If you’ve spent any time on this site, you’ll know I talk a lot about link building and my experiences with it. Link building is one of those necessary Internet marketing evils, and for the most part, it’s a big pain in the a**.
Sure, there are all sorts of tools that will automate the link building process (think SE Nuke or EdwinSoft’s Ultimate Demon) and these are fine for getting a base of low quality links. However, obtaining quality in-pointing links is a tedious, hands-on process, that often doesn’t bear fruit.
Webmasters of quality sites guard their links jealously, and won’t hand them out to any webmaster who comes calling, and certainly not one of a low quality website that can’t provide something in return.
Prior to the Panda update, I had a pretty relaxed attitude towards link building; a few blog comments here and there, some directory submissions, link exchanges with relevant sites, a handful of videos posted with their links pointing to the most appropriate pages, and so on.
Mostly I just focused on creating the sort of great content that garners links on its own.
That doesn’t seem to be enough anymore.
Today, in a post-Panda world, it seems to me that a much more aggressive link building strategy needs to be considered – which is why I’ve written so much about link building on this blog.
One of the strategies I’ve always considered but never put into practice is the Web 2.0 strategy; creating high quality material on Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Tumblr, Weebly, etc, and then linking those sites either directly to your “money” site, or to each other in a complex link wheel, and then to your money site.
That’s after you build some links to those pages as well, of course.
And, since Web 2.0 sites have a ton of authority with the Search Engines (SEs), the links gained from pages hosted on them can have considerable weight – especially if those pages you created have received links of their own.
I’m not sure I buy into the “linkwheel” strategy: it is manipulative (as far as the SEs are concerned) and too easy to reverse engineer. In other words, to me it looks more deceptive than a straight link. There’s no reason to my mind why a SE would ignore a direct link from any Web 2.0 property to your web site, unless, of course, you have a zillion of them and your page is of extremely low quality. That’s a dead giveaway.
I’ve seen some webmasters argue it makes sense to link your Web 2.0 sites together to further build the authority of the sites in your Web 2.0 network, thus transferring greater “link juice” to your own site in the process. Who knows whether this works or not for sure?
One of the reasons I never bothered with this strategy is that is seemed like a LOT of work. I won’t post crappy content under my name, which means I’d have to create them all myself, and with my regular content creation duties and the sheer number of web 2.0 sites worth considering, I’d never be able to get it all done.
Obviously then – considering the title of this post – this is something I’ve reconsidered. I’m thinking that I should develop quality material on the top 5-10 Web 2.0 sites. Build them, let them “sit” for a month or so, and then add a link or two to my money sites.
Yesterday, for instance, I created my first Squidoo lens – it’s on the subject of body building supplements, and today I created a second one on job training (for my new job training and certification site). It was a fairly painless process, although I imagine it will become less fun each and every time I create a Web 2.0 page.
Since I’ve seriously been considering hiring a virtual assistant this year, this seems like a perfect task to outsource.
In the meantime, stay tuned for updates and results on the Web 2.0 experiment. I’m curious to see how it turns out.
