We all know that quality link building isn’t an easy feat to conquer, especially if you’re starting out with your SEO strategy. Link building services help make this process a little smoother by helping you grow your website’s backlinks and increase your SERP ranking.
Finding a link building service that is both effective and risk-free is challenging. There are a plethora of different services, and each has its pros and cons. So, is there one link building service that clearly usurps the others? Let’s jump into it!
On the one hand, there are organic link building services which are free but take time to come to fruition. On the other hand are paid link building services which are not entirely above board, but allow a site to scale it’s backlinks relatively quickly.
What is Link Building?
First, let’s establish the basics of link building. If you haven’t read our article about on-page and off-page SEO or you’re new to the SEO game, let’s break it down for you.
Link building describes the actions taken to help increase the number of inbound links to your website. The more links you have to your website, the more Google will recognise your content and improve your SERP ranking. Google loves backlinks as it proves that your content is trustworthy and it helps crawlers navigate their way to your website.
The Different Types of Link Building Services:
Experts may argue that different services vary when it comes to link earning versus link building. With link earning the focus is on having fewer, higher quality links. Link building is more about the number of links and not so much about the quality.
Whichever route you choose, it’s important to know what services are out there and how they can impact your SEO.
Organic Link Building
Organic links are thought to be the gold standard of link building. Why? It’s one of Google’s main ranking features, it helps drive traffic to your website and you didn’t have to ask for your content to be linked! To make this strategy a reality, you have to give editors a good enough reason to feature your link. As it is about organic link building, it has to be passed on organically through your different seeding channels. The responsibility then lies on you to produce quality material that people want to engage with and share on their channels.
Blogger Outreach
Blogger outreach is a fan favourite amongst SEO practitioners and search engines. Unlike organic link building, blogger outreach requires you to manually get in touch with websites to feature your content. Contacting editors and websites with your content makes up the norm for most link building strategies. Contacting the right people within the right industry will help your content stand out and boost its chances of being featured. Just remember, you have to provide editors and websites with a good enough reason to link your content!
If your outreach is successful, the website owner may provide you with a backlink by citing your work or even offer you a chance to write content for their page. Search engines love these types of authentic backlinks!
Paid Link Building
Instead of organically having your website linked on websites, paid link building is pretty much the opposite. Here you will actually buy your links instead of earning them. While this may make your approach to SEO much easier, Google strictly forbids the notion of buying or selling links.Google defines this strategy as the exchange of money for links or posts that contain links. Even your sponsored blogger posts or paid reviews could be considered as paid link building. When search engines pick up these paid links, your SEO ranking will get heavily penalised.If you had to search the hashtag #sponsored or #ad on Instagram, you will come across a plethora of paid exchanges. Most of these #sponsored posts are followed by a blog post that includes a link.
It’s true that this is an effective method of gaining links and exposure. Nevertheless, it’s definitely not worth the risk of SEO punishments.
Private Blogger Networks (PBNs)
In the SEO world, you’re either completely for it or completely against PBNs. It falls under the grey hat SEO category where the waters of right and wrong become muddied.PBNs are a collection or, as the name implies, a network of websites that link back to your main website. It requires purchasing many expired domains that have already accumulated a good sense of authority. Once purchased, all that’s left to do is to post basic content onto the pages that contain links to your primary website.With all of those authoritative backlinks, you’d think it would be a great strategy for your SEO, right? Not exactly. PBNs aren’t pure-play SEO. The attractive advantage of this tactic is that it does increase your website’s ranking with easy backlinks. Unfortunately, it does comes with a trail of disadvantages too.While you may have 10 attractive backlinks, it directly goes against Google’s terms of service. Any “intentional” link building is a no-go in the eyes of Google. With little activity and close to no page value for the reader on these websites, search engines see it as an immediate spam red flag!If Google finds out of your PBN tactics, you may face penalisations and your SEO ranking will suffer.
Published Site Content
To be seen as an authoritative source on Google, platforms like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) work wonders for link building. HARO provides journalists with expert sources for their media coverage. In return, the source creators get a backlink to their website.The benefit of submitting your content to published sites like HARO is that you won’t have to worry about Google’s penalties. These are completely legitimate links in the eyes of search engine algorithms. As the links are coming from trusted websites, your new backlinks have even better weight behind them. Building authoritative and Google-friendly links isn’t as easy as it seems. You have to think about whether or not you want link building services that work or ones that have repercussions. It’s a choice between link building or link earning.
