Publish a “guest” article, ethics and quality.

Whereas before April 2012 it only took a few listings in directories and a few blog comments to see a website rise on its heavily optimized anchor queries, netlinking is now a high-flying exercise punished by penguin for the slightest wrong move…

Three years and six updates of Penguin have gone through this, sending the easy linking references that SEOs had enjoyed until then waltzing.

However, directory links (the good ones), forum participations and blog comments (the good ones too) are not totally obsolete (Google says so here), but these practices have lost their luster and their unethical abuse incurs penalization in the more or less long term.
It is no longer a question of quantity but of quality and link profile.

Links to many pages of the site

Backlinking has completely changed its pace.

Adapt or disappear.

The first effects of the abuses regulated by Penguin: the great clean-up that caused the disappearance of a number of sites considered as “S.A.

• Link farms
• Rogue article publishing sites
• Sites benefiting from a frenzied and unnatural linking
• Sub-blogs with “boiled” content created on the fly and alienated from the netlinking of a ” wheel ” for example.

Once the punishment has been applied: two alternatives

1. A long, tedious and expensive clean-up work with a request for reconsideration from Google. (There are good articles on this subject: I quote one here .

Or

2. Start clean with a new NDD (without the old content and without redirects)

In both cases, this is an expensive step for the owners of the affected sites, who were not always aware of the illegal practices of their SEO agency.

Getting out of a penalty

I have been approached in several cases of penalized sites and, after having suffered enormously to get a site out of a penalty, I decided to no longer accept this type of contract considering that it is faster to reassemble and optimize a new site. (and too bad for the loss of the corrupted NDD…)

This way of considering the problem is my own of course and this must be moderated, because each case depends on the theme, its competition and the extent of the damage…

How to link in 2015? What levers?

Wait for it to come?

If we stick to Google’s recommendations, we should only benefit from links acquired in a natural way… So wait for someone to talk about you spontaneously and reward you with a hyperlink.

• When we know the spontaneous reluctance of website owners to point the slightest anchor to an external site, so much so that the fear of losing their Internet user or of “passing” the prospect to a “competitor” dominates them.
• When we know that press sites are able to put together complete files on a company, without putting (under the pretext of “house policy”) an ” <ahref” on the URL of the website (which would allow readers to visit the site again)

We must consider that preconceived ideas about the outbound link have a thick skin…

However, sending links is good for your site.

This argument, too unpopular, is the first one I use when I propose an article as a guest.

Sending a link to an external site reinforces the relevance of the article by providing additional information to the subject matter.
As erudite as an article may be, it cannot stand on its own, it needs support, maps, references to establish its expertise, and external links correspond to:

• the notion of footnotes,
• references to a quotation,
• references to additional information,
• a statistic via its reference,
• an authoritative reference,
• an original thesis that disturbs the subject,
• additional information designated by the optimized anchor,
• and even pure “bibliographic” references.

What quality connections do we have left?

A few sites give excellent answers to this question about the query ” quality links “, and I won’t rewrite the advice given in these enlightened articles.

I’ll just develop the ones I’ve been working on the most lately.

The guest post or item exchange.

It remains ethical to publish a quality article on a site with a related theme.

Voluntary specifications

These publications will have to meet strict specifications that will guarantee their validity.

• The sites involved must be of quality
• The articles will also be of high quality, informative rather than promotional.
• The links sent to the partner site will be two in number for a “500 words”
  • One of the links will be optimized on a strong anchor
  • The other in signature will remain humble (such as “visit the site” or simply the URL “http://blabbla.com”)
• One or two other links to institutional sites or references will be sent so as not to isolate the two outgoing links from the partner.
• The article will be linked with its portal so as not to leave the page orphaned.
• Ideally, the new article will be mentioned and linked from other pages of the site (same linking objectives).
• In the case of an A-to-B and B-to-A exchange, it will take 4 to 6 weeks between the two publications.
• The links will not point to the exact same pages of the site.
• Guest articles will be promoted in the same way on social media as a post by the main author.

Explaining, negotiating, convincing the partner.

To publish on a site whose owner you don’t know, you have to be invited and it’s a real challenge.

• The rationale for the approach must be explained,
• to convince of the mutual benefit of the operation and very often,
• It will often be necessary to write both articles.

It also happens that the owner of the site requested backs down in the middle of the process while the article is written and “pre-meshed” for his portal.

5 hours (and more) of steps, research, communications and production are necessary to finally gain a quality link.

This is also why netlinking has become so time-consuming and overpriced.

But it’s worth it.

On the other hand, there are those who are very open to the principle, for example in my theme, and in this case all that remains is to propose a quality article.

• http://www.miss-seo-girl.com/category/articles-invite/
• http://www.miss-seo-girl.com/pourquoi-faut-il-optimiser-vos-pages-categories/

Don’t forget that beyond the link, the site that publishes you will make you known to its readers, so it’s qualified traffic that is likely to happen to you, comments and that’s priceless.

An article written by Kristof, director and consultant of TSEO-PME, SEO agency in Montreal