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Google SEO External Linking Guide: Strategies & Hidden Opportunities

‘‘What Google SEO Optimizers Don’t Know About External Linking: From Basic Strategies to Overlooked Opportunities

“Content is king, external links are queen” - in the battlefield of Google SEO, external links are still a very important ranking factor! But there are so many types of external links, how to choose or what opportunities there are, 90% of people may not know.

Today, from the opportunity of [Basic Type → Stage Strategy → Ignored], we will disassemble the external link gameplay that can really increase the weight, and teach you how to improve quickly!

01 Several core external link types and their characteristics

1 Dofollow (transfer weight) & Nofollow (do not transfer weight)

Nofollow external link example:

<a href="https://www.mww2.com" rel="nofollow">Link text</a>


Dofollow external link example:

<a href="https://www.mww2.com">Link text</a>

If the hyperlink code contains the rel=“nofollow” field, it means nofollow, without this code it means dofollow. If you want to improve the website weight, you must build Dofollow external links

2 According to the anchor text type

<a href="https://www.mww2.com"><img src="https://pic.mww2.com/mww2.webp" alt="image description"></a>

Generally speaking, the recommended order is: text anchor text > naked link > image external link

3 Classification by website type

3.1 Guest Post Links

Publish original articles on other blog sites with external links. The topics of these sites are usually related to our products/industries
Features: High relevance, negotiable Dofollow (needs high-quality and natural content), and acceptable prices (mid-quality articles cost tens of dollars per article, and excellent articles cost hundreds to thousands of dollars). It is recommended for most SEO optimizers.

Brand links published on media platforms through press releases. They come from high-powered and authoritative news websites (such as CNET). They have high weight transfer and high user trust.
Features: PR platform (such as PR Newswire) links are forced to be Nofollow, and are mainly naked links, usually appearing at the end of the article. The price varies greatly depending on the media, especially suitable for brand promotion!

Links added by social media platforms such as Facebook/LinkedIn/Youtube in profile pages, posts or video comments.
Features: Free!!! The platform is forced to be nofollow. Although it does not pass on authority, it is free and also helps brand exposure. We strongly encourage everyone to do it.
Especially under the profile page of the social media account, you must put a naked link to the website.
Social media posts may not be included, but the homepage will be included, especially if the brand has a certain influence on social media, this method can pass on authority!

Links embedded in answers on platforms such as Quora/Reddit
Features: Platforms force Nofollow and do not pass on authority

Links in industry forum posts or signatures.
Features: Same as the Q&A platform links above, forced Nofollow, no weight transfer, both require a lot of time. In comparison, the input-output ratio is not high!

Homepage links exchanged between websites, this is more common in China. There are fewer in foreign countries, not very suitable for Google SEO.

Links submitted to business/industry directories. Many years ago, the most popular directory website was called DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/), which has been closed. However, different industries usually have their own directory websites, which are relatively low-cost or even free.

5% of blogs automatically add Nofollow to the external links left in the comment section of blog articles, and excessive operation can easily trigger Spam detection.

There are many types of external links. The Guest Post and PR are relatively high-quality and relatively expensive.
At the same time, for many brands, building external links is a very labor-intensive job. It is recommended that you buy external links directly! So where should you buy them, and what types of external links should you buy at different stages?

2.1 In the initial stage of the website

When the website has just been built or SEO has just been launched, with limited manpower and budget, it is highly recommended to start with basic external links.
First, the budget is not that high. At the same time, these external links can not only increase the weight of the website, but also attract search engine crawlers to crawl pages through external links, so that the new content of the website can be included faster.

Recommended external link forms:

You can find resources on platforms such as Upwork or Fiver to purchase channels

2.2 The website has a certain degree of popularity and needs to be improved

Recommendation: Build high-quality external links, focusing on quality rather than quantity
You can analyze the industry’s more outstanding competitors and directly copy homework.
The recommended tools are Aherf/SERUSH


Click on the referring domain name to see the specific external links. Below are all the links filtered for Dofollow.
You can also do further filtering according to your needs.

How to judge whether the external links of the competitor’s website are worth copying?
It is recommended that you focus on quality rather than quantity, and look at the referring domain name instead of the number of backlinks.
At the same time, you can also observe the growth trend of the external link domain name of this website.
The process is as follows:
click on the backlink profile -> to see the traffic trend and traffic of the referring domain name.

If the trend is good, the traffic is good, and the number of referral domains is large (for example, thousands), then this type of external links is definitely worth our careful study and copying.
After finding these external links, you can try to actively contact them or find service providers through platforms such as upwork to help reach them.
At the same time, PR and high-quality Guest Post are especially recommended at this stage.
(The above has briefly introduced the excellence of these two types of external links, so I won’t repeat them here)

For example, after one of our pages is deleted or the product is offline, the page has a 404 error.
This type of external link is our first priority.
How to find these? It is recommended to use the ahrefs tool to enter the domain name -> Click on the lower left corner to sort by the number of backlinks -> Filter out the HTTP status code -> 404 page not found -> Display the results to get the following picture

The most direct way to do this kind of external links is to do a 301 redirect for the offline external links!

Most brand companies will publish PR articles when major news or product releases.
PR usually belongs to the category of brand, so it is usually led by the brand department, but the brand department may not have the SEO thinking and ignore the opportunity to build high-authority external links.
It is recommended to communicate with the brand department regularly and share what you have. One thing, double effect!
At the same time, you can also use data to present to the brand department to let them understand the value of high-quality external links for long-term brand exposure!
This way they will be more motivated to do so!
PR external link delivery strategy:

Brand mention external links refer to those web pages that mention your brand in the content but do not add corresponding links.
This method is essentially converting existing brand exposure into actual SEO value.
When other websites mention your brand spontaneously, it means that you have gained a certain level of industry recognition.
At this time, through professional communication, it is easy to convert these mentions into high-quality backlinks.
We can find these mention opportunities through brand monitoring tools, and then politely ask the other party to add a link on the grounds of providing more references or supplementary information.
This method has a high success rate because websites are usually willing to provide readers with more valuable sources of information.

Recommended through ahrefs:
Taking mww2 as an example, open Ahrefs and enter in Content Exploer:

Anker -site:mww2.com

The purpose of including “-site:someweb.com” in the search term is to exclude pages containing someweb.com’s own website in the results, which is the same as the use of the “-” parameter in Google’s advanced search instructions.

After searching, Ahrefs will list all the pages that mention the brand word, more than 7 million pages, and the corresponding parameters of these pages: domain authority, number of external linking domains, estimated SEO traffic, etc.
Of course, you can also use the filter in the upper right corner to select the results you think are more important.

This method may not be so friendly to small brands

04

The key to social media external link construction is not the link inserted when posting (such links are usually not included in Google and are nofollow attributes), but an often overlooked position: the “official website” link column in the social media account profile page.
Although it is also nofollow, when Google has enough trust in your brand’s official social media platform profile page, it will also have a weight transfer effect.
The most important thing is that these social media platforms are under the control of the brand itself.
Adding a link to the official website homepage is just so easy!
So it is strongly recommended to add it on all our platforms:
✅ Corporate homepages on platforms such as Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/ Instagram
✅ TK/Youtube, etc.

External link construction is a key link in SEO, and the focus is on obtaining high-quality, highly relevant dofollow external links.
It is recommended to give priority to high-quality channels such as guest blogs and news external links, and at the same time make good use of often overlooked opportunities such as brand mentions and invalid external link repairs.
Differentiated strategies should be adopted at different stages of development to continuously optimize the quality of external links.

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