When doing link building there are many questions that flow up on your mind like should we use the same site to link us twice? What kind of anchor text should we use?
I decided to make a post and answer some of the most important things you should know.
To that end… when building links to your/clients’/employer’s web properties, how do you feel about the following:
- Referring Domain (RD) diversity, i.e. never a repeat backlink from the same RD? Or, a different page on the same RD is a-okay forever and ever? Or… somewhere in between 2-3 repeats is okay, but you believe in a “law of diminishing returns”?
- What are your most preferred metrics in evaluating sites to secure backlinks from? TF, CF, DR, DA, PR, Ahrefs est. traffic, GA traffic, rankings analysis… or?
- With respect to your backlinks’ anchor text, what is the ratio of branded anchors: keyworded anchors: naked URLs?
- Also with respect to your backlinks’ destination URLs, what is the ratio of home page: money page: pillar content: other?
- With regards to niche relevancy, do you believe a referring domain must be relevant to your site, or you will earn a penalty? Or, do you care more about the referring *page*’s relevancy? Or, neither? Or, both?
Answers
- RD Diversity – Probably highly important. Chances are, it’s one of the things I went into a campaign looking for, especially with a paid vendor. The big annoyance with vendors is it feels like theft if someone has an author account (or another way to reliably post within a few days.) It seems like a month isn’t going to hit the link goal… then magically 3 links appear in the last week, all on repeat sites
- Traffic est from aHrefs or SEMRush – it’s basically a snapshot at how their rankings have been doing. There are so many DR40 domains selling links that get like 300 visits a month. If the site actually had the trust that DR was looking to model, it would have way more than 10 visits a day. Traffic – and traffic trend – above all else. (Trend-wise – I am super not interested in a link from a site that’s lost 70% of the est traffic it was getting. You’re tanking, bro – a link from you isn’t going to help me.)
- I do heavy branded – something like 50%, and then a good chunk of generics, and then longer phrases that contain my term – so ‘great dog food options’ not ‘dog food’
- Overall – something like 30-40% home and then everything else mixed. But if I’m working with a specific vendor they may be just a piece of the puzzle and I want only links to money pages from them, etc.
- Ideally, it would be a relevant + strong domain, the next best is a relevant page on a strong domain, and then a lower authority but relevant domain. Everything else is a distant second. Stuff like roundups on a high DR domain but no connection to the topic of the site getting the link may be good at pumping DR/DA/etc SEO-stats and not much else)