[Guide] Thinking on a Link Building strategy from scratch

After many years if I had to say which one topic has been, by far, the most frequent in this forum is this: "when shall I start doing link building on my brand-new site?"

Here I'm going to put all my thoughts and experience around the topic to give some insight to put everyone with this question, in the future, on the same page.

Foremost, I seriously doubt that there is one single strategy and one perfect way of linkbuilding from the beginning.

When I linkbuiild I always try to think this way: "If a had a great product, worth spreading the word and worth being linked from outside sources, which would be an average natural pace?"

Let's say I had invented a new gadget to help in cooking procedures called CookingMaster2000 and with the site cookingmaster2000.example

First linkbuilding process:​

First of all, generally as a new startup trying to move my product, I would start by setting up my social media, maybe Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and then start posting my site on those Social Media for free and without issues
After that, I may ping some famous cooking pages both on TW or FB to show off my product and see if I may draw their attention. In case it works, the most logical result will be some TW retweets/FB shares being taken in place.

So, here we see a first linkbuilding opportunity that we can start faking for the first week: go to a SM panel and start faking some retweets and shares from a post in both your facebook and twitter pages with the straight link to your site. The amount is irrelevant. Give a good shot with 100-200 per social media maybe dripfeeded for one week (around 20-50 signals per day per SM account)

Second linkbuilding process:​

At present, it's time to reach the early adopters! All the acolytes of cooking shall be using our CookingMaster2000 and the only way to reach them is to go to the "think tanks" they popularly use to discuss their information. Where are this? Generally we can find them in any kind of bulletin board, including forums, reddit and similar type of sites. So now it's time to find this and post there our awesome product with a link so they can start commenting and giving their opinion.

Now we have our second linkbuilding opportunity that can also be faked: time to go for what is commonly called "manual linkbuilding", in forums and reddit and other discussion places we find all over. This can easily take another week and should be dripfeeded at a certain pace per day, maybe 1-10 posts per day depending on how much time we have to do this.

Third linkbuilding process​

At this point early adopters are talking about this, so it's pretty common that these early adopters after, the second week start thinking on doing a review on their sites or comment on other sites because they have found a better way of doing this. So we will see many sites popping with their own review of CookingMaster2000. Here we include both professional blogs and web 2.0 (individuals that do this just like a hobby and don't have the technical knowledge to have their own site with their own domain, so they keep it low key at mrcookingproexample.wordpress.com

Now we find the third linkbuilding opportunity to fake: lets start creating some tier 1 web 2.0 and starting outreaching for some guest posts. Simultaneously, we can start thinking on buying 1 to 5 guest posts and/or PBN links. When to start this? Technically this could start after second week, to first month. Some people suggest waiting at least 3 months.

Why some recommend waiting 3 months? Some people go from the original premise that a site needs a good time to be completely build and ready to be commercialized. But the reality is that with the current test-staging-deploy procedures, many sites go fully featured from day one without MVP, meaning that technically we can start booming from day 1. But it's fine to wait 3 months and start from the 2nd or 3rd linkbuilding process as I've mentioned here, if you feel unconfident about starting fast and furious (check the Disclaimer below to understand the importance of your decissions)

Fourth linkbuilding process​

Now everyone is talking about CookingMaster2000, so the "late adopters" that generally tend to be a little more reluctant to publish anything new without confirming that is adequate are the news pages. But finally, 3 or 4 months (or even 2 months) after this massive spiral of sucess by our super-cooking-revolutionary product, we start receiving many emails from multiple media, willing to interview with us about our massive invention. And suddenly all those wonderful news articles talking about CM2000 start popping out of the blue.

Here we find our fourth linkbuilding opportunity: time to go to HARO/media guest posts/.... and start building from there some links with the budget you have.

Fifth linkbuilding process

At this point, I'm thinking if I'm forgetting one or many other linkbuilding alternatives, please comment if you think of some that I have forgotten. But now, 6 months inside the market, late adopters users that don't have time to test new products because they are very occupied writing encyclopedia articles find their opportunity to go to BestBuy and buy their own CookingMaster2000 and find it fascinating for a encyclopedia article. Suddenly our brand new Wikipedia article pops or maybe, a link within a Wikipedia article relating to culinary good practices including the good use of our impressive invention

Now we find our fifth linkbuilding opportunity: creating informational articles in sites, including Wikipedia and all wiki-type related. This can range from the 4th to the 6th month.

Wax on, Wax off: rinse and repeat​

From this point, don't stay there. Just repeat and perfection all these layers of linkbuilding

• After we have created a massive amount of tier 1 web 2.0, we start thinking on creating a second layer of web 2.0 massively blasted with GSA/RankerX/SEO Autopilot/SENuke or your preferred blaster
• We start thinking on creating our own PBN by owning some domains we started researching from day 1 and start using 3-6 months later
• We start outreaching for niche-edits (after all, some cooking masters may have forgotten there is a new gangster in the city and they must update their old posts)
• Posts start popping up in .GOV and .EDU sites (our good ol' student friend just wrote an article in their shitty university blog)
• We start creating sub-blogs to build our micrositing strategy. Yes! our fanbase is growing rapidly! CookingMaster2000fans.example is amazing.
• And last but not least, we parasite like mad and blast like mad! Let's change the world with that Change.org proposal to have a CookingMaster2000 in every home.

As I said, maybe I'm forgetting a ton of techniques, comment below

Disclaimer​

All these steps must not be followed at face value. I'm just explaining a logical way of linkbuilding that makes sense from a logical perspective, therefore will make sense when you justify it from a SEO/Google's perspective. You could make your own justifications on how you are marketing your new amazing product invention if it makes sense in your brain. There is no one single perfect linkbuilding process that will bypass all Google controls for a web starting from scratch. But the most important thing before you start linkbuilding like a monkey is: BE CONGRUENT. Justify from a logical perspective each link you build. Don't go and build 100 links and index them in a matter of one morning, just for the sake of it. Will it be natural at all that suddenly 100 sites link? If we are talking about a tier 2 2.0 or a parasite, it could be somewhat fine. But for your Money Site or even Tier 1, BE CONGRUENT.

And don't be afraid to test and find your own limits. If you ruin a project, rethink your justification and congruency. If you get to a manual action, you will have plenty of arguments. But if you have to agree with the action, it will mean that you did an awful monkey job.

This is more about strategy than volume.



Extra: Local sites

For local sites, let's say we have a brand-new restaurant with premium food coming from Lesotho and our brand-new site LesothoCulinaire.example. Same process may happen in the same order, but everything obviously kept more local to the area of influence of our restaurant (but considering that many celebrities from all over the country will be willing to come to our LesothoCulinaire Restaurant to take their amazing selfie!!)

In this process, don't forget to include in the first linkbuilding process all the linkbuilding in all the citation pages in the country + your GMB + schema in your site that exactly matches all 3 in terms of exact address, telephone, name of the place and contact email address.

Awesome! Very clear and detailed. It will help many begginers arround here

Just writing this here so that I can come back and read it again

Nice technical plan mate !

Really detailed guide, I see that questions asked a lot great thread to link to

Thank you, I will read it when I go back to the office!

Thx you so much for shared

Thank you for this! Your time investment is appreciated!

Excellent write up. When I start a new site (like I have this weekend) I generally keep it a while before adding paid links to it.

I always build a subreddit though in that niche and build out accounts so that after a while, I can drop in a nice link back to my site. Generally, the Reddit link only works with low competition keywords, but the small amount of work is definitely worth it imo.

Ozzyzig said:

I always build a subreddit though in that niche and build out accounts so that after a while, I can drop in a nice link back to my site. Generally, the Reddit link only works with low competition keywords, but the small amount of work is definitely worth it imo.

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Why you don't simply publish on a random subreddit?

I never use social signals and i rank just fine without it, i have run several tests and there is no absolutely evidence at all that suggests that social media has any effect on rankings at all...

Also, I would not use niche-edits but, put that money into building my own PBN where the P (private) is very important, niche-edits are extremely overpriced for the results you get (same goes for guest posts) just a waste of money.

Also waiting to start with backlinking makes no sense, i never wait, when i build a new site i throw around 30/40 articles on it and when it is indexed (most of the time within a week or two) i start backlinking, no need to wait and no need to make it complicated with tiers of quality links.

I throw everything in the mix, do follow, no follow, some comments, PBN links and some charged up web 2.0 properties, cus that is how it also works in the real world with real sites that are not being built to manipulate rankings.

If you think you can outsmart Google with this easy to catch, riddled with footprints method... Then be my guest, but you are making it way more complicated than really needed.

Stop overthinking it, it isn't that complicated!

Bookmarked. I will read later

Thanks for sharing it in such a detailed form

Cool trick.

fc-dh said:

I throw everything in the mix, do follow, no follow, some comments, PBN links and some charged up web 2.0 properties, cus that is how it also works in the real world with real sites that are not being built to manipulate rankings.

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Basically, from what I read, you are doing the same, but removing elements, like tiering and guest posts/niche-edits. I can't see the "over-complicated" aspect you repeat over and over again.

fc-dh said:

Also waiting to start with backlinking makes no sense, i never wait, when i build a new site

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And you have not read a single line. Essentially, you did a vertical reading checking all the headings and bolded parts, and you feel ready to go to comment on this.

Do whatever you like.
This is my take on LB.
Take it or leave it.
Not my problem.

Personally, I will not sacrifice or limit myself to any given set of practices that you feel that only works because it's just your "feeling" or "over-complicating" things.

Noone has real evidences that a PBN works better than a Guest Post. There are guests posts that can be killer in certain niches and PBN links that are worse than shit.

SirLouen said:

After many years if I had to say which one topic has been, by far, the most frequent in this forum is this: "when shall I start doing link building on my brand-new site?"

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i would have thought it was "how can i make xx$ per day/week/month?". bonus points if asking for passive methods that don't require investment XD

SirLouen said:

Why you don't simply publish on a random subreddit?

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I have total control over the subreddit, so I know it won't be removed.

Very interesting sharing. Your experience will be greatly appreciated.

Great write up and helpful tips shared

JavascriptPufferfish said:

i would have thought it was "how can i make xx$ per day/week/month?". bonus points if asking for passive methods that don't require investment XD

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I don't read frequently the making money subforums, but you probably be right in this case. I must specify the "SEO" subforums