You probably think that I am going to tell you the usual stuff about great content and link bait and how to get other website owners or visitors of a website to link to your site without you actually doing it – but that is not the case. It is a lot simpler than that.
So what is link building? Some might define it as: “Putting a link referring to your site onto another website (or have it put there by someone else).” But one crucial thing is missing here. The question is, WHY do you build a particular link. Do you or the website owner want the visitors to click on that link? For example, an affiliate link? Or do you want this link to be detected by search engines to increase your rankings for a specific keyword?
Well, I am talking about the latter – and here is where it gets interesting because this, of course, means that only those links, which can be found by search engines, will matter. I bet you know where I am going now, but I need to take it one step back.
Last year I created a small WordPress blog in the aquarium niche. It was supposed to be a test blog for some affiliate strategy I wanted to try out and so I tried to keep the workload and cost at a minimum. I chose a free WordPress theme, came up with some content ideas, and had my virtual assistant add around ten articles focussed on the topic – that’s it.
Then some other critical project came up that needed quite a lot of my attention, and for this reason, I didn’t even look at the aquarium blog for almost half a year. But as I targeted some very low competition keywords, the blog still was ranking for some low traffic keywords in the 20-30 range on Google and even got a few natural backlinks I discovered in my analytics plugin. Of course, I was curious who linked to my site, and so I clicked on the first link to find out. It was a small blog about saltwater fish that seemed to have been created only recently, and they even linked to me from their Startpage! How cool is that I thought and did a Google search with the “site:” parameter and the domain to find out how many pages were in the index – guess what:
0 – ZERO – NULL – NOTHING
WTF? I immediately pulled up the robots.txt and looked if they locked out the google bot, but there were no disallow rules in there. I looked up the source code and checked for the noindex meta tag – but no such tag. They didn’t even have a nofollow on that link to my site. So how stupid is that I thought – I get such a cool, content-related, dofollow-backlink, and Google doesn’t even know about it! So I pulled up pingomatic and submitted the site immediately – and believe it or not – only a few minutes later, the site was indexed, and my website got credited with the backlink (of course I couldn’t measure that immediately).
Totally upset about my stupidity that I didn’t think of this simple thing, I thought about all my other sites and how high the percentage of undiscovered backlinks probably would be. I thought about a solution for quite a while, and then I decided to implement this as a 100% automated feature in WP Link Builder. So now:
- WP Link Builder automatically detects backlinks based on the referer of incoming blog visitors.
- WP Link Builder automatically checks whether the backlinks can be accessed.
- WP Link Builder automatically submits the backlink’s URLs to pingomatic to make sure they get indexed by the search engines.
So with this feature, You get a 100% hands-off solution that makes sure your backlinks get indexed, and your blog gets credited for the backlinks. So my new definition for building links without building links is: “Leverage existing backlinks that haven’t been discovered by search engines yet”. If you also never want to worry about indexing your backlinks again, you can purchase WP LinkBuilder here:
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