I’ve been running a number of experiments over the last few months and closely monitoring the effects of various types of links for new blogs.
Here are my conclusions:
1. Always start out your link campaign with a week’s worth of article or page level links.
2. Never start off with run-of-site links
3. Leaving your link in the no-follow comments section of a blog works wonders, especially if you do it on about 5+ blogs
4. Only add run-of-site links if you’re desperate
5. A few good page level links can get you killer results
6. Too many run-of-site links can literally sink the short-term effects of you linkbuilding campaign
7. A mix of about 35/65 between main page and deep links seems to work very well.
So there you have it. A recipe for quick linkbuilding success (in terms of SERPS not PageRank) consists of getting about 10 main page links (within fresh content…not old, retrofitted content), 20 deep-links, and participating in the comments section of 5-10 thematically related blogs.
The order of your linkbuilding campaign should be something like this:
* Start by getting deep links in fresh content on other blogs
* Next participate in the comments section of a few blogs where your name on each comment links back to your main page
* Next get a few main page links
* At this point, you might start doing some social media promotion via Netscape, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon.
And for God’s sake, only do run-of-site links as a last resort (if SERPS are your main concern).
Ryan, can you please clarify. I’ve never heard the term “run-of-site links”. What do you mean by that?
site-wide links – he means site-wide links.
Interesting ideas Ryan – I’ll dissect them fully later tonight
So does this mean that sponsoring a free wordpress theme on a new blog is a bad idea?
Chris,
Not if your site has been around for more than 12 months. The negative aspect of site wide links is mostly for brand new sites.
Ryan,
One point I disagree with:
2. Never start off with run-of-site links
Aren’t blogroll links site-wide links as well? In that case, why the ‘never’? If you’ve got a new blog and you’re networking with fellow bloggers via email / comments and people find your blog interesting, there is a fair chance that they will add your link to their blogroll by themselves.
I’d change that to “get more single page links than site-wide links”.
If your link profile shows that you’re getting far more site-wide links early on than single-page links, then you might not get as good results as you would have had with the situation reversed (a lot of single-page links, few site-wide links).
Sponsoring a word press theme will not work. Google is onto to that trick and no longer counts it as a vote – especially true if its unrelated.
Jacob, I do hope that you noticed that this entry dates from 2007?