Link Building is Worthless. Do This Instead.

link building is a complete waste of your time if you're doing it it's time to stop and do this instead [Music] when i say link building what i'm talking about is spending time effort and in some cases even money with the intent to get a backlink to your website it's a really common seo practice and it's a complete waste now let me pause here for just a second and say this backlinks are good we are not now nor have we ever been anti-backlink google and other search engines use links from other websites to yours sort of as votes in favor of your content it's basically one of the ways that google is able to measure e-a-t of your content ndat is an important factor in determining where your content should show up in the rankings but you don't need to do link building to get backlinks let me show you this site is cookforfolks.com look up there i am and there's anna it's a site that we have had live for almost exactly one year when i go to ahrefs check this out this site has over 400 backlinks links from other websites that link to the content on our site guess how much time effort or money we spent to get those backlinks literally zero those backlinks were created naturally and organically now you may say all those are probably just low quality backlinks whatever but when i actually look at the backlink profile for this over half of them are do follow links which means i'm getting the link juice from the websites they come from and what i find when i look at those backlinks is the best links are pointing to articles where we had unique thought original research one in particular where anna did an actual experiment and put together data and took photos and it's a piece of content that's hard to replicate so what do people do instead they cite it and they link to it these are natural organic backlinks which is the intent of what google's looking for on our main site incomeschool.com we have over 34 000 backlinks and we have never done any link building i saw a post the other day in our project 24 community from a brand new member this is what they said hello i'm a newcomer why is there no mention of backlinks here how can there be a good ranking without backlinks this sample site and they posted a screenshot of that exact ahrefs report of one of the sites we've used it as an example a site we built and sold to another project 24 member who's building it up like crazy and doing really well i'll show you that that image here in a second this sample site has more than 5 000 backlinks and i want to learn how to create links actually the site has over 16 000 backlinks from over 5 000 different domains but guess what there was no active link building done on that site by us or by the project 24 member who bought it when others in the community said that this was the response hi are these more than 5000 backlinks naturally attracted totally impossible and then later hi backlinks are an important factor in seo the sample site posted must have at least 5 000 referring domains how did they get them it is not obtained by nature at all i can't figure this out i know that content is very important but backlinks are also very important are these backlinks naturally given by others and then they went on to say i am an seo worker it is impossible to have a good ranking without backlinks this is the problem this is the paradigm that we face people in the seo industry are stuck in the 1990s backlinks are a valuable part of seo but they're not as critical as seos would like you to believe but the practice of link building has a lot of huge issues so let's dive into those now when you think of link building what comes to your mind there are really only three methods that all strategies and tactics fall into the first method is creating those backlinks yourself that is going to other places on the web where you can actually add links to your site which is done through you know social media sites uh forum posts um commenting on other people's blog posts basically anywhere that literally anyone on the internet could post something well google figured out a long time ago that literally anyone can post anything in those places and so links of that type are given basically zero weight in the google search algorithm and in fact when google sees a lot of links from those types of sources they will even penalize websites that they believe are trying to manipulate their algorithm the second way to get these links on your site is to buy them you can literally pay people who have networks of websites or who reach out to others who have websites who will then for payment put links on their site over to your content this goes completely against google's guidelines and to get a link from the type of site that would actually add credibility to yours is so expensive the other pay for link option is to literally pay sites to allow you to write a guest post on their site that links back to your article so not only are you now paying to write this guest post that can literally cost you hundreds of dollars but now you're also having to take the time to write a post that doesn't even get to go on your own website and then the third method is to get those links by doing industry outreach we'll come back to that one in just a minute first let's see what google says about backlinks in their documentation about how search works google talks a little bit about quality of content that's where backlinking comes up what google's really trying to do here is understand the meaning of your search query that's key second they're trying to find web pages across the internet that have content relevant to your search that's actually the most important factor by far in search rankings not backlinks the next one is the quality of the content here they tell you where those links come into play says we look for sites that many users seem to value for similar queries for example if other prominent websites linked to a page what is known as page rank that is proven to be a good sign that the information is well trusted a good sign not a definitive sign aggregated feedback from our search quality evaluation process is used to further refine how our systems discern the quality of information google over the last several years has been improving their algorithm through the use of manual quality raters that are looking at specific pieces of content to see how authoritative they really are based on numerous different signals and they're using that information to update the algorithm to be able to algorithmically automatically determine the authoritativeness or the eat of pieces of content on your website backlinks are only one of the many signals involved in determining the quality of your content google also here talks about spam algorithms let's look at what google has to say about link schemes any links intended to manipulate page rank so listen to this very carefully any link that you have created that's intended to manipulate your page rank that is link building or a site's ranking in google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of google's webmaster guidelines this includes any behavior that manipulates links to your sites or outgoing links from your site this might include things like buying or selling links okay so that just completely eliminated method number two excessive link exchanges so this whole like hey you link to me i'll link to you you do that more than a couple times with another website you find yourself getting into trouble and then numerous other different methods that people use to basically spam the internet with links those types of practices because they're viewed as linked schemes and as manipulative can actually cause your content to rank lower than it naturally would on its own now let's look at what google has to say down here the best way to get other sites to create high quality relevant links to yours is to create unique relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the internet community creating good content pays off i want to highlight this word naturally and that brings us back to method number three but first if you're finding this video helpful i'd appreciate if you click the like button so we can get this important message to more people so if you remember method number three was industry outreach i am actually a big fan of doing industry outreach as long as it's done in the right way and at the right time in fact we have an entire course on eat inside of project 24 but i need to be clear about this we do not do link building you might say well ricky this is just semantics right you you call it industry outreach others call it link building no it's not the same the words matter when you do any activity with the sole intent of getting a link to your website your objective and therefore your behavior is different than when you do things with the purpose of building relationships with other content creators with establishing authority within an industry when you view it that way and it's not just about the link you actually do better types of industry outreach more effectively and it's so much easier let's dive into that now one of my favorite ways of doing industry outreach as a blogger is to go get interviewed on a podcast podcasters are often looking for people to interview you don't need to go on the biggest ones in your industry at this point start with small podcasts get yourself interviewed by simply reaching out to the podcast host linking them to your website telling them hey this is the content that i create i would love to talk to you about it on your podcast one great way to find podcasters is through a service known as pod match you can sign up for free i'm not not even giving you an affiliate link for it it's created by a great guy who's had me on his podcast before and basically it matches podcasters with people who want to be interviewed by podcasters kind of like a dating site but for eat getting interviewed on a podcast basically always comes with a link i have never once been interviewed for a podcast even an interview for a blog post or a youtube video or anything like that where the person interviewing me didn't ask me at some point proactively where would you like me to send people where would you like me to link to that sort of a link makes a lot of sense because the people who are consuming that content may want to follow up and learn more about the person interviewed but the link is only a piece it's not the end game the real benefit is coming because the person interviewing you is clearly viewing you as some level of authority within your industry that causes not only the algorithm to treat you a little bit more that way but people to treat you a little bit more that way users people who listen to that podcast watch that youtube video read that article that has that interview with you in it are going to be more likely to come search out your content when they see your content within a search that they perform on the web they're going to be a little bit more likely to click on it because it's a familiar name getting your name out there doing regular ordinary marketing organically ends up building authority not just algorithmically but among people because of brand recognition now among the audience of people who listen to that podcast episode let's say there are going to be some who are also bloggers they're going to be some who are also podcasters and youtubers within their industry well now they have somebody that they know they can reach out to who's another authority within the space someone they can interview they're going to be substantially more likely to just mention you in a podcast or on a video or within their blog and link over to your site this is organic backlink creation we're not building them we're letting them be created and spread on their own because we create high value quality content now let's quickly go back to that idea that it's totally impossible to rank without backlinks this mentality is false and it's actually really dangerous for bloggers let me illustrate why if that were actually true then your site wouldn't just need backlinks but every piece of content on your website would also need backlinks as they're all ranked individually it's true that people linking to your homepage or to your about page does lift the overall maybe authoritativeness of the site but the site's authoritativeness only plays a small piece in the authoritativeness of individual pieces of content on the website they're also looking at the authoritativeness of the author that wrote it and the individual pieces of content so you write an article and now you'd like to get three to five quality backlinks well what does that mean statistically it means you're reaching out to at least a hundred different people to try to get links to that article for each one of those people you need to provide an opportunity for them to create that link so you need to find what approximately 100 broken links that are relevant to that piece of content you need to reach out to 100 different site owners offering to write a guest post to hopefully get two three four or maybe five of them to say yes how much time is that going to take you for each article what if in that same amount of time you wrote three more articles now you would have four different articles covering four different search queries with opportunity to rank for those four different search queries and to get backlinks on four different topics the natural and organic way that i'm proving to you happens on its own our process of search analysis which is what we do instead of keyword research is how we identify low competition search queries that people are searching every single day google is more interested in providing people with the most relevant search result than they are in providing people with the search result with the most backlinks so we write articles with original value and unique content that are highly relevant to those search queries that most bloggers completely ignore and there are still tons of those by the way so without any backlinks at all on a brand new website we are very frequently able to rank on the first page of google and often number one we also use our snippet optimization strategy to write content that is more likely to be chosen by google as the rich snippet which allows content on brand new websites to quickly skip the line and get to the very top of the google search results with so much high performing content on those lower competition search queries we're able to naturally gain that authority which google is able to measure just as easily as they do backlinks and with that trust gained and that authority established we're able to rank for much more competitive search terms now with substantially more content on your website than others because of the time they're wasted chasing down links when others in your industry come to your website they're going to see larger amounts of content and better content that they're going to be substantially more likely to link to naturally and you have enough content that a podcaster in your industry is going to be far more likely to want to interview you industry outreach is extremely hard when nobody has any reason to view you or your content as authoritative but when you put high quality content first it actually doesn't take that long before others in your industry start to view you as an authority on the topic it's actually way easier and far less time consuming want to learn more about how to naturally attract a lot of traffic to your website in just a couple weeks i'm going to be putting another video on this channel totally free of charge where i'm going to lay out our entire seo strategy for 2022. you'll learn everything you need to know about how to get your content seen and how to get more users to your site so make sure you catch that video when it comes out and if you're watching this video more than two weeks in the future i'm gonna make it easy on you click that video link right there and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Income School

Views: 127,979

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Id: 9-tu3BSCIe4

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2022