Links are the foundation of the Internet as we know it: both search engine bots and users jump from one page to another through backlinks. By now, nobody doubts that a good link building strategy is essential to rank a website, but how should a link building strategy be designed in 2024? Do you want to know how we do it at SEO Alive? Read on.

Table of contents

Let's start at the beginning: link building is the set of strategies aimed at getting links that point to a page in order to increase its authority and, with it, improve its search engine rankings.

Like any other aspect of SEO, link building has to start with two questions: where are we right now? and what do we want to achieve? To answer them, we need to structure the strategy into specific steps or phases that help us know what to do at each moment and measure whether the results are what we expected or not.

Knowing where the project stands is essential before you can design an effective and efficient link building strategy. Even if links have never been worked on, there are always backlinks that build up naturally.

Tools like Ahrefs will give us a report with the number of domains pointing to the site, the metrics of each one of them, the anchors they are linking to us with, the destination URLs…

With all that information we can analyse the quality of the profile and set the goals we want to achieve in the short, medium and long term.

Competitor analysis

At this point in the project you should already know your organic competitors which, as you know, do not necessarily have to be the same as your offline competitors. An analysis of your competitors' off-page profile will show you the targets you need to set for your own if you want to get where they are. Again, tools like Ahrefs or Semrush will give you all the information you need.

But how do you assess the quality of your competitors' link profile? We use Ahrefs, which provides a large amount of information that is easy to interpret.

  • RD and BL: you have to distinguish between the number of domains linking to a competitor (RD, referring domains) and the total number of links it receives (BL, backlinks). In this case, the figure we are interested in is RD, that is, how many different domains link to it, regardless of how many backlinks each of them has.
  • Profile quality: if, for each of your competitors' profiles, you download the Referring Domains report from Ahrefs, you will get a list that lets you sort them by DR (domain rating) and segment them by ratios, to obtain percentages. Your goal will be for your profile to resemble the average obtained across your competitors' domains as closely as possible.

Ahrefs referring domains report

  • Anchor text analysis: for each of your competitors, you have to analyse the percentage of the different types of anchors. Again, your goal is for your profile to resemble the average you obtain.
  • Follow-nofollow ratio: in the same way, analyse the proportion of follow and nofollow backlinks in order to set your targets.

Analysis of the current position

Once you have analysed your link profile and you know where your competition stands, it is time to analyse what position your project's keywords are in, mainly for two reasons:

  • It is impossible to attack every keyword at once, so we have to make strategic decisions, based on traffic and the type of business, but also on how easy or difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword or long tail.
  • In order to assess the success of the campaign, we need to know where we stood before starting it and what we have achieved with it.

For this, at SEO Alive we use SEOcrawl's Rank Tracker, which lets us visualise, for each keyword in the project, its position in the SERPs over the last 6 months, as well as the current one, based on the average of the last week.

Keyword Map in SEOcrawl

We can also tag keywords, so we can easily filter those that have been part of a specific campaign, making it easier to observe the results of that campaign over time.

Choosing the landing pages we will work on

Once we have analysed the overall rankings of our keywords, we move on to choosing the specific landing pages we are going to work with during the strategy. Why do we talk about landing pages and not keywords? Because in the end, the landing page is the natural destination of the backlink we are going to place on another site, the one receiving the vote of confidence that a link from one site to another represents for Google.

To do this, we use SEOcrawl's page crawler, which gives us a list of the project's most powerful URLs according to the clicks received over a specific period of time, as well as a heat map with data as interesting as impressions, CTR, average position and the trend of each of these KPIs.

SEOcrawl pages report

By clicking on each URL, we also get a list of the keywords that particular landing page ranks for, which allows us to make decisions about the most appropriate anchor texts.

How to choose the sites: metrics to consider

Once we know which landing pages and keywords we are going to work on in our link building strategy, we have to start choosing the sites where we will place the links.

Although we use the generic term “sites”, these can be blogs, forums, websites of any kind or, indeed, general-interest or specialist media outlets.

What are the metrics we should look at to choose the most appropriate sites?

  • Topic: although it is not a metric as such, it is something we should keep very much in mind. Google will always give more value to a link to our site from a semantically related site (the same or a similar sector, a similar topic, complementary sites) than from a general-interest site or one that has nothing to do with us.
  • DR: or domain rating. This is a value given by Ahrefs to assess a site's authority. DR goes from 0 to 100, and the higher the better.
  • Organic traffic: it is not always easy to see the organic traffic a site receives, although once again Ahrefs lets us see not only the current estimate but, more importantly, the site's traffic trend since its beginnings, over the last year and over the last 30 days.

The ultimate goal of link building is not to increase our organic traffic through the links we get, but to increase our site's authority. That said, a backlink placed on a high-traffic site can help us multiply the clicks we receive.

  • No penalties: a link from a penalised site can take away more than it adds. That is why it is essential to know that site's trend, whether it is growing or whether, on the contrary, its data is getting worse. Again, we can check this with the Ahrefs domain inspector.

Example of a penalised website

Traffic trend and ranking keywords of a penalised website

If you want to design a complete link acquisition strategy that delivers real benefits for your site, you will need to use different tools at each part of the process. Since everyone has their own way of doing things, here we tell you the ones we use in the campaigns we design and run for our clients.

Measuring metrics

As we have already said, it is not enough to place links at random on any page: it is essential to take into account the metrics of the sites we want to be linked from. For this, at SEO Alive we use the following tools:

Tracking results

With SEOcrawl you can monitor the impact your link building campaign is having in two different ways:

  • Both in the keyword Rank Tracker and in the URL report you will be able to see the impact the published links have had from the date they went live.
  • In the visibility report you can add annotations as the campaign progresses and observe the impact the new links have had on the site's overall visibility trend.

SEOcrawl click performance report

You can annotate the publication date of the backlinks to assess their impact

It is also important to monitor the status of the links you have acquired over time, since changes can sometimes occur, such as a link disappearing or being switched to nofollow… You can devote part of your time to periodically reviewing the status of your project's links (slow, tedious and prone to errors, plus you will never spot the changes in real time) or you can automate the process.

At SEO Alive we track our clients' campaigns using SEOcrawl's Link Monitoring feature, which lets you enter all the links you obtain for your projects and alerts you in real time if any change occurs to them.

This all sounds great, but how do I find the most suitable links for my project? As we have already said, topical and semantic affinity is the first characteristic you should take into account. We mainly use these 3 tools:

  • Linkatomic: a platform for finding media outlets, blogs and niche websites where you can publish press releases or sponsored articles in different languages.
  • PubliSuites: a repository of general-interest and specialist media outlets and blogs that you can filter by topic, country or metrics. Once you have chosen the sites you want to publish on, you can set up a campaign and handle the content writing yourself or ask them to do it for you.
  • Growwer: with this tool you can set up your project for free and receive proposals of sites where you can publish links to your website, delegating both the search and the content writing.

In addition, at SEO Alive we do outreach directly to the sites we find interesting for our clients' projects, based on criteria such as authority, topic and traffic. This allows us to get links on pages that do not appear on the platforms and to negotiate better prices on those that do.

What determines whether a link building strategy succeeds or not? As with any other aspect of SEO, there are many factors we need to take into account, especially since the launch of the Penguin algorithm in 2012, designed to assess the quality of websites' external linking.

Hint: as with any other aspect of SEO, naturalness is the most relevant quality for a link building strategy to succeed.

Quality vs. quantity

More is not always better, and this maxim holds perfectly true in link building.

On the one hand, having a healthy link profile in which the sites linking to us have quality metrics will help Google see that our project deserves the rankings that authority brings. But can we go wild and place a huge number of links in a very short time?

Absolutely not. Since what we are looking for in our link profile is naturalness, it makes sense for our site to earn those “votes” from other pages little by little, as quality content is produced and the brand becomes known within the sector. A graph that shoots up from one day to the next is a prime candidate for a spam link penalty.

Anchor text

The anchor text is the words (or images) on which the link pointing to our site is placed. Some of the most common types are:

  • Generic: click here.
  • URL: the link itself appears.
  • Brand: the link is on our business name.
  • Exact keyword: SEO consultant.
  • Keyword + brand: in our case, it would be SEO Alive agency.

Depending on the stage our project is at, it is natural for some types to have a higher share than others (in very young projects, generic anchors are the norm, while more mature sites may be linked by their brand or even by keyword + brand).

A successful strategy will take all anchor types into account, giving more weight to the more specific ones as the project grows.

Landing pages

Closely related to anchor text, landing pages are important because they are where the users who arrive at our site will land. For every keyword we are going to work on, which in turn will become the anchor of the link, we have to choose the most appropriate landing page, the one that best resolves that search intent. Linking only to the homepage is a mistake.

We have already explained this: since every link to our site can be understood as a recommendation from the source page to ours, it seems clear that those recommendations will have more value the closer their sector is to ours. In other words, for an SEO agency, a link from another agency or from a digital marketing blog carries far more weight than one from a general-interest media outlet, for example.

Links within the content

Does the place where the link is inserted matter? It does, and a lot. A backlink placed naturally within a piece of content is always more convincing than one in the footer or the sidebar of the site.

Follow vs. nofollow

Bearing in mind that follow links are those in which the source page trusts the destination page and decides to pass on part of its authority, while nofollow links imply exactly the opposite, it would seem that a good link building strategy should prioritise the former over the latter at all costs. However, a profile made up only of follow links is not natural, so the ideal is to find a balance between the two.

But what happens if my site falls victim to an attack and thousands of low-quality pages suddenly start linking to me? Believe it or not, this can happen, and Google has a tool to fix it: the disavow.

If you detect high levels of spam in your link profile, you can tell Google not to take all those domains into account when calculating your site's authority through the disavow, which is nothing more than a file you upload to Google Search Console with the list of problematic domains.

Use this tool with caution: the search engine itself states that it should only be used when there is a large number of fraudulent links that have already caused or could cause a spam penalty.

Disavow Google

You can read what Google says about the disavow in its official documentation.

Just as topical proximity is important, so are the language and the TLD of the source page. If our project is national in scope, the links pointing to it should be too. However, if we are going to start an internationalisation strategy we need to think about gradually earning links on quality sites in the countries where we are going to be present.

Quality content

Is there any way to get links without “paying” for them? Of course! It is known as link baiting and it is as simple (and as complicated) as producing original, high-quality content that positions us as experts in our sector, so that other sites link to us as an authoritative source.

Other ways to earn links at no cost would be:

  • Manually adding links in directories, forums, blogs, social networks, etc.
  • Tracking brand mentions without a link, to ask the site to include one.
  • Writing guest posts on friendly blogs.
  • Tracking broken links.
  • Writing and publishing press releases.

Naturalness

We never tire of repeating it: the most important quality in SEO is naturalness. Trying to trick Google works less and less, and it can end up being more harmful to a project than even doing nothing at all.

In link building, naturalness comes down to:

  • A varied profile of links of different quality
  • A varied anchor profile
  • A strategy sustained over time
  • An appropriate follow-nofollow ratio

Penguin algorithm and spam penalties

As we have already mentioned, in 2012 Google launched an algorithm update aimed at detecting spam and bad practices in the acquisition of external links. Until then, anything went: link exchanges, blog farms, automatic generation tools… Penguin wiped out the visibility of many projects that were built on techniques that from that moment on came to be considered illegitimate.

The consequences of Penguin were so severe that, even today, we can find heavily penalised projects that have never managed to recover. But how do you know whether a project has been penalised for the poor quality of its links?

If you suffer a manual penalty, you will know because a message will appear in Google Search Console warning you about the actions that have been applied to your site. On the other hand, if the penalty is algorithmic, you will simply notice that your project, or part of it, has suffered a loss of visibility in the rankings.

What to do if Google penalizes you?

As we have been saying throughout this post, it is essential to aim for naturalness in a site's link profile; you already know what characteristics good backlinks have, but avoid having every link pointing to your site be “perfect”: look for variety across the different anchor types and the quality of the metrics, and go for a balance between follow and nofollow.

Bringing naturalness back to an adulterated link profile is not quick or easy work, but if you start playing by Google's rules and take the opportunity to create quality content that is useful to users, you will eventually reverse the punishment.

Black hat is the name given to the set of illegitimate SEO techniques carried out with the aim of tricking Google's bots. While years ago they worked to push the sites using them to the top of the rankings, today they are very dangerous, because they are relatively easy to detect and can lead to heavy penalties.

In the field of link building, some of the black hat techniques you should avoid at all costs are:

  • Blog networks: creating farms of blogs used solely to link to one another is easy to detect and potentially dangerous.
  • Bulk link buying: as we have already explained, getting a lot of links in a short space of time can set off all the search engine's alarms.
  • Bulk link selling: buying links to improve your profile is not the only illegitimate practice; selling them is too.
  • Automatic link generation: any automated strategy that follows a pattern that is easy for Google's bots to detect is liable to trigger a spam penalty.

In short, link building, like every issue that affects organic rankings, is slow, steady work that requires continuous analysis and a method for measuring results in order to succeed.

Do you want us to design the link building strategy your website needs to take off? 🚀 Don't hesitate to get in touch with us!