I’ve built an uncountable number of backlinks for 10 years straight, for 100s of clients from startups to publicly traded billion dollar brands.
Look, John Mu is right. All links are not created equal. A backlink is not a backlink. That’s like saying all chocolate cake is the same. It’s not. Some tastes good, some tastes bad, yet it is always called chocolate cake.
10 rules of thumb if you’re about to do link building:
- Domain Rating in a silo is useless. Incredibly easy metric to game. You must analyze a website holistically: DR, traffic, keyword positions, traffic history, how many external links do they give, brand traffic, content quality, is it publicly available to purchase a link, etc.
- Directories, profile links, etc, are not the same as as contextual links within the body of an article. If anyone can make an account + acquire a link, it’s defeating the entire purpose of why links are a ranking factor: they are exclusive, hard to get, and pass real earned trust.
- Stop being scared of nofollow, please. Some of the best links on the internet are nofollow by default.
- Unique root domains is a complete joke. Yes, you want more domains total linking to you, great. But, you’re letting “unique root domains” stop you from getting multiple links from the same great domain? That is nonsense. Repeat links from high authority domains = repeat trust signal.
- Relevance is a sliding scale, not a binary yes or no. Acquiring true tier 1 relevant backlinks is very rare. Why? Anyone who’s entire site is dedicated to the exact same topic your site is dedicated to is…competing with you either on product or SEO, or both, and is almost never going to link back to you.
- Anchor text is still important, but so is the context surrounding the anchor. Google openly admitted to struggling with context around a link many years ago, but they since improved. Both matter.
- Please, please, please for the love of all things holy do NOT request a site to add UTM to your backlink.
- Affiliate links do not pass link equity. Think long and hard about how your affiliate program works if you also need to build authority. AND, this matters heavily for unseating competitor links: if a site is linking out to an affiliate, they are not going to lose a revenue source and link to you for free instead.
- Link building is a proxy for brand awareness and authority. But, you can’t just “build a brand” and get links when you need rankings now. Active link building is essential in competitive markets.
- Pick the right pages on your site to target with link building. You need a blend between high impact, hard to rank product pages AND genuine content that takes zero convincing for someone to link back to. Anything else and you’re making link building more difficult than it should be.
Bonus tip: You don’t need 200 links per month unless you’re buying or building horrible quality backlinks, that, as John said, Google is going to ignore anyway.
