Automated Link Building Tools – Are They Still Helpful?

This guest post is by Mark Baleos

Penguin and Panda has left many link-builders and websites in the lurch. The question uppermost in the minds of most website owners who have experienced significant drop in their rankings can be easily ascertained: Automated Link Building Tools – Are They Still Helpful? Many website owners are unsure as to where they must target their link building efforts, as building new links may actually hurt their situation.

First thing that you need to understand about Penguin is that it is a quality-control update. Although Penguin has impacted a huge 3.1% of all standard search queries, the foundations of its mythic proportions is still based on an algorithm. Since it is based on a mathematical calculation, it is possible to zero in on the various factors controlling the process and manipulate them to desired ends.

It’s black… It’s white… It’s a Penguin!

If you need to control a beast, you need to know its nature thoroughly first. Penguin is not an exception to this rule. What it does is to examine a website’s inbound link profile metrics to discover “unnatural” behavior that is mainly denoted by the anchor text. If Penguin has jabbed you with its beak, then it is probably because of an over-optimized inbound link profile. This is in turn decided by your inbound link profile and the calculation of the distribution ratio of your anchor text.

Consequently, you must audit the inbound link profile at first to calculate the present anchor text distribution. You could make use of tools like Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer to take care of the job. Once the distribution is ascertained, you have two ways to adjust it, namely, link removal and/or building new links to lower the ratio of the negative anchor texts.

Socialize More!

Use automatic tools or processes, or slog manually to share new contents on your website on every available social pages. The point of the three big F’s namely; fans, friends and followers is to share useful content with them and spread the info as far and wide as you can possibly reach. Never underestimate the power of likes, retweets, and +1’s. The strength of viral spreading of messages far exceeds circulation amongst your regular audience and should be done as often as possible.

Make People Want to Link to You

This one should be the most evident of all links building advice, but it also happens to be the most ignored. If people quickly stray away from your pages and your website makes for bad end-user experience, you will get slapped in Google rankings. Each Like or Retweet that your content generates can make a considerable difference. Truly superb quality content can make people stay glued to your website. And once you get that done, a huge chunk of your link building worries will evaporate automatically. People will want to cite your website as a readily available and reliable resource from both their websites as well as social profiles. This is the most long-standing of all white-hat SEO advice and the power it continues to wield is tremendous. So, don’t make the mistake of getting cheaper but low-quality content for your pages whether it be from a native English writer or outsourced.

Make use of .EDU

This one might be tricky to implement at first and that is why Google loves this particular trick. It is tricky because there is no way you can buy an .EDU domain and thus submit content to these sites. Google happens to find them an exotic delicacy guaranteed to provide quick gratification. That is why a single link to your website on an .EDU site can mean a lot. This means that someone from that academic fraternity endorsed or wrote about your site.

Make Your Inner-Pages Count!

This should be self-evident, but a surprisingly large number of websites continue to use their home page in most of their backlinks. Google tends to take an exception to this and with reason. If you continue to link only to your homepage, it shows that you voluntarily downplay the importance of your content pages. If you don’t take your own content seriously, why should Google?  There can be no replacement for natural links pointing to a variety of inner content pages.

Internal links too merit equal importance as external ones. You can only improve the overall user experience of your site by focusing on improving the internal site structure. Make sure that the correct keywords are highlighted in an aesthetically pleasing manner and that they all point to the right pages within your site. You can even use some tools available online to automate the process and make your pages easier to browse for your users as well as search engines.

Don’t get too many, but get the good ones

If this was true before, it has more or less become a rule now after the Penguin update. Google discounts large number of backlinks if the average comprises of so-called untrustworthy sites. The focus should be on getting quality links from within your niche of industry or expertise.

Make use of the fantastic feature of guest posting and try and submit really high quality content to reputable websites. A single high quality blog post can do a lot better than hundreds of low quality posts.

Dubious quality mass directory submissions and other automated links do not really work anymore after the Penguin update as most spamming techniques have been heavily clamped down on. A lot of directory sites have been pushed down by search engines since their content tend to prove irrelevant and used only for the purpose of links. Directory submission can only be useful if they happen to possess relevant content, are organized according to legible and logical classification parameters and regularly perused for the purpose of getting information. Directories are useful if they are indexed by search engines and have stringent editorial review processes. Too many submissions to different directories can hamper your endeavors as can a submission to an ad-heavy directory.

About guest blogger
Mark Baleos is a freelance Online Marketing and Technology writer. He is currently writing guest posts on behalf of WebDrive.co.nz, a B2B company that provides a full range of web hosting & technology products to corporations & web development companies.

Image courtesy of blog.robotictradingsystems.com

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