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Ultimate Guide to Backlinks, Link Building, and Internal Linking - Part 1
62 Plays10 months ago
In this episode, Ashley Segura sits down at the table with Arsen Rabinovich, founder of TopHatRank, about the intricacies of link building, backlinks, and internal linking.
In part one of this two part episode, Arsen shares his first hand expertise in digital marketing and SEO, discussing practical link strategies.
Together, Ashley and Arsen explore foundational aspects of link building, the significance of competitive analysis, and the importance of balancing relevancy and authority. Arsen offers insights on effective outreach methods, the pitfalls of outdated link-building practices, and the role of internal linking in enhancing SEO performance.
Arsen also sheds light on the impact of recent Google leaks on link-building strategies and provides tips for maintaining high-quality links in a constantly evolving digital landscape.
Tune in to learn about Arsen's tried-and-true methods for successful link building, his approach to creating meaningful connections, and his secret sauce for SEO success.
Subscribe now for your bi-weekly dose of content wisdom, direct from the content marketing experts to your kitchen table.
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Transcript
Introduction and Commitment in Content Creation
00:00:00
Speaker
You might be writing content. It's time consuming because you're building relationships. You have to keep track of all of this. You can at one point start buying tools to do all of this. like You really need to be committed to this process and really understand the benefit of committing to this process in order to be successful in it.
Episode Introduction with Arsen Rabinovich
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Content in the Kitchen. Today, we're diving into the world of all things links. That means covering backlinks, link building, and internal linking with a true expert in the field, Arsen Rabinovich. He's the founder of Top Hat Rank, Arsen's highly accomplished digital marketer and SEO specialist, an international speaker, and a winner of multiple prestigious awards, including two interactive marketing awards and a search engine land award. He's the founder of Top Hat Rank, an LA-based marketing agency, and does consulting for Content Yum. He's known for his innovative digital marketing techniques that's tailored to brands of all sizes. So, grab your favorite cup and let's dive into the conversation with Arsene Rabinovich.
00:01:07
Speaker
Okay, so when you're not at your desk, building links, and you find yourself in the kitchen, what's your go-to dish to cook? Oh man, right now my go-to dish is, ah it's pretty boring. It's ah ground beef with all kinds of seasoning ah mixed with steamed vegetables and I top it with a lot of fermented vegetables, sauerkraut and all kinds of stuff. Avocado, ah everything bagel seasoning on top of it. Okay. And that it it gives me all the nutrients and it gives me everything I need to survive and and not die.
00:01:45
Speaker
Yeah. It sounds very healthy. I can eat as much of it as I want, but that's pretty boring. I usually cook other stuff. There's more interesting stuff. But right now, this is all right. At least
What is Link Building and Its Evolution?
00:01:53
Speaker
sounds healthy and checks most of the nutrient boxes. Right, right, right, right, right. yeah Decent-ish. Right. So when you're not making sure that you get all the nutrients and you're actually at your desk and working, you start us out by like really explaining what link building is from a very foundational aspect and why it's important for SEO. Yeah, absolutely. so you know ah it Just a way for ah for Google to connect the dots between documents, to really understand relationships between documents.
00:02:26
Speaker
And over time, as the algorithm matured, as the ecosystem grew, ah links started being much more than connectors. Links started ah carrying signals, your signals like contextual signals, authority signals, and so on and so forth. And and as as the algorithms matured again and again, ah we as SEO started noticing that, hey, the more links we get to a specific document on the web, ah the better that document tends to rank. Obviously, it's a little bit more complex than that. But ah in in in the way that it works, it's pretty much that. It's external signals that let ah Google know. They serve other purposes, but they let Google know that, hey, this document that I'm linking to from my document ah is indeed a good resource on the following topic. And then that's yeah what the topic is derived from the anchor text, the content that surrounds that, the anchor text, and so on and so forth.
00:03:22
Speaker
ah But basically, they we can you know so the easy way to explain is that these are votes. is many need The more sites that are linking to you, the better. And obviously, it's much more complex than that, and I'm sure we're going to get into that in this episode. I'm going to pause and getting all sorts of error messages. Yeah, you were frozen for a second. Yeah, which that's fine, because you're going to be the core of that one. I'm really glad that all these issues are happening with you. and not another guest. Nobody important. I didn't say it. You thought it. You can hear me, right? You can hear me perfectly fine. Okay. And it's the things are there. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's keep going. Some things are there.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, that's okay. So
Target URLs and Anchor Text Strategy
00:04:11
Speaker
to get even more granular with this, like, yeah, we're definitely going to dive into a lot of that. But what is like, when I think of link building, there's usually like, okay, this is the target URL that I want to build links to. And then you have the anchor text. What's the anchor text and how do you figure out what your target URL should be? Like that alone seems like a really big piece of the strategy puzzle. Right. ah you know There's all kinds of ways of approaching this. ah you know The easiest way to look at this is ah you have to do a little bit of competitive analysis and really get a feel for ah you know what your competitors are doing from ah from the standpoint of external signals that are coming into to this page.
00:04:52
Speaker
And we know that Google doesn't use or calculate or use as a part of their calculation all of the links that are pointing to your page. It uses a so a segment. We don't know how what kind of segment. but We don't know which links are being used or not. So the mimicking your competitor's footprint is not a smart strategy because we don't know how many of those links are actually working for them. but you can get a sense. And then there's, you know, ah certain tools have ah different scores that are ah specific to them, like Moz has, paid ah ah what is Moz? DA, Domain Authority, SEMrush has, I think, website score, Ahrefs has ratings, domain rating, page rating. So every tools have different ways of of really understanding like, hey, this particular page, and when we look at this, we don't look at specifically at the domain, we look at the page, right? And we say, okay, this page has
00:05:42
Speaker
this much authority here, right? So I want to come as close to it as possible to rank. Again, ah backlinks are, in essence, are supporting signals at this point. This is the way we look at this, the way our top hat rank, we look at it internally as a supporting signals. So back in the day, I was able to, and I can talk about this freely now, I was able to put a few words, 350 words on a page, as long as I keyword stuff and then optimize that page and hit it with a lot of links. ah that page is going to rank. A lot of context was passed to pages through that anchor text. These days, it's much different. Google is much smarter. Google understands link schemes, and we had Penguin, and we had all kinds of updates that helped Google understand and cut down on and on link spam. So you know the anchor text,
00:06:28
Speaker
sends contextual signal, the content around the anchor text sends the contextual signal. So we try to understand which keywords, which topics, ah how can we contextualize that with links?
Refining Link Building for Established Sites
00:06:40
Speaker
And just looking at it from a standpoint of how does how do things happen in the wild? right like If I am not actively pursuing links, ah If somebody was to link to this page, how would they describe this page? What anchor text would they use? right So somebody who doesn't understand SEO. like I reached out to you know to somebody who has a blog about kids' names. And I said, hey, I wrote this really interesting article. ah Do you think you can maybe consider it or in your roundup of kids' names? And then they should not give them any further instructions. Just ask for that. right How is that person person going to treat this page? How are they going to describe it? How are they going to contextualize it?
00:07:15
Speaker
There is correlation between anchor text and the keywords that you're trying to rank for. ah That signal is, but unfortunately, as we believe is much, much weaker now. ah google doesn't From what we see, Google doesn't really pay too much attention to it as long as we get close enough. And then obviously, there were like theres there's certain best practices that apply. You don't want to oversaturate. You don't want to do exact match too much. All of those are red flags. ah So it you know to answer your question, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Because links are not only for improving positions for keywords. Links can be built for towards authority. Links can be built for expertise authority and trust signals. So there's there's different ah reasons why you want to build links.
00:07:56
Speaker
So how would you approach it then from a strategy standpoint, say like you you have a site, you have Let's say a decent amount of content. You're not a brand new startup. It's not a brand new website. like You have a decent amount of content. You've had your site for a few years now. And you're like, OK, I'm creating content very regularly. I'm ah checking most of the marketing boxes. But I'm still not ranking for a few terms that I'd like to rank for. Where would you then start in the link building strategy? Would you start from, let's build links from an authority standpoint first? Or how do you approach that?
00:08:32
Speaker
So you know ah we always want to approach it from like let's build links with a purpose. right and We don't want to just do it just to do it. So when we build links with a purpose, if we're trying to improve positions for specific keywords, or we're trying to identify which posts can benefit from link building. right So I have a blog, and I'm going to take a look and say, OK, where am I ranking in top 10 for any keywords that I can consider meaningful? right Okay. up And you have to look at it again from a business perspective. So for like publishers, for bloggers, for monetizing from ad revenue, and that's you know ah they get paid RPM, ah basically per thousand ah page views.
00:09:07
Speaker
and so you know That's what we're trying to accomplish. We're trying to rank for specific keywords so we can drive traffic to the website. So am I going to, if I was the blog owner, if I was the publisher, am I going to spend time and effort ah building links towards a topic that doesn't have a lot of d demand, right? Towards a topic that I'm not in the top 20, top 10 positions for, right? ah You want to do as much work as possible on page before you start going after these secondary signals. And you can definitely squeeze much more ranking potential from properly optimizing. Your content will always be your main driving force. Think of links as supporting signals. So I'm going to take a look and I'm going to say, where is my content positioned? ah Content that's covering a topic that has good demand. And I can potentially earn, like once I rank in the top three spots and I can get traffic, that I can earn a lot of money. Because link building requires time, patience. And if you don't have that, you have to spend money.
00:10:03
Speaker
so So I would take a look and typically like I would say, okay, where am I in the top 10 positions and The keyword that I'm trying to target has decent volume and you have to be the deciding factor for what that decent volume is, you know, ah for certain niches like recipe publishing, you know, we always recommend going for something that has 65, 6,000 monthly on an average and above, right? Because one, if you're getting paid per page news, you want to go after something that's actually going to make you money.
00:10:33
Speaker
So I'm gonna take a look, I'm gonna say, okay, so ah this piece of content, I don't know, potato soup recipe, right? yeah This piece of content, I'm already in position six. I've taken a look at my content, i have ah it's perfect. There's nothing, literally nothing that I can do to this content to make it any more relevant, to improve the intent match or intent satisfaction rather. There's nothing more that I can do from a topic a coverage perspective. I've answered all the questions there is to answer. I've effectively predicted, understood and predicted what the primary secondary intent is behind this query. And I've addressed that properly and structured it properly on my website. I've optimized all of my internal linking. Those signals are much stronger and then and carry you much more contextual content.
00:11:21
Speaker
contextuality contextuality than backlinks. And if I can look at that piece of content, that document, and I can say, hey, I've done my absolute best with this piece of content, at that point, I'm going to take a look and say, OK, potato soup recipe has decent search volume. ah I'm going to start building links to this. right And then from that point,
Link Building Strategies and Relevance
00:11:41
Speaker
you get into a whole different process of trying to understand which anchor text, trying to understand how many links, and all of that, and so on. so Yeah, that that was going to be my next question, because from a strategy standpoint, it's like, OK, that makes sense. You've now identified where you're going to build links to. But how many links should you build to? And how long does that process usually take for it to show any success?
00:12:04
Speaker
Right. ah Again, you know, if this was our webinar, we'd be giving out a lot of ah the prizes because it depends, right? so So the first thing we want to look at is ah we want to take a look at what's happening now, right? what's What kind of links do you have pointing to this page? And everybody has a different approach. Some people like to take a more of like a holistic approach and mimic like how things happen in the wild. I like to be a little bit more measured and calculated with my approach. I'm going to take a look and see what's there now. Particularly, I'm looking at anchor texts that are pointing to... And you can use tools like SEMrush, you can use tools like Ahrefs, you can use Key Search. Any tool that shows you your backlink data in your anchor text is good enough.
00:12:51
Speaker
And if you don't have those tools, also fine, right? Because you're not going to be building links at thousands of links per week. anything you're not going to I don't think an average publisher, unless they're working with an agency and or have a dedicated ah ah SEO team, which does ah very aggressive outreach for them for link building or they're working with a PR agency, is ever going to ah raise any red flags by building way too many links too quickly, right? Like, it's a difficult thing to do, right? It's not an easy thing. So, if you don't have access to those tools, don't worry about it. If you are doing it at scale, you should probably have access to these tools. If you're just doing it for yourself, you really don't need it, right? ah So, I would take a look at what's there now, just for the sake of not wanting to maybe over-optimize or over-saturate for specific anchor text or stuff like that. But again,
00:13:39
Speaker
As a regular blog publisher, if you have a food blog, a travel blog, a DIY blog, you don't have to worry. Then I would take a look at the keywords that are currently ranking for that post, ah for that document, for that page. And you can do that inside of Search Console. It's very easy to do. You can easily Google how to see ah which ah keywords my ah page is ranking. In the Search Console, there's plenty of tutorials on that. And you want to take a look at those keywords. If you use a tool like ah Keywords Everywhere, or anywhere, I'll tell you right now. I think it's keywords ah keywords everywhere. yeah So if you have the paid version of keywords everywhere, it will actually bring in search ah volume data into your search console, in Google search console. So now you have a tool, which is pretty much free, that gives you your positions, your keywords, and then also volumes. right
00:14:30
Speaker
And this way you can take a look for a specific page. So my potato soup is an example of my potato soup recipe page. I am ah number four for potato soup. I am number three for potato soup recipe. I am number five for easy potato soup recipe, right? ah And I'm like, OK, all of those words have decent volume. All of those queries have decent search volume, right? I am positioned in top 10. My content from previously that I've analyzed my content, my content is perfect. There's nothing else I can do to it. I've answered all the questions. I've covered the topic. I've satisfied intent. At this point, I'm going to be like, OK, so these are my primary keywords ah that I want to build links to. I'm going to start with either those words as my anchor text.
00:15:17
Speaker
Or I'm going to ah create partial match. A partial match would be like, so if I'm trying to rank for potato soup, I'm going to so ah create a maker text that's going to be something on the lines of like a delicious potato soup recipe. As long as you have your primary topic within that anchor and it's relevant, that's the important part. It's relevant to the content that the link is pointing to. So you don't want to have your anchor text say ah potatoes and it's linking to potatoes so because that's not what the document is about. That link is not going to help you at all. right So I'm going to look at it from that perspective. I'm going to target the keywords that I want to improve positions for. right
00:16:01
Speaker
So if I'm selecting anchor text, this is how I would do it. I would take a look, again, I would take go into Search Console or any tool that you have, I would take a look at which keywords are ranking within top 10 positions and have decent search volume. And as long as I can answer, and as long as I can tell myself, I've optimized my document, I've optimized my content, there's nothing more I can do. I've improved the journal linking, I've improved the schemas working, ah page speeds on point, like I've done everything I can do on site. Then we go and we build links. ah So when something's kind of already working or working for the most part, then this is a way to amplify it. You're not taking something that has never rained or you're not getting any traffic and trying to build links to that. You want to build links towards things that already have traffic, already have great potential. It's more of that like iceberg effect.
00:16:47
Speaker
Right, absolutely. So again, when you're on ah different different brands, different reasons for link building, like some of our enterprise clients have the budgets for us to be very aggressive. They have very large sites, million plus pages, lots of content, lots of user generated content. They're generating their own links very well and their own organically. And then we can come in and start working within that flow of links to start molding it molding those signals into something but and being more aggressive with it. ah But if you're doing this for yourself, ah you start off slow, you build links a little by little, and then you see how this works. Obviously, it's not gonna be instant gratification, right? um So so yeah I wouldn't say, hey, you know, build yourself 10 links right away, right? I would say, okay, so maybe this is a piece of content has, it's a little bit, the keyword that I'm trying to target is a little bit more difficult. I'm in position five. ah the The documents that are ranking above me have, let's say, um
00:17:45
Speaker
You know 25 referring domains at the least so am I going to say and ah I want to build 25 links to this right away No, I'm going to start maybe with two three links Pause see how it moves and then continue to add from there Okay, that makes sense. So then and you're I guess at this point, like you have your strategy down on where you're going to build the links to. Now it's a how do you build the links process. but And I know back in the day, there was a lot of spammy practices. So what are the good ways to build links and what are the ways that we definitely want to avoid?
00:18:25
Speaker
right So you know the links that are deep links, the links that you want to build directly to a piece of content that you want to improve positions for, because again, there's different types of link building. There's the PR aspect, there's the authority aspect. right ah So i want to build I want to bring links to the page that I'm trying to rank for a specific keyword. right so Two things are very important, relevancy and authority, right? I would say relevancy trumps authority. So would I reach out to a transmission repair website in Fresno, California to send a link to my potato soup recipe?
00:19:05
Speaker
Probably not because you know for a user perspective Google users gonna be like hey ah I'm here reading about how to repair this transmission. Why is there a link to a potato soup, right? And Google sees it the same way. It's irrelevant. So that's a useless link. It's not gonna harm you. It's not gonna help you. You just wasted your effort. So
Building Links through Relationships
00:19:23
Speaker
Relevancy if I'm writing about potato soup, the first thing that I'm going to do is at the end this is again we're We're building links to a specific page that we want to rank for specific keywords. That's our objective, right? So I'm going to do a few different types of link building.
00:19:41
Speaker
the most The one that's going to most likely yield the best results is going to be ah reaching out to other bloggers, to other publishers, building relationships. ah And basically, once those relationships are built, I'm going to say, hey, I have this really interesting post on my site. It's about potato soup. I see that you wrote something about, I don't know, ah ah cooking soup with kids on your blog, right? Like a mom blog. It's a mom blog. She has a section on her site, cooking with my kid, right? And one of those is, ah she you know, she has a post about, you know, ah you know ah how I cooked soup with my kid, right? yeah
00:20:24
Speaker
That's relevant, right? If that post, ah you know, I cooked soup with my kid, here's what happened, right? ah Links to my potato soup recipe, that's relevant. That makes sense, okay right? So, I would make a connection there. I would say, hey, ah you have this, I have this. Would you mind referencing me? but you don't want to say beauty You don't need to say backlink. Would you mind mentioning me there? right And just building the best links that are going to come that you're going to be able to develop is through your connections. right i There's different ways of approaching that. You can do, ah let's say, I have a newer website, but I have a very strong social presence.
00:21:06
Speaker
right yeah And you actually, you have that that that mom blog about cooking with kids, right? And you have a very old website that's been around for a while, but your social is really poor, right? So here we can help each other, right? I can feature some of your content, promote it on my social. In exchange, you can do something for me, right? ah You can link back to my post. So those kinds of connections are going to be ah delivering the best type of links. And there's a lot of agencies that offer this kind of link building, where they've already established relationships with publishers, with bloggers, who will help with that. The other way to do this, and that's the more traditional way. This is how we do it. This is how ah we prefer it done. And that's if you're you were working with agency, and that's traditional outreach. right ah There's no scamming. There's no hacking websites.
00:21:55
Speaker
there is no ah There's no farms, website farms, there's no private blog networks. If you're making a list of websites that are relevant to you and the topic, ah you're checking things out. You want to make sure the website is in good shape. You're checking things out. You're looking at, hey, this this website looks like it's but there's a real person behind the site. right Does it have a functioning contact page? Does it have us ah this does it have a good about page? right like All of the things that like will hint to you that there's a human behind this. It's not a robot or a farm. right
00:22:27
Speaker
Check out their socials. How active are they in the social? Look at last day, they published something. right How frequently are they publishing? And if all of those boxes are checked for you, right this is a good potential for you to reach out to. So at this point, you can reach out to them. You can figure out, so am I going to reach out to them on social? Am I going to reach out to them through email? How am I going to make contact? They usually make contact and you say, hey, ah You know, I wrote this really interesting piece of content about potato soup. I see you have this other post on your website. I have i believe that ah my piece of content ah is very complimentary to and a good point of reference that you can include in your piece of content. ah Would you be willing to do this?
00:23:09
Speaker
And that works. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes energy. It's literally a pain in the butt process, right? ah It's been ah muddied by ah ah agencies that just do this and in mass and do it dirty and trick people. And they email publishers from like, you know, linkbuilder381 at yahoo dot.com, right? ah It's very unprofessional, so a lot of publishers already have a bad taste in their mouth. Those emails are ignored. I ignore those emails. I'm sure you ignore those emails. I get them on LinkedIn. right yep So how you craft that, how you craft your pitch, how you craft your your email,
00:23:48
Speaker
It's very important, right? There's also other things you can do. You can say, hey, I wrote this piece of content. This is what we do. I wrote this piece of content and I would like for you to public this. Here's an additional piece of content that I feel will work very well on your website. Yes, it does reference my post on my site, but I'd love for you to take a look and you can modify it as much as you want. You can, you know, ah whatever you want to do with it. We're releasing the copyright to you. We feel like it will work very nicely on your website, right? And then certain publishers will accept that. They will publish it. And then we have a backlink. So there's different ways.
Authority Building Techniques
00:24:20
Speaker
There's different ways of doing this. ah I think for, like, if I was in a position where I am working, not working with an agency or not working with a provider who does backlinks because I'm limited on resources or I'm limited on money, ah I am going to do the relationship building approach.
00:24:38
Speaker
If you have resources, you're working with a provider, ah you you know and depending on who you're working with. So if you're working with an agency, it's going to help you figure a lot of stuff out. ah If you're going to self-direct it and work with them it with a provider, ah that you can just come in and say, hey, I need to build links. I want you to do outreach. Here's all the stuff that I need. ah You have to be a little bit more self-directed. But um those are the ways to build links directly to, we call these deep links, directly to the piece of content that I want to write. There's other things that you can do. There's ego baiting. There is basically, hey, ah Ashley, let me interview you. right I want to publish it on my site. I want you to reference this interview ah from your website, from your socials. right ah That link is going to go directly to the interview. It's not going to go to the post that I want to optimize, that I want to rank. That's authority building. That's just building, bringing in sites, bringing in links from you know from relevant websites that are not so much on the topic that you're covering.
00:25:37
Speaker
ah that, you know, going out to getting yourself ah to be guests on podcasts, right? Like right now, like you're going to you're going to record this, you're going to publish this on Content Yum, there's going to be a link to top head rank, right? Yeah. Orson from top head rank. So that establishes credibility, authority, trust, I can use, I can take that, I can put that on my about page, say, hey, I was interviewed by Ashley at Content Yum. So like there's different types of link building and all of those things are ah essentially links that help Google connect the dots, right? At the end of the day, Google is crawling a web
00:26:10
Speaker
right And Google needs to understand how things are connected. right So it's not just a matter of like, I have more links than this guy. right It's about really showing Google, you can have you don't need to have a lot of links. You can have like a handful of links, but if they're super relevant, they're coming from authoritative websites that that that are are so focused around specific topics and they're linking to you and they're clean, nice websites, you're gonna squeeze much more ranking power, whatever that is, out of that link, then 10 links from crappy websites that don't that are not relevant. And then relevancy can be established across multiple ah aspects, right? You can establish relevancy at domain level, you can establish relevancy on ah on the silo level, like if you have but like a category, cooking with kids, right? ah Or you can do it page level, right? And then there's like different things that you can do with that information also. But relevancy is definitely the number one thing that you wanna focus on.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. We do link building at Content EM from the manual outreach perspective that you were talking about. And it's literally looking at the site, do the niches work, do the industries match, does it make sense from the get-go. But I mentioned Google, so I got to dive into the Google leaks and talk like, OK, so since all of that happened, did any info come out from the links that you're at least aware of that has changed your perspective on link building or ah should change our strategies at all? i You know what, we gotta apply a filter to this, right? So ah the leaks are not what the algorithm is. The leaks is what data the algorithm has access to. We don't even know if it pulls those data in, right? So these are API calls, right? So these are not, this is not like, these are the ingredients, it's not the recipe for the soup. Does that make sense? Right, so we know what the ingredients are, we don't know if they're gonna be used or how they're gonna be used, right? ah Having said that,
00:28:02
Speaker
Has it changed our approach? No, because we stick to very specific, old-school, monotonous, boring ah approach to link building that is is deeply nested in ah outreach and doing outreach from a PR standpoint, where we're not just spamming sites, we're trying to actually find the match. I'm not gonna give away our secret sauce, obviously, but we're looking for a way to start a conversation with a publisher, right? And I'll leave it at that. Like, am I looking at like when they'll ask if they published something? Am I trying to find an issue on their website that I can make friends and say, hey, by the way, here's what's wrong. And because I'm an agency and I work with clients, um you know I have authority on this. You should probably fix this. not So like there's different ways of doing this. right yeah ah And and i've seen some I've seen some crazy creative stuff, like some of these link builders.
00:28:50
Speaker
ah that I'm friends with, they get so creative. They have ah funny comedic email pitches that they send out. So there's definitely different ways. but People send presents. People will send a present to a publisher. They'll say like, you know, I want to start, I want to be your friend, right? There's different ways of doing this. I like to look at it from a standpoint of ah regardless of how google what how Google looks at link building, right? Diversity is always key, right? ah You can't have the same type of link
00:29:22
Speaker
outreach link pointing only to your deep content while your homepage has very few links, while the overall link flow to your site is really poor, right? Those, that does not look natural. And I'm not talking about like mimicking an actual footprint, right? I'm talking about just looking at things, take a step back and look at things from like a logical perspective, right? Like if I'm only building this one type of link, Am I creating a single point of failure for myself, right? Is there diversity? Look at my competitors. What kind of diversity do they have? They have probably press releases. they have They've been mentioned on ah newspaper sites. They've been interviewed. There's their social links. there' ah There's podcasts. There's directories. It's not just other bloggers linking to you. It's not just roundups, right? So, relevancy.
00:30:18
Speaker
And diversity, I think, is even more important these days than before, just because of what's in the leaks. And
Impact of Google Leaks on Link Building
00:30:24
Speaker
that's where I'm going to leave it, because we're we're going to go down the rabbit's hole and talk about like a whole bunch of stuff that's in there. But without knowing how it's being used, it's really difficult for me to like give you any kind of concrete advice on that. Yeah that that's a really good perspective because so many people are are taking the leaks and now everything that's in there I'm going to redo my entire strategy and there are some really helpful things in that in there that kind of like validate a lot of what SEO is already kind of new and now they dive into a little bit more but from like
00:30:54
Speaker
Trashing your original strategy that you've been doing that ah and has been working especially from like a foundational aspect of like how you guys doing building how we do link building like and taking what's in the leak information and Switching it all together is not necessarily the best recommendation here. It's more of okay This is information to add to our potential strategy or like validate what we're already doing but not pivot and that's kind of I feel like with a lot of the updates between the spam update, helpful content update. It's like, OK, here's things that you can change to your strategy or pivot within your strategy overall. But it's not a slice and dice for starting from scratch, essentially. Right. Absolutely. 100%. Yeah.
Internal Linking and On-page Optimization
00:31:35
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense. OK, so I am curious. You said you didn't want to share your secret sauce, which is fine. But we need some kind of secret sauce. Like, what's your favorite tool right now? What's a new resource that you came across or a strategy that you're doing, whether with links or without links?
00:31:51
Speaker
um So look, the secret the I can't even say this is a secret sauce, right? So you it's it it should be it's up it should be a part of wolf of what you do, right? So again, I'm not gonna give away what we do because it's unique to us. ah But, and I think we'll have resources on this also, ah but like internal links, right? Such a strong signal, such a strong signal. And a lot of publishers, a lot of sites, a lot of e-commerce sites, ah lead gen sites, ah just don't get it right right. And I've said this before.
00:32:30
Speaker
ah Link building is very resource heavy and time consuming. Resources including money, right? ah There's a lot in there. You might be writing content. It's time consuming because you're building relationships. You have to keep track of all of this. You can at one point start buying tools to do all of this. Like you really need to be committed to this process and really understand the benefit of committing to this process in order to be successful in it, right? ah Internal links. and your on-page signals, your on-site signals, are so much stronger. I want you to think of backlinks as just supporting signals. And I've said this in the beginning of this of this interview, ah they're supporting signals. I am not going to, even if a client comes to me and says, Arsen, I want you to build links to this page. Here are the anchor texts, here are the, right? I'm going to take a look at it because I'm an agency, and I'm gonna say, hey,
00:33:25
Speaker
have you optimized this page to be as perfect as you can get before you build links to it, right? So a part of that is internal linking and how you properly structure that. I would spend more time on optimizing and more resources on optimizing my on-page signals, my internal linking signals, and getting them as close as possible to like, even if I can move myself from position five to position four, that's already worth the effort. yeah right And then from there, start building links. right yeah A lot of ah webmasters, a lot of site owners, ah big brand sites, ah they'll come in and say, OK, we want link building. this is These are the pages that we want to build links to. And then we look at them and we're like, whoa, hang on. like This page does not, like for the links that you want to build,
00:34:18
Speaker
or or the anchor text that you want to use, this page is not optimized for that. So I can build these links for you, but it's not going to move. ah I say this all the time, like ah building links to a piece of content, to a document that's not optimized properly, is like putting gas into a car that has a broken transmission. That page is not going to move very far or very fast. It will move, but it's not. So you're going to wind up putting more and more gas, which are the backlinks, which are much more expensive and resource-heavy than optimizing content that's on your page. So I would definitely start there. That's the secret sauce that I'm willing to give away.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. And i I definitely want to dive into internal linking, but that's going to be a part two of this because that's a huge conversation and there's so many different aspects to that. So thank you so much for what you've shared. Definitely for those listening, stay tuned for part two. That will be on the next episode. All right, everyone, that's it for part one of this episode on all things links. Next, we're going to dive into the conversation on internal linking with Arsen or Benovich. So stay tuned for the next episode.