Predictable linking patterns is something that the ever-evolving algorithms are designed to identify and understand if they amount to spamming and penalizing such practices thereon.
Thus, Link diversity is an exercise to maintain randomness of your backlink profile thereby avoiding repetitive linking patterns that can get your site penalized.
In simple terms, it’s using a variety and different types of links to ensure a random footprint that appears natural to the algorithms or are difficult to track easily in order to eliminate any risks of penalties.
By following a carefully planned backlink diversity, SEOs endeavor to prevent any sort of roadblocks to organic rankings and traffic as a result.
You can consider this as a ‘car analogy’ for SEO where Website is the engine, Content represents the Wheels, Backlinks are Gas, and link diversity as lubricating agent.
Now you yourself can imagine how much importance link diversity holds and building links without this can just land you up in a gamble game.
Just think of Amazon and observe how random their links are, flowing from a plethora of sources such as site types, power levels, and more.
When you are building links for yourself or your clients, keeping your site protected for standing the test of time is important.
The sites that maintain a diversified link profile facilitates the website protection & safety in every way.
In an ideal situation backlinks are built by random users, thus any link building campaign must be created in such a way to ensure relevancy on either of the three levels – Niche/Industry, Content or targeted demographic for higher engagement.
Though there are more than 200+ factors that are responsible for your sites ranking high or low, link building with link diversity is one of the most important among them.
There is no clear-cut rule of providing safety to your site due to the nature of the algorithms that may prove any SEO wrong due to its sheer dynamism.
Thus the diversified backlink profile of your website will surely keep your site look natural, random, safe (from penalties & competitor threats), and above all worthy.
Here’s a brief about different backlinks types that are easy to acquire and most commonly used for the purpose, a mix of these links can help you ensure a natural and diversified link profile.
A post is something when you write something on your own blog but when any article is written and then posted on the blog of some other person then it’s a guest post.
Mostly the guest posts are newly written articles and do not possess any age or pre-existing backlinks (inner pages of niche related sites). They are also called power links and are usually contextual.
They are loved as they are:
Everything has advantages and disadvantages. So, guest posts are somewhat more expensive than the niche edit links. They may also take time to work and with articles having no pre-existing links could lack power though may have high authority.
These are also great & pretty similar to guest posts with a couple of differences mentioned below:
The Bottom Line:
The above two are the most renowned & impressively powerful link types which help in pushing sites to the top positions in the SERPs. Again using one heavily may show a particular pattern, so using them in a combination is great for backlink diversification. Both these compliment each other brilliantly and due to the reasonable price point the niche edits are used more.
These links help in maintaining naturalness and diversity all through the ranking process.
These are often no follow links and do not comprise of a target keyword either. So to diversify your target page’s link profile you can use them as padding or insulation for your site.
If it is an extremely low-competitive niche then only you may expect some site ranking with pillow links otherwise they do not help in direct ranking of your websites.
I am not mentioning all types of pillow links here but most of them you can build on your own and generally for free.
The Web 2.0 platform allows you to create your own mini websites and while building links you can get links from users, authors, and website profiles on the other sites. Just keep in mind that these are not just limited to blogs or social microblogging sites.
Some examples:
When you create a Web 2.0 using some great relevant content and link it back to your site, then a genuine and natural pillow link is created.
This is all because the domain will have high authority and creating contextual backlinks will be something you will be permitted for with your anchor text choices.
These are cost effective links and you can use for low to medium competition niche keywords. They prove effective as they offer:
These are pretty simple to make as you can create your profile on forums and social networking sites. You are allowed to include a link in your info.
These work good for new sites as by using several such links their online presence is increased for the future. Facebook is one such platform where you can make your business page and insert your website’s URL.
In no case you can overdo them and most of them are no-follow links which are not very powerful. But they still hold importance as they are brilliant tools for driving trust, relevance, and diversification to your site.
Niche related directories and citations are the commonest way of procuring links for affiliate and local websites alike. This is a place where you can offer complete information about your business.
The entire information is accumulated, stored, and listed (catalogs) proving of much help to the people who are in search of any specific services.
Both are similar in nature where citations facilitate users to list their name, address, and phone no. – NAP. Both these permit you to add your site URL thereby gaining a backlink. These links are free, easy to get, and natural (for real businesses) too.
Though links pointing back to your site were used quite heavily for SEO purposes in forum posts and blog comments.
Still they are good for pillowing but should not be done more in order to stay natural. Keep these two things in mind strictly when you place or get a link from a blog comment or a forum post:
It’s quite natural for a business to be talked about or promoted in any forums or comment sections. Like others mentioned above these are good pillow links, also easy to get, look natural, are free, are relevant, when you place them in forums and comment sections.
Q & A links are quite similar to the above forum posts and blog comments but come from a different site type which is trustworthy and well-known.
Ensure you do not over do them and provide relevant answers without linking them in any spammy ways. There are fair chances of your answer being removed if you fail to follow the rules.
Sites such as Reddit, Quora, and Yahoo answers are the place where you will see or use such links.
They have the potential to drive additional traffic and you should also try to make them valuable in every way possible.
Press releases are again a platform where placing links within your article can fetch your site immense popularity. You just need to submit newsworthy articles and Press releases take the responsibility to distribute them to a huge network of new sites.
These were also used well and abused well in the past. But to keep them valuable using only branded and naked anchors should be the choice.
Since the distribution press release is undertaken on several sites so keeping them natural and non-spammy is crucial.
Hope the above a write up on Link Diversity shall enrich your understanding about building an effective back-linking strategy.
There’s more to it, should you need to learn more about link building, here’s my free E-book on Structured Approach To Link Building that will put a full stop to all your doubts regarding building backlinks.
If you wish to discuss a project or your client SEO, I offer a free 15 minute Strategy Session with no strings attached. You can book a call here.
From The author
Amit Kumar, Marketing Lead & Co-Founder at RankJacker SEO is an MBA & A former Sales Professional with a knack for experimenting with Content & Copywriting. He loves to keep a tab on the latest updates in Content Marketing & SEO applications.
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