The world of SEO has developed so much today that even beginners know that several factors influence a website’s position in search results, and therefore the amount of traffic and profit it generates. And if you rely solely on keywords, your online platform may suffer irreparable damage. This is where backlinks come to the rescue.
Backlinks – who are you?
In simple terms, a backlink is a hyperlink that directs a user from another website to your resource. The more external links a website has, the more authority it will have in search engines and the more popular it will be among users.
A few years ago, you could simply buy links and your site would rank higher. But Google is no fool, and that trick no longer works. Now, the search engine acts fairly and tries to give all sites equal access to the top positions. This is where not only the quantity but also the quality of backlinks comes into play.
What kind of backlink is considered high-quality?
- If it is placed on an authoritative resource with relevant content. If your link is on a website with questionable or diverse content, not only could your rankings drop, but you could also be penalized.
- The resource on which the link is placed has high traffic and is not spammed with an excessive number of backlinks.
- The text of the web page in which the backlink is inserted is thematically consistent with the content of the target page.
- Your link is not marked with the nofollow attribute, otherwise the search robot will simply not see it.
- If the anchor is a keyword that you use to promote your resource.
How to get high-quality backlinks for free?
Guest posting
With this marketing tool, you can not only get good backlinks and referral traffic, but also increase your brand awareness. How does it work? You post your article on a third-party blog with embedded links to your resource.
Both parties benefit from this. Your partner receives an article that is useful for their audience free of charge, and you receive free backlinks, moreover, from text related to the topic of your landing page, to which the anchor leads.
What should you pay special attention to? Don’t cling to any guest posting platforms. If they have a dubious reputation and their goal is only to create a bunch of backlinks to various resources on different topics, posting on them will do you more harm than good — you may end up getting penalized by the search engine.
And one more tip: write in a “human” way and focus on the audience that will read you. If your post gets a lot of views, the search engine will “think” that your resource is relevant to users and will rank you higher in the search results.
How to find a site for your guest post?
- Google knows everything. The most effective search is based on the formula: keyword/phrase that reflects your activity + “guest post” / “become an author” / “write for us” / “publish a guest article” (your choice).
- Analyze your competitors’ backlinks. If they have posted their article on a certain resource, what’s stopping you? You can find this information using Ahrefs or Serpstat services.
- Join thematic communities on Facebook, for example. There you can find a platform that will publish your guest article and, in fact, an author who can write it for you. This method is especially effective for those who work in the Western market.
- Go to Twitter. It’s a great alternative to Google search. Plus, there’s a much better chance of finding more authoritative platforms that care about content quality. The formula is the same: keyword + guest post/ guest post by + author.
The review game
This game is actually quite fair. Most importantly, the links obtained through this method are considered to be of high quality. The fact is that all companies, both small and large, like to showcase their customer reviews. Some of them only show selected comments on the main page, while others have entire pages dedicated to reviews.
So what is the scheme?
- First, create a list of truly high-quality companies whose services you use periodically.
- Check if they publish customer reviews on their website. If so, great! Post a positive review about your experience using their product and contact them. Most websites have a feedback feature or an email address for reviews on their contact page.
- Don’t forget to leave your link. It is usually added to comments automatically, as companies need to verify that you are a real person. Also, be sure to indicate that you allow your review to be used on the main page, as that is where your link will receive the most exposure.
Moving
The “moving man” method is one of the most popular ways to create high-quality backlinks using outdated resources.
Many well-known companies go out of business for various reasons. However, while they were operating, their websites had high-quality content and a certain number of backlinks generated from other sites. Usually, of course, when a business closes, the domain name is not renewed, but some reputable companies register their domains for several years in advance. Accordingly, their websites remain online, even though the content is deleted.
This means that the backlinks created by these companies continue to work as before, but direct users to empty pages. There may be another option—when the content of the site remains online but is no longer updated.
How to use the moving method?
- First, you need to find reputable websites that contain a large number of links to other pages.
- You can use Google’s Domain Hunter Plus tool. With it, you can see which of these links lead to empty pages.
- Next, for example, using Ahrefs, download a list of all backlinks pointing to this website.
- We begin to generate backlinks to our own resources. If your content matches the same queries as the missing site, you can contact the resources that contain backlinks to it and inform them that the link no longer works because the site has been deleted.
Broken links
This technique is very similar to the moving method, except that instead of old links or empty pages, you look for so-called “broken” links that return a 404 error.
The plan is as follows:
- We look for resource pages in our niche and check them for broken links.
- Stop — you don’t have to follow all the links to find one broken link. Just use a browser extension, such as Check My Links from Chrome. Broken links will be highlighted in red, making them easy to find at a glance.
- Then, proceed as you would with moving. Notify the resource about the broken link. Be sure to indicate the exact page where it is located and the text of the link.
- And the “knight’s move” — kindly inform them that your site has relevant content on the same topic with a link to your page.
Restoring links
Sometimes your brand is mentioned online without a link to your website. To find such mentions, just use a special tool, such as BuzzSumo, which will generate notifications every time someone writes about you.
In most cases, you will find that the link is already embedded in the text, which is great. However, sometimes the link will be missing. And that, in principle, is also what we need.
Send a letter to the person who mentioned you. First, express your gratitude for the mention and ask if they would consider adding a link to your website. Remind them that this could help their readers find you easily when needed.
The main thing is not to insist on adding a backlink by hook or by crook. Make a friendly request, thank them again, and wish them a good day before sending the letter. This will increase your chances of receiving a positive response.
Google My Business
Many companies are now creating Google My Business accounts to use them for SEO promotion.
First, you should make the information on your Google My Business page more accessible for indexing. Be sure to add keywords to the title and description of your company. And most importantly, use a relevant backlink to your website, for example, to the home page.
Insert links to your website in your posts. Here are some bonus tips for your posts:
- update them at least once a week;
- it is better to write separate texts for your Google My Business page rather than copying them from your website;
- don’t forget to use keywords related to your niche;
- banners are also important, so make them appealing to your potential customers so that they want to follow your link.
Social networks
This is the holy grail for backlinks. By creating a business page on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Reddit, and others, you can interact with your potential and existing customers, advertise your product, and share interesting and entertaining content. And when your post with a link is shared, it will create a “ripple” effect for your backlink. Well, you know all this already.
The only advice is to tag links so that you can later track which visits to your site came from social networks and which ones specifically.
Q&A services
Special question-and-answer services are useful not so much for getting backlinks as for driving traffic to your landing page and increasing brand awareness in general. As a rule, your links on such services may be automatically assigned the “nofollow” attribute, but this does not mean that they will be useless.
Among such services are:
- Answers.com – one of the top 50 most popular resources on the Internet. You can ask questions, answer them, and search for information in 180 different encyclopedias.
- Quora – an international question and answer service focused on professional questions.
- It is especially useful if you are promoting yourself in the Western market.
- Stack Exchange is an English-language network of interactive websites, each dedicated to a specific topic. For example, Stack Overflow contains questions and answers on programming.
- Opinionaided is usually used to ask others for their impressions of websites or photos.
Thematic forums
Another place where your audience goes is forums such as Yahoo Answers and Google Groups, as well as thematic forums dedicated to a specific industry. The main thing is to:
- choose relevant forums with topics that best suit your niche;
- check if the blog has traffic. You can do this using Similarweb;
- see who “lives” there: real users or link builders;
- check if the forum has rules regarding the placement of links. Some forums completely exclude this possibility. Violating the rules can lead to a ban.
Wikipedia
Despite the fact that a backlink from Wikipedia (traffic of over 60+ million visitors per month) is not a pure manifestation of it, it is still considered one of the most trusted. However, be prepared in advance for the fact that you will have to spend a lot of nerves and time on a lot of edits to your page and constant negotiations with administrators.
Yes, Wikipedia is not exactly about dofollow links, because including your link on a Wikipedia page is unlikely to give you a direct advantage in ranking your site. However, people conducting research often refer not only to the Wikipedia article itself, but also to the resource they found in the article. This gives you an effective way to present your content to a wide audience.
How to proceed?
First, you need to prove yourself to the system and wiki administrators. There are several ways to do this: edit articles in which you have found errors, or supplement them with truly valuable and relevant information.
Then you can do the following. Look for so-called “dead” inactive links. You can do this through WikiGrabber – enter a query related to your content, and the platform will give you pages from all of Wikipedia that have inactive links related to the topic you need. You can also use a filter that automatically selects links that need to be cited.
Another way to find “dead” links is to use Google’s advanced search. The formula is as follows: enter site: wikipedia.org + “search query” + “dead link.” Google will give you a number of wiki pages with inactive links that match your query.
After that, use a service such as Wayback Machine to check what the page looked like before and whether its content really matches yours. If the answer is “yes,” move on.
Replace the inactive link with your own. But before that, you need to create an account, then find the article with the link you want to change, and click “Edit.”
After that, we save it – click on “Save page” and wait for Wikipedia administrators to respond and approve our link. If everything is OK, it will remain there as long as the moderators deem necessary and as long as the link is relevant and valuable for this article.
And one more thing: don’t add too many links. With Wikipedia, it’s not about quantity, but quality. If there are too many links, they may simply not be approved.
Website directories
And finally, another fairly obvious but no less effective way to get a quality backlink is to place a link to your resource in a website directory. Placing the link itself will not cause you any difficulties—you will only need to register. However, getting your listing approved is a different story. Depending on how authoritative and well-known the directory is, this procedure can take up to several months. Although this is more the exception than the rule. Quite often, moderation can take just a few minutes.
Do you have more foreign clients? Then here are the top 3 most popular global catalogs:
- Chamber Of Commerce – Listings are free, but advertising options are paid. Monthly traffic ranges from 450,000 to 600,000 users.
- Hotfrog – Every month, 1.6 million people search for information about 120,000 companies listed on HotFrog. Listings are also free.
- Nextdoor – They have a very active user base. Not only are ads free, but so are advertising options for business posts. They are very similar to Google My Business posts.
Conclusion
As you can see, there is more than one way to generate free backlinks. But remember – without high-quality unique content on your website, it won’t work. And don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors and check where their backlinks are located. You can do this using SE Ranking, SEMrush, or Ahrefs .