Truth About Link Building & Link Earning in 2015 & Beyond

Another episode of the Click Intelligence notebook presented by James Owen. In this episode James talks about the Truth About Link BuildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. & Link Earning in 2015 & Beyond.

Not sure what link building, content and link earning strategies you should be implementing in 2015 why not contact the team at Click Intelligence for some help and guidance, You can contact James Owen and the team here.

Find out more about the technology that James Owen was using here: Click Intelligence Link Discovery Platform

Video Transcription

Hi everyone and welcome to another edition of Click Intelligence Notebook. In this edition I’ll be talking about the truth about link building and link earning in 2015 and beyond.

Before I jump into that, let’s just recap what’s been going on during the last couple of months with Google PenguinGoogle Penguin is one of Google's many algorithms, first released in April 2012 in order to identify and filter out spam webpages from search results.. So Google confirmed that they had released Google Penguin 3 back in mid-October. However, since then there’s been reports that they’re still rolling it out. This was a couple of days after the first confirmation. Still rolling out. A bit more information in terms of the, sort of, search queries that might be impacting with Google Penguin.

Moving back into December they’re now saying they are reverted back and rolled back what they’d updated onto the live index and then in December 11th they said that any fluctuations are down to Penguin roll out also. So it seems that if Penguin’s now gone from a one hit-, you know, once a year hit and if you’re hit, if you see a different invisibility you’re done for at least the next six to eight months But now it seems that it’s now an ongoing roll-out and from what I can see and I’ve been monitoring this for quite a few sites, is if you were hit originally back in October, and you fixed what was wrong with your site, it may not, you know, if it’s quite a light issue, then you can potentially fix it and then, I’m starting to see sites that were hit are now actually starting to improve their search visibility in the first couple of weeks of December. So that’s quite interesting.

Also Google said that if you update your disavow file it will take up to many months for it to be looked at by Google.

I’m seeing a lot of sites along with our own clients which we do proper link building with about how much we’re seeing massive increases over the last couple of months which is great. So that’s sort of Penguin 3. Interesting, I guess, to a degree.

Another bit of news story came out today that apparently Panda has might have also rolled out potentially. So a lot of things going on a Google.

So link building 2015. All right? I think this is a really interesting conversation to be having. Now, I’ve been reading a lot about you know, a lot more web in terms of what people are thinking has happened in terms of 2015 what type of linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. you would be building, what strategies you’d be doing. You should be going down the PR routes, should be going down the high quality outreach routes and I think, first of all, I think I just want to make it plainly clear that in 2015 these type of sites, okay, are not going to work. Okay?

If they do still work, it is a ticking time bomb for you. I haven’t got to go into much detail about these sites, but sites that look like they’ve been chucked up, in five minutes, they’ve got a lot of duplicate contentDuplicate content is content that appears more than once across a single website. Duplicate content can be a sign of poor resource management, low trust, or a lack of quality control.. No-one’s actually really commenting on this so you can see zero, sort of, comments. And you know, potentially it’s about lots of things that are not about anything at all. Also, a big give away, check the cache. You can see here that actually Google has de-indexed this website although it’s still got its page rank. So, you know, any site that has been de-indexed by Google, just stay well away from.

So that’s a sort of top tip to start with, straight away. I think, something that we’ve been doing a contingency, is always developing our own internal skill set and outreach capabilities. We’re starting to look at and work with our clients on the next level of content. This is really a really good example of outbreaks that plagues mankind piece of content – nice bit of content there. Fantastic. But this infographic is very much an interactive infographic so we can click on one of the diseases it gives interactive information. And of course, this is really, really interesting. Shareable and potentially relevant at the moment with what’s going on in the world.

So, this type of content works very well, it’s infographic. It could be shared if you so wish. In this case lots of people had 5,200 people have decided to share it with their friends. So this is the sort of next level of content that I believe people should be looking into, in whichever market you’re in.

This brings me onto link discovery. Now, internally, we know that outreach is very important, sort of, connecting with the right people through social, through just picking up the phone to sort of meet people in pubs and bars and stuff like that. We know that, you know, it’s really important to make online connections and links can reflect on – I’ve spoken about this platform before on one of our other videos. We’re developing it quite hard. It allows us to find potentially relevant sites, also, sort of, connections round the web that potentially would be interested in any content and in any market.

It also helps us to match relevancy, you know so if you have a sort of, medical or sort of technology infographic you go to technology and medical websites versus go to a poker website. Makes sense. So it allows us, you know, to go out and find those type of contacts and spend actually more time making friends versus trying to research and find the sites.

So that’s great. So this is one type of content, it’s going to work very well in 2015, but, you know, you can’t always use infographics, you still want to be outreaching to our websites also. One of the other things I think is going to start to become a lot bigger, it’s going to PR outreach. Okay? We’ve spoken about during the mid of sort of 2014 and I think it’s going to be a massive player next year. So these type of links here, you know, obviously this is The Guardian, this is a national newspaper which is great. This is a piece of content about a roll-out of some product, which is great. Obviously this is a link which is really what you want. It’s branded.

So, a mixture of your standard outreach to high quality links your sort of infographic high quality sort of content marketing and also this PR outreach. I think those three elements there are going to be the top three things that you should be focusing on in, definitely in 2015 if you’re not already doing that right now.

Other sort of elements I’ve found which are quite sort of important moving forwards, going mobile, okay. Definitely mobile usability, content and user intent are going to be quite important we’ve seen that over the last couple of weeks that Google started to talk about mobile a lot more. Search Engine Roundtable put lots of content on there as well, talking about Google rolled out a little symbol on your mobile SERP to show mobile friendly sites.

So they’re starting really to, you know, focus on mobile and how people, sort of, interact with your website through their mobile device. So, if anything, you should be really focusing on, okay, is my content going to be displaying correctly for users on mobile? Is my website mobile friendly? And also, you know, if you log on to Google Master Tools there’s now a mobile section also. So that can really help you. And also, if you, I noticed from a week ago that if you have lots of 404 errors, if you do a download it actually tells you what device the sort of error was in. If it’s desktop, mobile.

So Google’s definitely moving towards mobile world and I think mobile will, and tablet will definitely take over sort of desktop overall search traffic this year (2015). So, real big emphasis on mobile this year. Also, no, yeah, one other thing. Native SEO. I think that’s going to become a massive player. We saw in, sort of, 2014 that the stories on the web that people were being hit by low quality spammy links, potentially built by their competitors and Google not being able to tell sort of the difference between who’s actually building them.

So top tip, it’s going to be, you know, it’s going to be big, it’s going to be continue to sort of work, you know, Google’s, you know has always said that link negativity doesn’t work. But it does, there’ve been case studies on the Moz Blog. Search Engine Roundtable has also sort of mentioned about this.

So the best bit of advice is you can, you know, I personally use Ahrefs and you can basically show your new and lost links looking at your new links over, you know, a quarter or a month and you can see, if you start to see lots of massive links at, you know, your link velocity going up, you got a problem. You’ve got to fix it straight away, you know, the disavow file is there for that use.

So to summarise, 2015 is definitely going to move away from low spammy SEO type sites, moving to the next level of content marketing, PR outreach and just generally good, sort of connections with out of manner outreach.

Thanks very much for listening. I’ll catch you on the next video. Thanks.