The Authority Pillar: Links & Linkbuilding

We’re looking at the authority or link building pillar this week – which is still the biggest aspect of SEO, despite what some might try and argue.

If you’re trying to rank a website in a competitive space you’re going to need to spend a lot of your effort on link building. This episode introduces you to why that is the case and some important considerations for the link building pillar.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ahrefs
• Archive.org

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Transcript

Local Digital 0:04
It’s time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization, so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here’s your host, Michael and Arthur.

Michael 0:23
It’s linkbuilding week on the SEO show, we’re talking about the link building pillar today, the biggest pillar of SEO. And you can tell I’m very excited. I’m joined by Arthur, how you doing?

Arthur 0:34
I’m good. I’m good. How are you?

Michael 0:36
I am excited, as I just said, because we’re talking link building. This is the area that’s going to have the biggest impact on your SEO. Right.

Arthur 0:43
Yeah, it’s a very controversial area as well.

Michael 0:45
Yeah.

There’s many schools of thought about link building. But it’s really you got to do it if you’re doing SEO in any sort of competitive market, right?

Arthur 0:54
Yeah. Well, there’s been agencies, I’ve worked out that were stricly no link building, which I found odd. But there I guess there are situations where you don’t need to do as much link building but we can touch on that later on, or in a different episode.

Michael 1:06
Yeah, look, because link building is such a big topic. Today is just going to be an introduction to, I guess, the pillar, and the main concepts, and we will do more technical in depth things in later episodes. So let’s start at the start. It’s always a good place to start.

Why are links important? Well really, if we go right back in time to when search engines like Lycos and Alta Vista and Webcrawler existed If you remember them?

Arthur 1:36
I’ve heard of Alta Vista. I’ve never heard of Lycos.

Michael 1:39
Yeah, so web crawler used to be my favorite back in the late 90s is a little

Arthur 1:43
you’re a bit older than me. So

Michael 1:44
Yeah. oh welll yeah, little bit older.

Anyway, they were basically, you know, you typed the keyword in it would return results. And it would be based on keywords on the page and results would often be not the best. Google came along, and started looking at links from one site to another site as a quality signal that played a really large role in their ranking algorithm. That was the billion dollar idea.

Arthur 2:06
PageRank.

Michael 2:07
PageRank. Yep.

So basically, the thinking was that if a human has taken the time to link from their website to another website, it means the website’s pretty good. And the more links that a website had, the better it would rank in Google. So this led to super relevant results in Google, and they pretty much obliterated the competition, which is why Arthur has no idea who Lycos is. But um, look, Google’s evolved, obviously, a lot over the years. But links remain a massive part of their algorithm to this day. We’re doing link building for clients, and we see it get results all the time. So what is link building? You know, we’ve been throwing that name around a bit. Maybe Arthur can chime in and tell us what he sees link building as because he spends a fair bit of his time doing that every day on clients?

Arthur 2:51
Yeah. Well I actually started as a junior link builder back in the day. So I’m pretty familiar with the process

Michael 2:56
Come up through the ranks.

Arthur 2:57
Yeah. Basically, it’s just a process of acquiring links from other websites, to your website, so that Google finds and rewards your site,

Michael 3:06
Pretty much.

Arthur 3:06
So getting getting relevant links from sites that are relevant to your niche back to your website.

Michael 3:11
Yep. So sounds easy in theory, but it does take a lot of time, a lot of effort, sometimes a lot of expense as well. Not all links are built equal.

Arthur 3:22
No

Michael 3:22
There’s a lot to it. So we’re not going to cover absolutely everything to do with link building today, obviously, what we thought would be cool is if we maybe go through a few types of link building, so that we can give you an introduction to you know, what you might be able to do yourself, and maybe where an SEO agency spends their time. So um, in regards to types of link building really to start with is free versus paid link building. So free link building is basically links that you can go out and acquire from other websites where the only investment is your time. Paid link building is where you’re investing money, whether that’s in content creation, or promotion, or publicity, PR,

Arthur 4:02
sponsored posts

Michael 4:03
sponsored posts like straight up paying websites for links

coming back to Arthur’s point at the start about it being a controversial topic. That’s a controversial part of SEO. But really, yeah, that’s you are paying for links in some way, shape or form, whether it’s with your time or with your money. Do you have anything you want to add to that topic?

Arthur 4:21
I think that that type of link building can be natural. I mean, there’s been situations where I’ve worked with clients and have sent them. So in this example, we worked with a online liquor store. And we found a blog that was a wine blog, basically, and we sent them bottles of wine to review got links that way so that that’s technically paid link building, supernatural.

Michael 4:44
And I guess a good thing is to highlight here the reason we’re a little bit iffy in arming and hiring about paid link building is because Google, say the paid link building is bad. That’s what they say. Yeah. They say that because they know it works. And they don’t want people spending money on SEO. They People spending money with them on Google ads. So they basically have, you know, webmaster guidelines that say you should never pay for links, or you shouldn’t even exchange anything of value.

Arthur 5:10
Well, if you do, then you should mark it as a sponsored post. Yeah. And then that link isn’t valued as much as a natural, regular link. Google really that smart?

Michael 5:19
Yes. And we think that, you know, we never guess a risk versus reward type decision to make as a business as to whether you want to pay websites for links. Because you know, as a business, you want to rank high, you want to get traffic you want to get leads, your competitors are doing it, you probably have to do it to, you know, make up the ground between you and the competition. Google’s telling you not to do it, they’re going to get you but they don’t always get you. And there’s a lot of things to consider with paying for link building. But

Arthur 5:48
there’s also costs involved with link building. So to get a copywriter to write content that cost is so where do you draw the line? Yeah, basically.

Michael 5:56
Yeah, that’s right. like Google will try to say no, money should be extended can throw a link. But, you know, for example, when we’re building links, our copywriters are adding content to play some websites. Exactly. We’ve had to pay the copywriter to do it. And

Arthur 6:08
yeah, would you do something for free? Most of the time, you wouldn’t. So why would someone go out of their way and post something for free for you?

Michael 6:16
So yeah, that’s a website owners know the value of their website salutely. Yep. And book were from the school of thought that you should be trying to do all sorts of different types of link building, do you free link building where it makes sense to pay for links, and you probably should be if particularly if you’re competing in really competitive spaces. Just don’t go over the top with it. Because, you know, it’s really the aggressive stuff that looks really obvious to Google that ends up getting people in trouble. Yeah. You had a sponsored post here, and they’re not so much. Yeah.

Arthur 6:47
And I may be jumping the gun a little bit, but scaling link building. It’s difficult if you’re doing it, I guess, the more natural way? Not natural, but the

Michael 6:56
white hat way. Hmm. White Hat in inverted commas. Yeah. Right. Because as we said, you can either spend money to get the results, or you can spend time and time costs money anyway. You know, as a business owner, you don’t want to be spending your time scouring the web for websites and finding out who owns them and reaching out to them and trying to get them to get a link and following up with them over time.

Arthur 7:16
Yeah, we’re not advocating painful links, but there are going to be costs involved. Exactly.

Michael 7:20
So just to give an example on that, you know, at our agency, we have a team of outreach specialists who spend their days looking for websites, reaching out to them trying to get links placed, so that costs money. That’s why link building costs money. And doing that at scale, doing it when you’re dealing with big, important sort of quality websites is just an expensive thing to do. So yeah, anyway, whatever Google says, There is money exchanging hands when links are being bought. That’s sort of unavoidable. In terms of the types of links, I guess, we’ll probably maybe start with examples of free links that, you know, you could start by building yourself tomorrow, if you wanted to invest the time in the immediately obvious ones would be directories, right.

Arthur 8:05
Yeah. directories, web 2.0 profiles, social profiles, you’ll get a branded link back to your site that way?

Michael 8:13
Yep. So when we say web 2.0, we’re just referring to like a website where you can go and create a profile or create a website or some sort of directory listing, like SoundCloud. Yeah, like SoundCloud, even MySpace, like you know anything where there’s a link on there that you can control? You can obviously put your website in it, Google find this stuff, there’s not a lot of value to it from an SEO point of view. Yeah. You know, it’s not passing over lots of value in the ranking algorithm. But it does give you more branded links of APA said Ryan branded anchor text, and maybe we should, I guess, reverse engineer what anchor text? Yeah, good start. probably getting a bit all over the place here. But with a link,

Arthur 8:53
and we have covered anchor Texan. Yeah, this episodes?

Michael 8:56
Yeah, we did. Yeah, I think so. And the the initial how Google works. Yeah, I hope it’s been a long time now. But in any case, we’ll recap. With anchor text, when we’re referring to it, it’s really just the words that you click when you clicking on a link. So if you’re on a website, and you’re reading a news article, and that news article links to a company, they might use the name of the company as the link that name in the in the link of the anchor text. Google looks at this stuff, like if it sees keywords in the anchor text, it’s a ranking signal. But coming back to the point that Google don’t necessarily want you doing a lot of link building, if Google can detect that you’re building lots of links with anchor text for keywords that you want to rank for. And that doesn’t look natural, you know, what would look natural would be branded links or sort of all sorts of different terms. But if you’re trying to rank for construction company, Sydney, and every link to you is using that term, very easy for Google to discount you and sort of not give you the rankings you’re looking for. So when we say web 2.0 is and directories are good. It’s because You can build branded links. So you the name of your company, the URL that the website address of your company in the anchor text, you can build a lot of them, which makes your anchor text profile look natural.

Arthur 10:11
Yeah. So you’re basically padding out your backlink profile with different types of anchor tags. So it appears natural to Google.

Michael 10:18
And likewise, pretty much every business is listed on most social media platforms, all the big business directories in Australia, for example, how frog? Well, they

Arthur 10:26
play a lot of local SEO as well. Absolutely, absolutely not just regular SEO.

Michael 10:31
Yep. And the good thing is that free, all of these is just your time setting up the profiles and the listings. So that’s a good place to start. If you’re looking to build some links to a website, it is time consuming, and a bit tedious. But yeah, definitely a good place to start. That’s definitely where Junior link builders start their their career that that sort of stuff, as a business owner, probably don’t want to be spending hours every day building directory links to your site, you know, focus on the higher ticket items. That’s where SEO agencies normally come in and add value to businesses. Another area that you can look at for free links is broken link building. So what are your thoughts on broken link building,

Arthur 11:10
um, again, very time consuming. So that’s just going through different sites and having a look. So there’s different plugins you can use to see if there’s any broken links on a page. So that idea is you’d go find a site that’s kind of relevant to your niche or to whoever your client is, and then have a look at all the break or have a look at all the links on the page, if there’s any broken links that are linking to any, anything that’s relevant to your site, reaching out to the webmaster or the other blogger, the owner of the website, and asking if they would link back to your site as a resource. Yep. And it’s a good way to get free links. But again, it’s it’s very time consuming and very hidden Miss

Michael 11:48
competitive too, because other SEO people are out there constantly hunting for broken links, and trying to get those links updated to point to their site or to their client site. So like time consuming, it’s a good way of adding links, you’re not paying money, you’re just exchanging your time for it. So all comes back to how much you value your time and how much you can handle.

Arthur 12:09
You also have the recording, you have to have the right resource to link back to exactly,

Michael 12:13
yep. So the idea is, you know, you are helping this webmaster out by letting them know there’s a broken link. But hey, you can just link to my site, look, I’ve got this great infographic or blog or guide or something, to replace what you were linking to. But really, outside of that, the other things that you can do is maybe run a competition. If you run a competition with a really good giveaway, or offer or something that stands out, and you can go and find websites and reach out to them and say, Hey, I’m running this competition, or you’re interested in sharing it on your site, or doing a blog post or something like that. Really, it’s combining a giveaway with PR or amridge efforts. Again, time consuming,

Arthur 12:54
and expensive.

Michael 12:55
Yeah, depending on what depending on what you’re giving away. But really, it’s you don’t you can’t just throw up a competition and expect to get links back to your website. You need to throw up a competition and then spend a lot of time proactively finding people that would be interested in reaching out to them and trying to drum up links to your website. Another way that you can do free link building is through the use of assets like infographics. So we haven’t really done too much with infographics lately, but not for a while. Yeah, used to be popular A while ago.

Arthur 13:29
Yeah. Many, many years ago.

Michael 13:31
Yeah. But maybe we’ll just cover it because it is a very viable way of getting links, right. Yeah, I think so. So basically, with that you’re just taking backs or something of interest and turning it into a visual format that can be shared. So I don’t know if you’re if you’re a company that sells timber, you might have a infographic that shows how timber comes from a tree all the way through to ending up in your walls. Well, we

Arthur 13:54
did a really good one. Well, the election 2016

Michael 13:59
Yep, yep. So we did what Australians are googling about palazzi. Yeah. And it was back when it was Malcolm Turnbull versus Bill Shorten.

Arthur 14:08
Yes. A while ago now. Yeah, five years ago.

Michael 14:11
Yeah. They’re both gone. But um, we basically now Come on, anyway, that’s irrelevant, unimportant. But we were looking at what people were googling around, whatever the, I guess the different points of the day were so it was like NBN. Yeah, marijuana legalization,

Arthur 14:29
I think was an issue. I think, just different political topics at the time.

Michael 14:33
Yeah. And we put it all together in an infographic and then shared that on our site. And then we ended up picking up links from websites like Huffington Post and Business Insider and like really big, strong, authoritative sites. Because we took a topic that’s kind of boring, you know, on face value, but people are interested in seeing what people are googling and you know, what’s going on around politics in an interesting, easy to digest format like that. So

Arthur 14:33
it’s good that you said interesting because you can’t just create an infographic for the sake of creating an infographic, you have to make sure that people are interested in it. Yeah. So again, it comes down to, you know, the time to actually be creative. Think about all the ideas and create the infographic and the time to sit it out. So I’m sure you spend a lot of time

Michael 15:15
ages. Yeah, because there’s research, there’s the writing of it, the rewriting of it, the design the redesign. So again, time

Arthur 15:23
outreach,

Michael 15:24
outreach, with that one, we didn’t do anywhere near as much outreach as we should have, you know, we put it up, we did a little bit and then let it sit there. But when you spend all that time creating an asset like that, that’s only half the story. But really, the outreach, and the constant promotion and follow up and trying to get it in front of get it in front of as many people as possible, is just as important as getting a good piece of content to begin with. But um, look, if you have a good angle, it definitely is a really viable way of getting links. And as a way of doing it for free in terms of money that you’re actually spending on links. So another way as well, on the free side of things really would be guest posting, I guess, is the main other way of doing things. Which is where you lend your expertise to another website, in terms of writing an article for it, right?

Arthur 16:15
Yep.

Michael 16:17
So when I say guest posts, it means you’re brought on as a guest author, but you write the article they posted on their website, they get the content for free, you get exposure as the author on a website and the link back to you maybe in the author profile, or in the article itself. This used to be an awesome way of building links back in the day, because websites were sort of, I guess they had an insatiable need for content, and they would take them for free. But we sort of find these days coming back to the point we made at the start that website owners know their websites are worth money.

Arthur 16:49
Yeah. Especially if they know you’re linking back. Exactly. for your benefit.

Michael 16:53
Yeah. So it’s not so easy to just get a guest post done. For free these days. A lot of them will say, you can do one, but you have to pay me a publishing fee.

Arthur 17:01
I guess it depends on who you are. If you’re like the bond diver and you wanted to do a post on a vet blog, I’m sure they do it for free. So it depends on your profile, huh?

Michael 17:12
Yeah, they’re often like, the owner of a business or someone with some sort of a story like an entrepreneur type or something, might be able to get a foot in the door at, I guess, bigger publications, well run, I guess, more professional websites, to do guest posts as a guest contributor. But once you sort of go down the totem pole a bit, just normal blogs, you know, niche specific blogs, we find most of the time they want money. Yeah. So now we’re getting into the world of straight up paid link building. This is a controversial part of link building. This is the part where you can get yourself in trouble with Google. And it really is. There’s no, there’s no right or wrong answer here. It really does come down to your risk profile and what your goals are, and sort of your timeframes in the like as to what decision you make here. Yeah. So you know, peddling building, what do you think about I would say there is a wrong answer.

Arthur 18:09
Because if you’re blatantly going out and buying links, so for some context, my inbox is just inundated with bloggers that have somehow somehow managed to get my email address. And just send me a list of sites asking me if I want a guest post on these sites. Now, what we do is we blacklist all these sites, because we don’t know how many people that they’re approaching with this list of sites, so they’re blatantly trying to get people to pay for backlinks. Sure. And that’s the type of stuff that’s going to get you in trouble later down the track. That’s the stuff that Google cracks down on. So when it’s looking at, you know, when it’s looking and assessing your website and sees these PB ends, basically, or personal blog networks linking to your site, they’ll worst case scenario penalize you, or best case, devalues links. Hmm. So I guess that’s the side of the paid link building that I would avoid completely. And that’s something that we like, like I said, we blacklist any site.

Michael 19:06
Yeah, that’s on a list like that. Oh, because ultimately, I just absolutely agree with that, you know, you can’t just pay blast money out and get links, and it’s gonna have awesome results that you need the right types of links.

Arthur 19:18
Yeah. And I guess that kind of goes into, like, what makes a site good. So we’d haven’t really touched on that. Have we not? I think

Michael 19:26
we have not in not in depth, we’ve probably kicked around a few of the metrics we might look at. Let’s do that in a sec. Well, we’ll just on the topic of paid, I guess, you know, as a business, we try not to ever pay for links for our clients that we invest money in our content writers and our designers and our outreach team and our SEO specialists to work on it and spend all that time trying to get links. But you know, unless the clouds open to paying just straight up paying for links, and I’m bored with it, then you know, we might do it. But otherwise we’re trying not to

Arthur 19:57
Yeah, and probably still want to do it.

Michael 20:00
Yeah, and we’re definitely not just buying links of random emails that get sent to our inbox. And you shouldn’t be doing that yourself. If you are getting those emails, I’m sure most people

Arthur 20:08
in the world, it’s a good way to get yourself in trouble later down the track.

Michael 20:12
So with paid links, look, I personally know, when I run affiliate websites or websites on the side to get traffic, I absolutely pay for links. Because it’s quick, you get to the desired result quickly. And if I happen to lose a website, it’s not that big a deal. But as a business, you know, if you’ve got this website, you’ve been building up for years, and it’s your only website, then it’s a bit more of a big deal if that website goes missing in Google so

Arthur 20:38
well, if it’s a client of ours, and it’s even bigger deal. So

Michael 20:41
that’s what I’m that’s what I mean. That’s what I’m getting at there. So again, it is a matter of your goals, your risk profile, your timeframes, that sort of stuff as to how aggressive you might be with paid link building. But as a general rule, it’s not the starting point.

Arthur 20:57
Do you feel that Google hasn’t been as strict with the algorithm updates recently? So yeah, what I’m trying to say is back in the day with Penguin, and wiped out all these sites that were doing dodgy link building. Now, there’s a lot of sites where you look at the backlink profiles, and you find all these trash links, and they’re still ranking Hmm. So do you think that Google has stopped cracking down on it as much as it used to or they no longer just penalize the site and wipe them out? They just devalue certain pbn sites? Yeah,

Michael 21:28
I definitely see a lot less cases of straight up algorithmic link of penalties or manual penalties. Or if I can’t remember the last time I saw a manual penalty, I haven’t never seen one. So what we’re talking about here is manual penalties where a human that Google has looked at your website and said, a human Google, no human at Google, human Googler, has looked in their web spam team and said, Look, this is just trash, because it’s got all these dodgy links, we’re going to get rid of it from the search results.

Arthur 21:56
I think I think it would happen with very large sites, not so much the akustik. Obviously, I

Michael 22:02
just have not seen any evidence of manual penalties for a while. Not to say that don’t happen, they obviously do. But back in, let’s say 2012 1314 15. They were rampant. So I remember. Yeah. Then algorithmically, pink penguin. Penguin was an update to Google’s algorithm back in 2012. So were they really crap clamp down on obvious signs of dodgy link building. So, you know, too much anchor text with the keywords you want to rank for is obvious spam content. Yeah, just like junk sites, like people using software to build what comment links that were just gibberish used to work, then penguin came along, and it didn’t work. Now, these days, Google, when they update their algorithm, they’re very, they’re deliberately not really giving much away about what’s changed and what they’re up to. And why. Because they know people like us will reverse engineer it as much as possible and try and, you know, use it to improve site’s rankings. So what we do see is that there’s a lot of sites these days that do have what you might consider a risky link profile, or over optimized anchor text, and then not getting penalized, like they might have used to. Yeah, definitely the cave. Now, I’ve totally forgotten where we were.

Arthur 23:14
We’re gonna talk about some metrics and link metrics. Yep, yep.

Michael 23:18
Yep. All right. So we’ve got an outreach team. They go find websites to get links from, but we have probably 20 different criteria that we make them run a site through, before they even approach the site. So we’re not going to get through all of them. Because that’s gonna make it way too long. And give away all of our secrets. Yeah, give away all of our secrets. But we can talk about the main ones, we’ll freestyle, let’s cap it at four. So So what would be the first thing that you’d look at, on a website when trying to decide if it’s worth getting a link from that site to yours? Well, the

Arthur 23:53
first thing that came to my head, say it’s the most important thing, but we look at the domain rating. So the site has to have a domain rating of about 20 or more 30 or more, depending on the niche. And when you say domain rating, a domain rating is a score, an href score. So h refs is a very popular SEO tool. If you do SEO, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. And it’s a score between zero and 100. On a logarithmic scale, the higher the score, the stronger your domain. And and it kind of measures that based on the the number of sites linking back and the quality of the sites linking back to your website. What to a website.

Michael 24:29
Yep, yep, yep. Yep. So we look at that. Yeah. 2030 plus good sign. Yeah, that it’s a decent site

Arthur 24:37
traffic as well. So going back to h refs, we can see how many keywords the domain is appearing for and how much traffic estimate it’s estimated to get Yeah, so we avoid any sites that have very little traffic going to it, or we can see if they used to get traffic historically, and then had a massive drop off. Yeah. So that to us indicates that they’ve been hit by an algorithm update. We don’t want links coming back from sites that have been penalised, because then that’s just bad practice.

Michael 25:05
Yeah. And like on the flip side of that, if a site is ranking in Google and getting traffic from Google, it means that Google likes that site. So link from it to your site is going to be worthwhile. And, you know, not all traffic is created equal. We look at what country that traffic comes from to. So if we’re trying to rank a site in Australia, and it’s a site based in Australia, but all their traffic is coming from some other country, probably not worth getting a link from that site. Another thing that we like to look at is the website itself, you know, you go have a look at it, and what does it look like? And does it have, you know, some sort of social interaction, you know, comments on blog posts? Or is it a real brand real website? Or is it clearly just a website that’s been created to fill links on or try and make money from

Arthur 25:51
Yeah, looking at visual cues, you’ll find that there’s a pattern, a lot of these PB ends or sites that I basically built for that purpose, have a very, very similar template, very similar layout, you’ll find that the content is very general. So it will talk about random things like cryptocurrency home insurance. In some cases, viagara gambling is a line Invisalign. So it’s just very all over the place. The contents not that good. You can read in any of the posts and the generally pretty rubbish, no engagement whatsoever. It’s just a site that’s been built for SEO basically.

Michael 26:29
Yep. And you’ll typically find coming back to the the spammers that email you saying, Hello, Sir, I’ve got all these sites, do you want links on them? These types of sites that they’re trying to sell links or get you to? You know, give them money for a link for your basically cell links? Yeah, well, I had to say that twice. They’re the types of sites that those guys are pedaling really hard.

Arthur 26:51
Like you said, they they work in certain situations, if you’re building an affiliate site, and you don’t mind taking on the risk, it will increase your rankings, it’ll help build your authority. Hmm. But yeah, if you’re looking to help out in client, that’s definitely something you want to avoid.

Michael 27:06
Yeah. Short term wins with that, but probably long term at dive. But it’s not like a sustainable long term approach, like we tried to take with clients. One other big thing I like to look at is the history of the website. So when I say history, is what the website looks like now, but you can use a tool to go back and look at what that website looked like a year ago, or three years ago, or 10 years ago, sometimes. Wayback Machine Wayback Machine, that that is a tool, it lives at archive.org is a URL, you can basically plug a website in there. And then this tool keeps snapshots of that site over time. Not every site is in there, but you know, tries to keep most sites on the internet in its database, you can use that to see if, you know, if you’re thinking about getting a link from a website, and maybe the name like the URL, the domain name is a bit weird, it doesn’t quite match the name of the site, you can go back in time and look at what that site look like a few years ago. And you might find that it was one website, and then whoever owned it, they forgot to register the domain or they let it lapse or whatever some SEO person has come along and just put junk on them. And then maybe it’s left again, someone else’s now built a new site and you’re getting a link from it, that’s just a garbage link, that’s not going to do any value for you because that domain has been burnt in the past, basically. So yeah, if you if you’re a little bit suspicious about a site and you think that its history has got a little bit of dodgy behavior going on in it, then that’s a great tool to suss that out and make a decision on whether you would want to get a link from that site. And, look, as I said, we’ve got about 20 of these, we won’t go through all of them. But again, this probably comes back to the point that link building is super time consuming, you know, you to do it right. You need to be investing the time to look at sites like this, to write the right content to design good infographics to reach out to the website owners and negotiate with them back and forth and try and get your content placed. Right. So to do it, right, it’s well worth the effort. Because you get those long term rewards, you get the SEO rankings, you get the traffic, if you take the shortcuts, if you pay for links with with PBNs and dodgy sites, you might get a short term wind, but long term, it’s probably gonna hurt you.

Arthur 29:17
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure we’ll have a lot more episodes about link building in the future.

Michael 29:24
Yeah, we’ll get tactical we’ll we’ll do all sorts of different, I guess, approaches that we’d like to use tips and tricks and the like. But for now, look, it is the biggest aspect of SEO, if you want to compete in any industry by any sort of commercial keyword or space that you’re looking to rank in. your competitors are probably building links in some way, shape or form, right? Yes, of course. So if you are wanting to do that, then basically you’ve got to join in the game and build links, whether it’s a free approach, the time consuming approach, whether you want to pay for them, or a combination entity, whether you want to use a combination everyone’s different or use us Or use us. That’s right. So it’s horses for courses, I guess, comes down to your risk profile, how much time you have, how much knowledge you have. So we’re trying to help you with that knowledge with this podcast. But that’s about all the time we have for today. But that’s pretty much all the pillars done, isn’t it? So, we’ve done the first four pillars of SEO and from here we’re going to move into a bit more, I guess, tactical stuff and informative stuff about SEO in the next episode. So who knows where that’s going to go, we’ll probably get some people in to interview them as well. If we’re feeling confident enough to have another human in here with us while we’re talking. I think we’re ready. you recommend ready? You’re feeling good?

Arthur 30:36
Yeah. Yeah.

I’d like to see the list of people first. Before I get it, yeah,

Michael 30:41
yeah. Okay. What because you were they’re gonna hang it on you or something? Who knows? Yeah, yeah. Well, I did have a list of people likely to hang it on you. So yeah, the list is long. Alright, well, that’s enough rambling from us for this wait. Time to wrap things up. So look for the 12 people out there that are listening right now. It would be great. If you could go and subscribe to this podcast. Give us a review somewhere. Help us get some sort of visibility on this podcast so we can help more people. We really appreciate you listening in and we will be back next week with another episode of your new favorite show the SEO show. See you guys soon.

Arthur 31:15
goodbye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai