Four Types of Links to Help Improve Your SEO Game
Over the past few days, I’ve been watching a few videos from the Whiteboard Friday collection that the crew at SEOmoz has available at their Vimeo site. By “a few videos,” I mean a few hours’ worth of videos. Sounds trying, but Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz does a great job explaining SEO in a way that makes these videos fly by without compromising helpful information.
Today, I watched one of the most helpful so far: “Dude, your links kinda suck.” Rand introduced four kinds of links and, if you need to troubleshoot some SEO problems, checking your links would be a great place to start. While the quality and trust of sites that link to you are immensely important, the origin of these links can sometimes be overlooked.
As I mentioned, he breaks links up into four categories: spam, low quality, good quality, and awesome stuff.
1. Spam
- Comment spam: Leaving comments manually or with a bot on other blogs and websites.
- Guestbook spam: Similar to comment spam, but a bit outdated.
- Link farms: Creating a number of websites with the sole purpose of linking back.
2. Low quality (most common)
- Bad directories
- Forum signatures
- Social media profiles: This references spamming other people’s social profiles. Sharing relevant links using a company profile leans more toward the average quality link.
- Sites you own: Search engines see this as a cousin to link farms.
- Reciprocal links
- Link trading
3. Good quality
- Partners: Develop partnerships with relevant sources
- Blogrolls
- Good directories: Yahoo! Directory, government sites, etc.
4. Awesome Stuff
- Editorial content: Inside the content frame of a page. Guest blogging is a great way to achieve these links.
- Badges/widgets
- Industry news leader blogs