So, the time has come to revamp your SEO efforts. Although building any links with the intention of boosting your site’s SEO is frowned upon according to Google Search Essentials, there is a white hat way of doing it. With more and more SEO agencies coming forward and claiming they have the white hat techniques you need, it’s necessary to take a step back and properly vet an agency and the services they use.
Since white hat link building is an absolutely necessary practice in any SEO campaign, it’s crucial to properly vet any white hat link building service. Whether your SEO team is in-house or part of a hired agency, the link building services used need to be vetted for white hat techniques that will drive organic traffic to your site while properly boosting your site’s authority. To make the process of finding a great white hat link building service effective and easy, we’ve got five questions for vetting a potential white hat link building service. Take a look below to keep you from deep link building contemplation!
Do They Do Manual Outreach to the Websites They Engage With?
Often times, link building services tend to use the lack of knowledge their potential customers have against them. A link can sometimes be a sort of illusion. At first glance, it looks like something that will help to boost your backlink portfolio and strengthen your site’s authority. However, one big way that link building services could pull a fast one on you is by not manually reaching out to the websites they use for their link building.
When this is the case, it’s typically pretty easy to tell. If the link building service is simply purchasing links from a site, the sites tend to have a very clear offer to purchase links directly on the page. This alerts Google with a red flag, conveying clear-as-day that this site selling links and is both prone to penalization and prone to passing along spammy signals to the client site.
A white hat link building service reaches out to sites manually, asking if they’d be willing to offer their site as a place for guest posts links to be built. Manual outreach to sites conveys a link building service’s honest approach towards avoiding spammy sites and obvious link building merchants.
Are the New Links Being Built from a New, Unique Referring Domain?
If you’ve been using a link building service to build a handful of links to your site, it’s necessary to do some quality control. Any kind of white hat link building service should be able to build links on new, unique referring domains. By having the same referring domain link to your site, you lose the opportunities of acquiring all the power of link juice possible because Google will devalue every subsequent link you get from a site you’ve already received a link from. Thus, a white hat link building provider should have large bag of domains to choose from in order to utilize every link built to their fullest.
One example of link building gone wrong in this context is when a link building provider’s “link” is located in a site’s footer or sidebar. The problem with this placement is that these links are present on every footer and sidebar on the referring site. This kind of link ultimately reduces the power of each link and waves yet another red flag in Google’s face of black hat SEO techniques.
Is The Provider Conducting an In-Depth Analysis of Your Site’s Backlink Portfolio?
Upon the start of link building in an SEO campaign, every link building provider should be doing a in-depth analysis of a site’s backlink portfolio. Technically speaking, this should involve the link builders gathering the site’s backlink portfolio to analyze it for the proper usage of anchor text, ensure the site’s backlinks are rationed throughout the site properly, and that they match the anchor text portfolio of competitors that are ranking for what you want to rank for.
Do They Have Control Over the Anchor Text of Backlinks?
Another key quality a link building partner should have is control over the anchor text used for links in guest posts being built. In the midst of the content generated in guest posts for your site, the anchor text used is important in building the best backlink portfolio for your site by attributing the link juice and semantic proof through the anchor text to the respective page.
The poor quality version of this can be dangerous for a site’s backlink portfolio. If the link building service doesn’t have control in choosing the desired anchor text, your site will more likely than not receive guest posts with generic or branded anchor texts, which in turn will create unbalance and an uneven distribution of links to your site.
Do Their Links Work?
The answer is pretty simple – do the links work?
White hat link building providers should provide case studies and tangible evidence that the links they’ve built are actually boosting a site’s SEO. Other than a classic SEO case study, another way of knowing the links are of quality is if the link building provider offers a free link. But, don’t take the bait too quickly. Do your own analysis of the link – the URL’s referring domains, all the content on the page, where your new link is on the page, and the domain authority of the URL the link is being built on. Remember that if your backlink portfolio consists of low quality referring domains, your site will take the hit as well, and so will your business’ pockets.
Most of the time, finding a white hat link building service isn’t the easiest thing to do, but approaching link building with these practices helps to avoid the obvious characteristics of a link that Google would otherwise penalize a site for. It may be easiest to go with a top rated SEO agency who can get your site proper links built. Get a free quote today and see what Victorious can do for your backlink portfolio, your link building efforts, and your site’s overall search engine optimization.