A lot of our clients get anxious about the perfect link profile of their websites. The real answer is the same as the majority of SEO questions. You guessed right: It depends.
But I will try to give a quick and straightforward answer, which will cover 80% of the readers.
- 50% Guest Posts
- 20% Editorial Backlinks
- 15% Link Insertions
- 10% PBNs
- 5% Citations
- Blog Comments/Forums (depends on the niche)
If you belong to the 80% of the readers, you can stop reading
let’s go more in-depth here for the rest 20%
In general, in every link building campaign, we are looking for three key factors
- Relevance
Best links for relevance are the Guest Posts - Trust
Best links for trust are the high authority editorial links. - Power
No doubt, PBNs
Guest Posts
Guest posting is the practice of writing an article and sending it to the people running the site you want to get a link from with the explicit purpose of including a link back to your site.
Guest Posts are the most common choice when it comes to acquiring links. That’s because they are easy to find when it comes to relevance, and with some luck, you can land some with high power & trust.
Editorial Links
Editorial Links are links that are acquired from high authority sites where an Editor (hence the term) has either written or approved the content of the article. They are usually high quality articles from top sites like news sites etc.
Editorial Links work great and are the most powerful links you can get. They are top DR links, and you will gain trust and power most of the time. The reason they work so well is apparent. They are hard to get. You have to prove you deserve the link and cross through several levels of gatekeepers to acquire them. Usually, you have to be introduced to the editor or build some kind of relationship. Sometimes even money won’t get you an editorial link.
Link Insertions
Link Insertions, also known as niche edits, is when you get someone to insert a link back to your site on an existing relevant article. The name “niche edit” has been slowly phased out over time due to a false correlation between them and hacked links.
Personally, I love them. I’ve had massive success in my Link Insertion campaigns so far. Most of the time, Link Insertions are cheaper than any other type of link because they are effortless for the webmasters and require no content. They are also easier to scale. Perfect for power as you can choose the URL with the most tier 2 links pointing to them.
The only disadvantage of Link Insertion Links is that they are trending right now, and Google will eventually find a way to detect unnatural patterns. We run some internal tests to identify how far we can push these types of links.
PBNs
PBN is an acronym that means Private Blog Network, and it refers to a network of sites that one person or organization owns and has access to.
PBNs are still working GREAT in 2020. You can’t build too many of them as it’s unnatural to have many homepage links. The only PBNs I point to my websites are from my own really private network.
There are a couple of vendors I trust and been using for some years now, and I continue to use them today mostly to power up my guest posts. I won’t publicly reveal the vendors for now.
Citations
Citations are links you get from mostly directory websites and include your business’ name, address and phone number.
They are easy to acquire and most of the time they are also free. Perfect for pillowing. Consider them as necessary if you are trying to rank a local business. The only drawback here is that they are usually no-follow.
Blog Comments/Forums
Those are links that are included in blog comments or forum posts, usually as a response to someone asking a question.
I still get some smooth early traction is some niches with a fanatic audience. I have recently had success in the travel and motorcycle niche by posting helpful forum posts and including a link to a useful page in my site.