By Some CEOs, CMOs, Managers, or Clients think you can just snap your fingers and make links. Maybe pre-Penguin you could, even if you felt dirty doing it, snap your fingers and create hundreds or thousands of anchor text rich links. You could buy links on a PBN or even got real shady and paid some hacker to exploit known hacking techniques to inject links on thousands of other sites. But today link building is a hard business rife with all kinds of obstacles that can impede the most clever of link building campaigns.
When you construct a link building / earning or content marketing campaign you should be aware of the problems you might face and be ready to overcome them or at least be prepared to report those issues. The problems with link building include:
- No response to your outreach
- Posting the link to social media instead of linking from the target page
- Mis-understanding the request
- Linking to your page but only providing a NoFollow link
- Refusing to link to your page
Now your boss may not believe you or me, and telling them you read this blog may not help either. So I have a live, real example of a recent link request from me to well known SEO Bruce Clay. Now this isn’t me calling out Mr. Clay, he’s a respected peer of mine, just an example of how link building can go ary.
A few months ago I started writing out my presentations and posting them on my private blog website, this one you’re reading now, in order to help those who enjoyed the presentation but missed something or those who couldn’t attend see what I spoke about and get some of the in-depth information I presented. Recently Bruce Clay moderated a panel I spoke on at Pubcon Las Vegas 2014. Mr. Clay also had someone from his company live blog the session.
A few months passed and Bruce Clay Inc’s twitter account posted the link to the live blog and I decided to ask for a link to my original presentation in more detail to help his readers get more information on it. What follows is the conversation that ensued after my request and just one way you can do all the right things but still not get the link you were hoping for.