Linkbuilding in 2024
What should linkbuilding be like in 2024?
Over the past year, my Trust-SEO team has done some great research, including on the impact of links, and talked a lot with industry representatives. In this piece, I'll tell you what to do with links so that they benefit your projects and your budget isn't wasted. If you want to refresh your knowledge or just make sure you're doing it right, this article is for you.
Choose reputable sources
We realize that this recommendation for experienced SEO specialists sounds something like this: "Do good, but don't do bad!". So let's dig a little deeper: let's talk about what goes into the concept of "authoritative sources" and back up our words with fresh research.
First and foremost, it's not just about not getting penalized by search engines for link spam. All of our recent studies reliably show that as the strength and trustworthiness of a link profile increases, positions and even traffic increases. Yes, correlation is not the same as causation. But, when this correlation is seen everywhere - the boundary between these concepts becomes as shaky as possible.
What's interesting is that it doesn't matter what service you use to evaluate it. DR from Ahrefs, that TF from Majestic SEO show the same picture. Higher index - higher positions, more traffic. This was confirmed, for example, by a study in medical topics and a very recent study of the "Electronics" niche in e-commerce.
Search traffic
So - work on DR or another similar indicator. Both Yandex and Google appreciate a quality link profile and reward it with position growth, which provides increased traffic.
Add Tier 2 and Tier 3 links
This is about a tiered linkbuilding strategy. Tier 2 links are links that strengthen not your site directly, but a donor page that links to you. In short - the point is that a pumped up external page can give you much more benefit than a few more links put directly to the site.
Here, of course, there are pitfalls, the main one of which is the risk of sudden disappearance of donor pages that you pump Tier 2 and Tier 3 links. Therefore, you should choose the most trusted pages on trusted sites whose webmasters do not sin of deleting pages and links.
The benefits, however, clearly outweigh the risks:
✔ Even a young site can be pumped relatively quickly without the effect of link explosion.
✔ You can more quickly increase the link weight of the old site, for which it is already difficult to find quality donors for direct links.
✔ Expensive links - for example, from the main links - can be made even more qualitative.
✔ Links are indexed faster and appear in Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console.
Use links-submits
Submits are links on sites where user-generated content is allowed. It is not only about forums and social networks, but also about other resources where publishing a link to the company is as natural as possible: in catalogs, on review sites, map services, video hosting, and so on.
The main advantage of sabmits - the maximum naturalness in combination with often high trust sites. If you have a budget, you can use placement on paid directories - usually for this ask from $50. But even in the absence of a budget, sabmits can be a great addition to linkbuilding:
✔ You can place sabmits yourself using the sites functionality. You don't need any web development skills to register a company card on 2gis or post a comment on a forum.
✔ Due to their naturalness sabmits - one of the safest types of links. Even at the very beginning of promotion they can be used more actively than standard external links.
✔ Submits are good for local SEO. They make it easier for users to find a company and its services. Especially good in this regard work well in this regard otzoviki and map services.
Expand the criteria of donors
A common mistake, especially for beginner linkbuilders and companies that have just started promotion, is to choose donors incorrectly and/or too strictly. Thus, they often emphasize strictly on the thematicity of the site.
This is not bad - thematicity and really important. At the same time, such a strategy will soon lead either to a rapid decline in donor standards, or to an increase in costs, or to the purchase of fewer links than desired.
In most cases, the thematicity of a particular page is much more important. At the same time, there are many more themed pages than themed sites. More choice of donors → opportunity to buy cheaper links with better performance → increase in the quality of link strategy → increase in positions and traffic without overspending the budget. For example, a news site dedicated to trucking may have a maximally relevant page on IT topics - about satellite navigation systems.
Usually linkbuilders work in a cascade - they set up the toughest filter, collect the results and start reducing the requirements for various parameters. For example, DR on Ahrefs is set to the level of 50 and above, and then reduced to 30. In this way you can get more potential donors for several visits. At the same time, links from non-thematic pages also have an effect in promotion.
Follow the naturalness of the link profile
According to most SEO-experts, to get sanctions for link explosion is now more difficult than 7-8 years ago. However - it is still possible. It would seem that the importance of a natural link profile any novice SEO should learn in the first days of work. And yet - we believe it is necessary to include this point in the article.
The reason for this is what we see through our Sape system. There are still those who buy hundreds and even thousands of links in the first few days. Don't be like that :) Slowly increase the number of purchased links, focusing on the age of the site and already accumulated link mass. Plus - use the above recommendations on the types of links and the choice of donors. This will make the link profile strong, natural and not too expensive.
Let's briefly summarize and outline a few more important points:
1. Grow your site's trust by choosing quality donors. Preferably less but better. It works - repeatedly tested.
2. Pump up strong donors by buying Tier 2 and Tier 3 links.
3. Don't forget about different types of links. Not only sabmits, which were written about in the article - but also rented, article, crowd, links-pictures.
4. Look not only for themed sites, but also for themed pages.
5. Do not think that expensive links, such as article links, will have a greater effect than cheap ones. It is recommended to allocate about 50% of the budget for rented links, 20-30% for article links, and the rest for crowds and social links. Such a link profile will be natural and will not arouse suspicion from search engines.