Google updates its algorithm several thousand times every year. Some changes are minor, while others, such as the notorious Penguin updates and the recent SpamBrain integration, are major revolutions that change the fortunes of websites in a blink.
With such turmoil in the industry, there is still one thing that remains unchanged – trying to “trick the system” will never work in the long run.
Tactics to fool Google by coming up with manipulative link buying schemes is not only a challenging thing to do but also highly risky. Just one manual action is enough to wipe out years of great work, traffic, and revenue of your site.
Therefore, it is white hat link building that has become the only option and way forward. White hat link building refers to the practice of obtaining backlinks by virtue of merit, value, and genuine relationships rather than manipulation or payment. It focuses on developing resources that other websites want to cite.
Black hat methods may give artificial and transient high rankings to your site, but the crash will eventually come. White hat strategies surround, shield, and secure your business. They are by far the best choice for the future. By concentrating on quality and relevance, you fillet your site from the adverse effects of algorithm updates and establish a brand authority that will stand the test of time.
This article will guide you through the actual steps of ethical link acquisition, leaving you with the knowledge to produce captivating content for obtaining links, perfecting the outreach process, and using technical methods such as broken link building for getting real links.
The Philosophy of White Hat SEO
Understanding the philosophy that underpins white hat SEO is essential before getting into the details of the methods.
To practice white hat SEO you need to transition from a mindset of “how can I get a link?” to one of “why would someone link to me?”
Quality Over Quantity
Back in the day, everyone who had the most backlinks was the winner. However, this is no longer the case. Google algorithms have advanced and now mainly consider the authority and relevance of a site rather than the number of backlinks alone.
Imagine if a single link from an extremely authoritative and relevant source – such as The New York Times for a news website or HubSpot for a digital marketing agency – would be worth more than 100 links acquired from various low-quality and spammy directories. Having too many bad-quality links might trigger filters like SpamBrain, which is a signal to Google that you are trying to manipulate your rankings.
The “Vouch” Concept
A backlink is, in its simplest form, a vote of confidence. It is like Site A is telling the audience of Site B, “We believe this resource is trustworthy, so should you.”
White hat SEO is a way to make sure these votes are genuine. If you are purchasing votes or deceiving someone into giving you a vote, then the vote is not authentic. Google prefers to reward websites that are naturally getting such votes because it is an indication that the content is a supportive pillar in that particular field.
User Experience First
The primary focus of a white hat strategy should always be the satisfaction of the end user.
If a web owner puts a link to your site, does the user of the site get the benefit? Do they get to understand a difficult term better, get evidence for a statement or get a solution to their problem through a tool?
We can say that if a link benefits a reader, then it is probably a good link. On the other hand, if a link feels like it was forced, is totally unrelated or exists only for the search engine, not the human visitor, then the link will be a liability.
Content-Led Link Building Techniques
By far the most effective and enduring method of garnering links is through the creation of content that is so good that readers not only see value in it but feel the need to share it. This technique is often called “link bait,” while a more appropriate term would be “link worthy assets.”
The Skyscraper Technique
Brian Dean is the person who brought the Skyscraper Technique to the public. It is considered to be a very effective and simple method for creating incredible content.
- Spot popular content: Use SEO tools to identify articles on your topic that have a large number of backlinks.
- Develop superior content: Study the successful factors of that content and then go beyond it. For example, you could write 50 tips if the original has only 10. You could also update the data if the original is outdated.
- Make contact: Get in touch with the people who gave links to the original content. Present your new and improved version as something that their readers might find more useful.
This is effective as you give the site owner an instant benefit. You are not purely requesting a favor from them but at the same time helping them to enhance their content with the link to the best resource.
Original Research and Data
Writers, journalists, and bloggers will always be in need of data to back up their claims. By being the go-to source of such valuable information, you establish your site as an authority.
You can do it by:
- Questioning your subscribers about the trends in the industry.
- Exploring public data sets for newly discovered correlations.
- Documenting details of an experiment, revealing that the best time to send an email is based on the analysis of 1 million emails.
Original statistical reports are your citation. Whenever a writer refers to your result, they will do it with a link to your site.
Visual Assets and Infographics
As more and more Internet users prefer to consume content in the form of images, videos and infographics, the importance of visual content is increasing.
Complex concepts quite often appear to be best explained by means of charts, graphs and infographics rather than text only.
A lot of content owners have well-written articles but fail to put out high-quality graphical materials due to lack of resources. It can be very advantageous for your site if you produce high-quality visual content that other websites can easily use by embedding it on their pages. A good practice (and often a requirement) when someone uses your graphics is to provide a credit link back to their source.
Relationship-Based Strategies
SEO is a technical discipline; however, link building is about human relationships. These are people who decide about what goes on their websites.
Strategic Guest Blogging
Because it was exploited by spammers for years, guest blogging has acquired a negative connotation. Nevertheless, it is still a potent white hat tactic if one does it right. The major differences between a good and a bad guest blogging are…
- The Black Hat Way: Producing low-quality, 500-word articles, directed to any site that accepts “guest posts”, to get a keyword-rich link.
- The White Hat Way: Finding authoritative and well-respected publications that your target market actually reads. You pitch unique, expert-level topics that haven’t been covered before.
The primary aim is to genuinely add value to the audience of the publication. The link comes in the form of a bio line or relevant in-context non-promotional citation that adds support to the article.
Caution: Be mindful of anchor text. Google’s spam policies caution against the use of keyword-rich anchor text in guest posts (e.g., linking the words “best credit card” back to your sales page). Make sure your links are natural and branded.
Resource Page Link Building
Resource pages are collections of useful links on a particular topic. You can come across titles like “Best SEO Tools,” “Helpful Resources for New Parents,” or “Useful Industry Links.”
The sole purpose of these pages is to provide links to other sites, and these are, therefore, great targets.
- Find resource pages: Use search operators like intitle:resources + [your keyword] or inurl:links + [your niche].
- Make the Offer: Send a polite email to the webmaster suggesting that your content can be a valuable addition to their list.
- Reason: Webmasters like their resource pages to be complete. You are actually helping them to keep their content useful and up-to-date if your resource is of good quality.
Technical Opportunities
Nothing feels better than fixing someone else’s mistakes and getting rewarded for it.
Broken Link Building
There is an epidemic of “link rot” on the web—clicking on a link leads to a non-instent page (404 errors). This is a problem for user experience as well as for the site that is linking out.
The procedure goes as follows:
- Find broken links: Analyze competitors’ websites for broken external links with tools like Ahrefs or Check My Links.
- Creating a replacement: Match the content of the broken link with your own material; if there is no such content, then create it.
- Reach out and assist: Contact the site owner, and in the letter let them know about the broken link. To make the repair easy, suggest your resource as a direct replacement.
The beauty of the strategy is that it is a double-win situation. You are not simply requesting a link be put up, but at the same time, you are facilitating the owner of the site’s repair.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
Growing your brand will result in people talking about you. However, they will not always link to you. They could pass by “Acme Corp” without linking it to your home page.
These are the easy targets when it comes to link building. The difficult part? Getting them to write about you is already done.
- Set up alerts: Get notifications of your brand name with applications like Google Alerts or Talkwalker.
- Clip unlinked mentions: Go through the mentions and see if the text that talks about your brand is a hyperlink.
- Reach out: Send your cordial note with thanks for the mention and a request to make it clickable so that their readers can find you easily.
Staying on the Right Side of Google
Besides knowing what to do, one should also be aware of what not to do. Google’s spam guidelines are very explicit, and if you break them, you could be subjected to manual actions (penalties) or algorithm demotion.
Avoiding Black Hat Techniques
In order to secure your site, keep away from the following blunders that exist in abundance online:
- purchasing Links: This also includes paying money for links, sending products free in return for a link, or “sponsoring” posts without the appropriate rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” attributes.
- Mentally engage in link exchange schemes: Excessive “I will link to you if you link to me” games are a breeze for Google to spot.
- Use of private blog networks (PBNs): These are often money sites that are linked to by a network of sites created solely for that purpose. Google is very good at spotting and de-indexing such sites.
- Automatic Comment Spam: Posting software is a generic comment with links on blogs and forums.
The Risk of Manual Actions
In case Google’s quality raters find that your website manipulates link schemes they might issue a manual action. Your site will be removed entirely from the search results in the worst-case scenario. The recovery process is long and painful as one has to disavow bad links and submit reconsideration requests. If you stick to white hat SEO, you won’t have to go through this nightmare.
The Tools to Know Your Impact
Link building is a long-term project, just like any other, which means the returns need to be measured. But counting how many backlinks you have is a vanity metric.
Main metrics of interest
- Domain Authority (DA) / Domain Rating (DR): These are third-party metrics provided by Moz and Ahrefs, respectively, and are not directly used by Google; however, they do serve as useful benchmarks for evaluating the relative strength of your backlink profile against those of competitors.
- Referral Traffic: You can expect genuine referral traffic from a high-quality link. Check your analytics for the external links driving the most traffic. Such visitors normally have a high conversion rate.
- Trust Flow: This is a Majestic metric that assesses the trustworthiness level of a website. Having a website with a high Trust Flow means that your links are from acclaimed and highly trusted sources.
Ranking Relationship
The main objective of link building is to improve the rankings of your site. Your focus should be on your key phrases. Is it the case that a certain page that you have built quality links to is now gradually moving up in the SERPs over a period of 3 to 6 months?
Link Velocity
Link velocity is all about how fast you get new links. If you suddenly get 5,000 links in one week, this will pass for unnatural (unless you have just gone viral). A natural and steady growth curve is a typical result for white hat link building.
Conclusion
White hat link building is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time, imagination, and dedication to quality work continuously. Original research or creative writing of a personalized outreach email is much more time-consuming than buying a link on a shady network.
But the advantage is that such a strategy is well defended against any attack. When you build links based on value, you are building a brand that is resilient to algorithm updates. You are building an asset that people — not just search engines — will trust.
The key strategy for link building is just to create a brand that others would find worthy of linking to.
Do you want to get down to business and start creating meaningful authority? Don’t try to do everything at once. Take one technique from this guide, say the Skyscraper Technique or audit for broken links, and commit this week to the implementation of that technique. Future rankings will definitely be in your favor.
