Link Building in 2017: A Practical Guide for Bloggers and Brands

Link building was, for a while, a fairly simple process that bloggers and brands could use to give themselves greater visibility on the web. However, as more people took up the practice, misuse of the same to give visibility to poor brands and other undeserving entities became a serious issue and Google had to quickly crack the whip to cut down on the amount of low quality or irrelevant content that was ranking high up in many searches. This cracking down posed a serious problem to bloggers and brands who now need to find a way to stay on the right side of Google’s guidelines or risk penalties.

A guide for bloggers

1. If a brand or a website gave you any sort of incentive to link to them e.g. money, products or services, ensure you nofollow their links. There are plugins for WordPress that can do this automatically for you.

2. Whenever you’re working with a brand, you should have a consistent template that lets your readers know that you’re working with a brand. Your readers should know that you have been paid for your time by the brand and this will help to build trust between you and your readers.

3. If a guest post doesn’t match the type of content you post or your audience, don’t accept it. You should especially not accept this type of guest post if much of the anchor text is keyword rich or if the brand or site insists on followed links. In the long run, low-quality content will bring in much less money for you.

4. You can use the Google search console to check whether you’ve been penalised in case traffic to your site has suddenly gone down. If you’ve been penalised, follow steps 1 to 3 above and then fill in a reconsideration request.

A guide for brands

1. Be careful when it comes to working with bloggers who break the rules. If they’re willing to break the rules for you, they will do the same for others. You could lose links that you’ve paid a lot of money for in case Google cracks down on the blogger.

2. Check if a blogger has been penalised or if they’re likely to be penalised before working with them. You can tell if a blogger is likely to be penalised by checking whether they nofollow links. If the blog’s visibility is fluctuating as per SearchMetrics, they could have been penalised.

3. Don’t refuse to work with bloggers just because they have been penalised. Their SEO value may have gone down but they may still have a lot of dedicated readers.

4. Instead of sending bloggers products so you can gain followed links, you can instead try something like hosting an event which the bloggers can attend and you can invite influencers in the industry to speak.

5. If your only reason for working with a blogger is link building and not reaching the blogger’s audience, don’t do it.