March 29, 2007 Comments
Debra over at The Link Spiel offers up some excellent (and practical) advice about how do adapt your link building tactics now that popular sites are tagging outgoing links with nofollows. So what do you need to change? Well, nothing really. (and that's why I was so happy to read her post!)
Now I've long been an advocate of building links for the sake of the traffic they'll send to your site instead of the potential for increased rankings. In fact, I view traffic as the cake and increased rankings as the icing. Now I like icing as much as the next person, but it's the cake that really makes my day.
Check out what Debra has to say about link building in the age of nofollows...
I was just as dismayed as the next link builder when places like the Wikipedia, del.icio.us and YouTube decided to turn all their links ‘pink’ by adding nofollows to the outbounds. Rats! I had spent a good deal of time getting some of them well placed and thought – oh well, there goes the neighborhood.
But! After thinking about it a bit I decided if I couldn’t get the juice from the link I’d focus on getting the link to the juice.
(ahh...finding the silver lining, I like that...)
She continues...
There’s a very high probability the demographic frequenting the site will click through to mine because they trust the host site and assume any link they offer has to be relevant. It also doesn't hurt that I'll use the most alluring anchor text I can think of to further entice people to click. Once they do it's up to you to do everything in your power to capture their attention and presence.
With the emphasis on presence! If you’re establishing new links, point them to pages with special offers and free giveaways that require registration to download. Give away whitepapers, discount coupons, survey results, newsletter memberships… anything with a perceived value that allows you to capture an email address.
Well said Debra! New links aren't just about increasing your rankings. They're really about increasing the success of your web site. That might mean making a sale, attracting even more links, getting a newsletter sign-up and so on. The value of a link is multi-faceted and you need to focus on ALL of potential values in order to know which one to target for a particular link.
While it does stink that many popular sites are turning to the nofollow tag, the value of links isn't dropping. Links are still the currency of the web in terms of endorsements and credibility. Just because a search engine isn't going to spot the link doesn't mean that your next customer won't.
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