A Common Sense, Safe & Effective Link Building Strategy You Might Be Overlooking

If you’re a frequent reader of this space, you know that we tend to emphasize focusing on developing your brand and branded content where four years ago that energy would be spent trawling the web for links. And as any savvy and effective link builder will tell you, while a successful piece of content can cause a specific page of your site to do well, it might not be the page that you’re aiming to rank. After all, for all the “links are dead” talk from the past few years, getting a quality link pointed to an underperforming page can truly be a silver bullet when it comes to your rankings.

But let’s be honest: whereas building links to a new or underperforming page on your site can certainly help, the days of paying a few hundred dollars for a few hundred links are long gone, replaced by long days spent maybe generating one or two new links (of course, there are those link building mavens out there that make a day of link building worth the investment, but they are far less common these days.) That said, there are still plenty of time-tested techniques that work, and one in particular is the practice of link reclamation.

Link reclamation can actually refer to two totally separate, but equally easy strategies. The most common is the process of identifying and fixing any 404 pages that may be depriving you of precious links. And a free and easy way to start reclaiming sites whose links to you are causing 404 errors is to use Google Web Search Console and check the Crawl Errors report, which will not show all of the errors, but still give you a fine start and show you the URLs of the websites causing the error.

Now, this is the part where things get slightly updated. While it used to be that you had to contact the webmaster of the linking domain and point out that they misspelled the URL to your site, if you know how to upload an .htaccess file to a 301 redirect signaling the correct URL, you can fix this issue and gain a number of links very quickly. Of course, the practice of reaching out to webmasters for link opportunities is a time-honored one and another way link reclamation can work is when you see an article that mentions your company’s name but does not link to your site. This writer was shocked at the tens of links a week he was able to get for a former for-profit educational institution that was often in the news by just reaching out to the writer or webmaster with a friendly email asking if they would consider linking to your company as some visitors might indeed want that. Just try to pitch in terms of improving user experience and not simple link grabbing as your chances of securing a fresh new link are vastly improved.

So if you’ve hit a wall in your link-building strategy, get into your Google Webmaster Console and start sussing out those broken links. And if you’re looking for a tool to help finish the job Google started, Ahrefs has an extremely powerful capability. Finally, in case you don’t already have a Google alert for your brand name, set one up and look for mentions without links.