White Hat Link Building Methods vs. Links to Avoid

Link building is one of the most fundamental off-site strategies in search engine optimization (SEO). But getting links is the easy part. The challenge is securing Google-compliant links. When devising a link building strategy, website owners need to know the difference between ethical methods, known as white hat link building, and the unacceptable, black hat strategies they should avoid.

Read on to learn how to differentiate between white hat and black hat link building.

What is White Hat Link Building?

Link building is all about getting other websites to link to yours, usually through good, relevant content. In every study of the factors influencing search engine results page (SERP) rankings, links, and link-related metrics have always had the highest correlation with better Google rankings.

But link building has a history of abuse and manipulation. In the past, black hat SEOs used shady, unethical linking tactics to trick Google crawlers into ranking irrelevant content higher than it deserved.

While these strategies worked temporarily, Google crawlers have gotten better at evaluating backlinks. Now, websites with questionable link building practices are penalized.

Backlinks and the Google Penguin Update

In 2012, Google launched the Penguin Update to lower the rankings of websites that used manipulative link building strategies.

Before the Penguin update, websites could build their site authority and artificially boost their traffic by buying low-quality links or using spammy linking tactics. However, after the update went live, Google had much higher standards when evaluating links. If a site owner’s backlinks seemed spammy, they were less likely to rank. In the worst cases, Google would de-index websites that appeared to be purchasing links.

As time went on, website owners started to avoid spammy or toxic links to their websites, but they got them anyway. The truth is, they have little to no control over which pages link to theirs. Thankfully, Google offered more options — like Disavow Files — to reduce the impact of toxic links on keyword rankings.

The Penguin algorithm has been updated several times since its launch. The most recent update evaluates sites in real-time. Google also makes regular minor updates to its algorithms that you should keep track of. Check out our filterable History of Google Algorithm Updates for a full history.

Not sure whether the links to your own website are high-quality or toxic? Use our Backlink Analyzer tool to get a better sense of the overall health of your backlink profile.

So Is All Link Building Bad?

It’s easy to assume that, given the complicated history of link building, there is no value in trying to get other people to link to your website. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Google knows that brands want to increase their visibility and promote their content through strategies like PR, outreach, content marketing, and more. These strategies are considered “white-hat” link building because they find linking opportunities through original content and organic outreach.

As long as you follow the straight and narrow with link building, you can improve your Domain Authority scores and your overall ranking.

Link Building Methods: Good vs. Evil

There are plenty of ways to build links, but some are more effective than others. We recommend you stick to white-hat methods that search engines appreciate because they focus on long-term results.

Beware of black hat tactics. These shortcuts try to manipulate search rankings in spammy and unethical ways. Strategies like keyword stuffing, cloaking, forum posting, backlink generators, comment section spamming, content spinning, or spammy link building with exact match anchor text are frowned upon. They might have worked in the past, but now they can seriously hurt your website, as you will be blacklisted or otherwise penalized by the algorithm.

At LinkGraph, we’ve helped clients recover from the fallout of black hat strategies that resulted in plummeting rankings and the loss of over 50 percent of their traffic. With that warning out of the way, let’s look at some winning strategies.

Healthy White Hat Link Building Strategies

Contextual Links On Reputable Publications

A contextual link is a link embedded in relevant content that adds value or informs the reader. One of the most common examples of high-quality contextual links is hyperlinks within articles that provide more information.

Well-placed contextual links can boost a site’s credibility and trustworthiness. LinkGraph’s outreach-based link building campaigns focus on emailing the editors and webmasters of high-quality publications with good organic traffic and pitching them original content.

To succeed in content marketing, you need a wide variety of authoritative sites and high-quality linkable content that publishers find attractive. This is by far the most effective link building strategy today and will continue to stand the test of time.

Why? Because it benefits everyone— the publications, readers, and the online community overall.

Creating High-Quality Linkable Assets On Your WordPress Blog

This strategy is all about creating valuable content marketing assets that other websites will find and link to. Doing original research, publishing white papers, technical case studies, free software tools or analyzers, and long-form, keyword-targeted content are all effective strategies.

Promoting these assets on social media to increase engagement through Facebook likes, comments, and shares is an effective way to grow your audience, increase brand mentions, and speed up your link velocity around these assets.

Many SEOs claim that posting new content regularly is most important. However, we would argue that posting regularly is only a good idea if the content you create actually gets traffic and social media engagement.

One great strategy to guide content strategy is the “skyscraper technique.” Identify a piece of content on the internet that’s in your niche that has received a lot of backlinks and engagement across social media. Then, do your best to create an even better piece of similar content that lives on your own website.

HARO: Help A Reporter Out

HARO is a free database of sources for stories and a great way for potential content writers to get media coverage. Once you sign up as a source, you’ll start receiving daily emails containing topics you can potentially write about.

Any reply you send should be well-written and answer all the reporter’s questions in detail. This will increase your chances of being credited as a source. You’ll also need to include an author bio and link to your site to secure some exposure. Backlinks from high-authority news sites are among the best you can get, which is why HARO is a great tool for link building.

Contributor Opportunities and Guest Posting

If you’re an industry expert with specialized knowledge, look for publications in your niche that could benefit from your articles. TechCrunch, Forbes, and several other sites accept contributors and will often permit you a link from your author byline.

This strategy can help you secure some hard-to-get, high-authority links, but it requires hard work and perseverance.

Every day, high-quality journalistic outlets are inundated with pitches from brands seeking press coverage. But at LinkGraph, we’ve mastered the best ways to earn more link-building opportunities.

An important disclaimer here is you should only target sites with relevance to your industry. Doing this will result in meaningful organic traffic.

Broken Link Building

This is a technique where you find a broken (dead) link and recreate the link’s content. You then reach out to each site that links to the missing content, suggesting that they can fix the problem by linking to your asset, which has the same or similar information. For every webmaster who accepts, you’ve created a new backlink for your site.

The process of finding worthwhile dead links can be a bit cumbersome and time-consuming, but it’s still less effort than creating a new article for each backlink you want to earn. Bonus effect: adding additional content to your own site is likely to increase the number of keywords you rank for, improve your relevancy, and increase your content depth.

Directories

A directory is simply a cataloging system that contains references to relevant resources. Some popular online directories include Yelp, LinkedIn, Google My Business, and Facebook. In SEO, directories are websites that accept submissions that allow you to create backlinks to your website.

Directories are great for local or niche marketing, and targeting relevant directories with detailed descriptions can increase your traffic.

While some web directories provide do-follow backlinks, these are generally low-impact, tier 2 links because the links they provide are low quality and transfer a minimal amount of PageRank.

Directories are a cornerstone of local SEO as they help a business get discovered by its target market, but compared to the potential traffic from Google, most directories are low-impact and low-return.

Local SEO

Local SEO, as the name suggests, refers to optimizing your website to rank better in local searches. Countless local searches are made every day, particularly on mobile devices. 50% of customers who conduct local searches visit a store that same day. Most local searches are done to check the opening hours of a location or to search for specific services in the area.

To start taking advantage of local SEO, you’ll need to create a local landing page with keywords optimized for your area in the headline. The content of your landing page will generally include your opening hours, address, phone number, and a brief description of the products or services you provide.

To start gaining backlinks for your landing page, you’ll need to create a listing in your Google Business profile. This gives you a chance to appear in the top three results in the Google map pack. These spots dominate all other search results. You can also gain backlinks from local news sources by sponsoring local businesses or by listing your business in local directories.

Image Link Building

These are popular for a variety of reasons.

First, users generally love images that can break down complex content into easily digestible chunks. A good example is an infographic. Content creators like using images as much as possible for this reason. You can build your backlink portfolio by contributing images and infographics to other sites that link back to your page.

Secondly, you can create new images by either revamping outdated ones or by converting existing content into infographics. Providing unique and valuable images to big influencers can be a great way to promote your content. This Moz guide will show you how to create image links.

Links to AVOID

Link Swaps (BAD!)

Also known as a link exchange, this is a situation where you work with another site to provide backlinks for each other. Unless they are a high-quality site that is relevant to your niche, this practice is a bad idea and best avoided. For this reason, exchanging links falls into the category of grey hat strategies.

Sites asking for link swaps are often low quality or unrelated to your topic. Backlinks like this do more harm than good.

Link farms fall into this category and are groups of websites that are created with the sole purpose of linking to each other.

The only type of link swap that is considered “white hat” is a guest blog swap. Again, using original content is the key to making links valuable. Instead of a link swap, see if you can both contribute high-quality pieces of content to each other’s websites.

Forum/Comment Spam (BAD!)

Forum and comment spam doesn’t necessarily have a strict definition, but spam is largely considered anything that doesn’t ask a relevant question or provide any appropriate information.

It’s easy for bloggers and site owners to try and promote their sites with spam in forum threads to get some free links, but the practice is discouraged.

Firstly, it won’t provide particularly valuable links for your profile. Secondly, it’s disruptive to the forums you’re spamming. Stopping comment spam is a top priority for many forum moderators, and any links you make are likely to be removed.

Exact Match Anchor Text Links (BAD!)

Anchor text is simply the blue, underlined, clickable text in a hyperlink. Anchor text can say anything, though it’s generally best if the wording is relevant to the destination page.

It is generally considered bad practice for the anchor text to exactly match the keyword you’re trying to rank for. It clearly signals an attempt at link building, and the links often look unnatural. Too many of these can result in search engine penalties.

Also, users don’t respond as well to exact-match links anymore. They see them more like advertising than ways to obtain valuable information. When in doubt, focus on linking to your homepage or blog posts. Then, use branded anchor text so it doesn’t look like you’re trying to manipulate rankings for a specific search term, especially ones with higher CPCs.

Linkable Content

Securing high-quality backlinks requires high-quality linkable assets that are well-researched and add meaningful value for readers. This is what will make other sites want to link to you.

In today’s SEO, there are no shortcuts for creating great content. Depending on your industry, this could be in the form of well-researched blog posts, engaging podcasts, infographics, white papers, or case studies. Use unique, relevant, and useful content if you really want your efforts to pay off.

You’ll also have to link to outside sources in your own content to support your points and build trust with your audience. The following are some things to keep in mind when choosing content to link to.

Relevancy

When creating content, you must ensure that it’s valuable to your target audience. This requires a deep understanding of your audience and their problems. Anything you link in your content should be relevant to your audience and your efforts. Good links could include reviews of your products/services, material that backs up your points, or stories about events in your industry.

Link authority

Naturally, when choosing links, you need to make sure they’re actually helpful for your rankings. You’ll want to check the domain authority of any outside links you’re targeting. The more authoritative sites you get links from, the more your own authority will increase.

Site Traffic

It’s long been a matter of debate within the SEO community as to whether linking to pages that have high traffic provides any concrete advantages. On the surface, it would seem that linking a page with a high volume of traffic would increase your authority and, therefore, your rankings, but this isn’t necessarily the case.

In fact, an ahrefs traffic study found that referring to domains with high traffic often didn’t correlate with higher traffic than the total number of referring domains in web pages. This certainly doesn’t mean that referring link traffic isn’t at all important for rankings. But it does suggest it shouldn’t be your main concern.

Tips for Earning White Hat Backlinks

Earning high-quality backlinks can often be difficult, particularly if you’re trying to build them all on your own. Many white hat link building strategies won’t cost you anything more than a bit of time and effort to implement.

User-Centric content creation

As we said before, it’s crucial to make all of your content relevant to your target audience. But you can go a step further! Create content specifically designed for the user’s convenience.

One great way to do this is by creating useful video content for your audience. Online video is staggeringly popular, with 55 percent of people watching videos online every day. This is especially true of mobile users, with over 90 percent of them sharing videos with friends. Your video content could include tutorials, product demos, or informational videos appropriate for your niche. Shared videos give your brand more exposure and can link back to your site.

It’s also a good idea to incorporate images into your content whenever possible. One easy way to do this is to include infographics in your written content, to sum up concepts and engage your audience. These are simple to make with Adobe Spark or other online infographic makers.

E-conferences and Industry Networking Sites

Arguably, one of the best ways to get high-quality white hat backlinks is through conferencing and networking sites. Search specifically for e-conferences in your field, and make a list of the most popular networking and forum sites in your industry.

If you’re having trouble, follow prominent people from your industry on LinkedIn and see what groups they’ve joined and events they’re attending. Conference/networking sites can be a goldmine for content-submission-based link building. They can lead to additional opportunities as you network, including interviews or guest posting on blogs.

Community Involvement

If you want to get your name out, it’s a good idea to become more involved in your online community. This can include more social media activity, but it can be even better to engage more directly.

Search forums for questions your business can answer, and start answering them. You might also consider using surveys for multiple purposes. Firstly, surveys can be great tools to gather insights from your current customers/users, gauge their satisfaction, and discover ways you can improve.

You can also create surveys with questions relevant to your industry and post them online to see if your business lives up to your audience’s expectations. This way, you can work on improving the user experience. You can create your own surveys online with services like Survey Monkey, Typeform, and others.

Backlink Cleanup

Now that you have some strategies for new backlinks, it’s also important to know how to clean up any bad links you might have. You can use the link building tool in your Search Atlas dashboard to get an idea of how many harmful links your content may have before cleaning them up.

Once you’ve identified any bad links, you have a couple of options for dealing with them. The simplest way is to contact the webmaster of the site you have a bad link from and ask them to remove it. If they are unresponsive, then you’ll have to resort to using Google’s disavow tool.

This is typically seen as a last resort and is only recommended if you’re certain it is a bad link. The tool basically tells Google not to count disavowed links toward the ranking of the page. This won’t affect any Google penalties you may have already incurred for toxic links, but it can protect against getting any more.

If you need help with identifying and responding to these links, schedule a meeting with one of our SEO strategists to learn more about our backlink audits and white hat link building services.