some feedback. You cannot choose your anchor text but you can get a dofollow link back to the “podcast homepage”, and most of the active pages had a pagerank of 4 or higher!

Mevio.com is the last item on the list and used to be the giant podcast site Podshow.com. If you’ve never been here before I urge you to take an hour or two to browse some shows, because this is where high quality and podcasting come together. You get your own subdomain with your podcast account and one very sexy looking design. Mevio seems to be taking advantage of a nice internal linking structure on their own, so the pages seem to get crawled quite a bit. They have just about half a million pages indexed! Other than that, you can get a link back to your project homepage, and it is dofollow!

Thanks for reading the post and I hope you found it useful. There are dozens upon dozens of other great podcast hosting sites you can use for link building, but they’ve been covered before by other good bloggers. I’ll link to some other resources that should help fill in the gap and keep you busy for hours to come.

Podcast Link Building Resources:

Link Building With Podcasts – Collin Lahay

Tagged Link Building, podcast, podcast link building, podcasting