Five White Hat Link Building Techniques

June 13, 2008

I came across this link building presentation from SEOmoz.com this morning while doing some research on link building for our presentation on Monday.

While the speaker was mostly speaking from the point of view of larger, corporate clients most of the techniques he outlined are also applicable to smaller clients as well. This is especially true for the “white hat” techniques.

White Hat Link Building Techniques:

1. Widgets
2. Social Media
3. Article Syndication
4. PR / Press Releases
5. Web Badges

These are link building techniques that google / other search engines would perceive as “ok” and will not harm your site by doing things improperly. Luckily for us and most small and mid-sized brands, these techniques are also very accessible and with a solid plan of attack can be implemented with pretty good success. The main thing to consider in all of these techniques is that the search engines view these link building methods as “positive” in that they are actual votes for the site by a third party.

The other two categories of link building techniques are considered “gray hat” and “black hat” because they are a little tricky, and can be considered deceiving by the search engines.

Grey Hat Link Building Techniques:

1. Un-Related Widgets (widgets that don’t pertain to what they do i.e. a stat counter that advertises for a poker site)
2. Affiliate Links
3. Discount Offer Links
4. “Hoax” link bait

These techniques are mostly dangerous because they will either cause problems with the way search engines index things - for instance many affiliate link programs inadvertently cause duplicate content problems because they produce hundreds or thousands of URLs  with the same content - only the link is slightly different i.e. offerid=12345 at the end. Discount links can be considered a problem because some search engines - specifically google perceives them as being similar in goal to paid links. With hoaxes, google may remove the link value if it is brought to its attention, but probably won’t cause problems.

Black Hat Link Building Techniques:

1. Paid Links
2. Un-Related Widgets and Tools with Hidden Links
3. Automated Links

These are areas that will absolutely get you in trouble, especially with Google because they are not “editorial” in principle because they either involve a financial transaction to secure a link, or the widget developer has hidden links that serve no other purpose than to trick the search engines.

Posted in Link Building