Will Critchlow - The Future of Link Building
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The future of link building will focus less on manipulating links and more on creating valuable content and building genuine relationships. Traditional link building tactics like unnatural links, spammy guest blogging, and exploiting directories have been disrupted and are no longer effective. Instead, link builders should aim to engage audiences, measure the influence of links based on engaged visitors rather than sheer volume, and find ways to contribute value through their expertise, networks, and content.
![Guest columns have existed forever
Does your process look like this? Please tell me no. [Hat-tip Carson Ward]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/willcritchlow-thefutureoflinkbuilding-130315105449-phpapp01/85/Will-Critchlow-The-Future-of-Link-Building-27-320.jpg)
Will Critchlow - The Future of Link Building
- 1. The future of link building WILL CRITCHLOW
- 2. Here are the kinds of things we’ve seen today
- 5. Info vs plain graphic
- 6. Much of What Makes Leaders Great Also Makes Them Great Marketers Via the White House Flickr Feed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/8191317327/ - Inbound marketing in
- 7. Where did my “submit link” button go?
- 8. Links are dead I want to make it 100% clear that this is not what I am saying
- 9. Links are dead If you tweet that I said this, I will hunt you down
- 10. It’s link building that is in trouble I’ve been answering SEOmoz Q&A since it looked like this All the answers to “why don’t I rank?” used to be “you need more links”. Now?
- 11. Dear GOD. Not those links
- 12. I’m not here on a moral crusade I just happen to prefer flywheels over explosive unsustainable growth
- 13. …and I’m not risk averse I have invested in all kinds of risky things (defined as “things that might not work”)
- 14. This is the last linklove
- 15. The future of link builders
- 16. There’s a bigger problem
- 17. We broke directories They used to be the best way of finding great things on the web
- 18. We broke comments Now we all have to run akismet
- 19. We broke forums Many legitimate forums and communities closed under the onslaught of forum spam
- 20. We took a 150-year-old form of communication “Distribution of the slave population of the United States”, 1861
- 23. As practiced by respected newspapers “The Ebb and Flow of Movies”, 2008
- 24. And ruined it Thanks @ChrisLDyson
- 25. Try to make the design support the data Please tell me this was a joke
- 26. Incidentally, a good use of Pinterest Maybe the only one I’ve found yet - http://pinterest.com/scottcowley/ugly-infographics/
- 27. Guest columns have existed forever Does your process look like this? Please tell me no. [Hat-tip Carson Ward]
- 28. We can’t even clean up after ourselves Without hacking people off
- 29. information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google
- 30. You think: “how can I game that”
- 31. There’s an even bigger problem
- 32. Ad agencies are better than us Honda Cog
- 33. Artists are better than us OK Go
- 34. Celebrities are better than us @ladygaga
- 35. Celebrities are better than us @willcritchlow
- 36. Brands are better than us Red Bull has videos of pigeons doing backflips
- 37. Loss leaders are hard to compete with Snow Fall – How they made it
- 38. STOP
- 41. Stop worrying about your hosting IP address
- 42. Start worrying about CDNs, edge nodes and site speed
- 43. Stop worrying about linking C-blocks
- 44. Start worrying about how many journalists you have in your address book
- 45. Stop worrying about anchor text
- 46. Start worrying about being misquoted
- 47. Stop worrying about nofollow
- 48. Start worrying whether anyone will click
- 49. Stop calling it link juice
- 50. For the love of GOD stop calling it link juice
- 51. Link equity plays much better in the board room
- 52. The future of link builders
- 56. Hire the right VP Marketing or you’ll just end up with a bunch of blue pens with your logo on them
- 58. We understand amplification From Thomas Baekdal
- 59. If you aren’t naturally technical Start here – incredible deck from Jamie @ SEOmoz
- 60. Earn attention instead of shares
- 61. Measure links based on engaged visitors I made you a custom report and advanced segments for non-bounces and >2 pages
- 63. We can instantly tell Mom & Pop from Thin Affiliate
- 64. We know why no-one is linking to you Your site is ugly, your content sucks, no-one knows who you are
- 65. We know how influential a person is Haha. Just kidding.
- 66. Power searching We can find out who people are, where they write, what they own
- 67. Homework time
- 68. Inspired by Entrepreneurial Design By Gary Chou of USV - Course here and blog post write-up here
- 70. = 1 hour or less See here = an afternoon = day or more
- 71. Not extrovert?
- 72. Get a journalist to run a story based on your tip Call 3 journalists & tell them you thought they’d be interested in a story you found online
- 73. Present to a crowd of 200+ people See Justin Briggs’ explanation of how
- 74. Present to a board Bonus points for getting shouted at
- 75. Negotiate with a salesperson Get more than 10% off retail price of something (doesn’t have to be a car!)
- 76. Record a screencast or webinar Get it watched by more than 20 people. Camtasia / Google+ Hangouts on air
- 77. Reach out to a hero get an answer
- 78. Visit a newsroom
- 79. Debate a business case With 3+ colleagues who you don’t normally work with. We have enjoyed 2078 & 4168
- 80. Sell something door to door Don’t want to go outside? Make 10 cold calls
- 81. Run a live usability test Offer to buy a stranger a coffee. Resist the urge to coach them
- 82. Answer 3 customer calls
- 83. and website instant chat I highly recommend olark.com
- 84. Read to a child In some ways, they’re an easy audience. In others…
- 85. Not technical?
- 86. Install a web server I’d start with Apache. Send enough traffic that it breaks. Fix it.
- 87. Build a web crawler Crawl 10,000 pages. Discover how little of the web is nicely-formatted HTML
- 88. Search through some log files Find 3 crawlers on your site that aren’t googlebot, slurp or bingbot
- 89. Build a tool
- 90. Contribute to an open source project Github makes some parts of this really easy. The hard part is working out git
- 91. Make something and sell a copy online
- 92. Work out who someone anonymous is
- 93. Run a conversion rate test end to end I recommend Optimizely. Don’t worry if you don’t get significant results
- 94. Install and play with r Take some Google Analytics data and strip seasonality
- 95. Not creative?
- 96. Film and edit some video Phone camera. iMovie / Premiere Elements. Lower third. Cut a scene. Improve audio.
- 97. Make a graphic Get 20 shares
- 98. Make an interactive graphic
- 99. Build a wireframe Try Balsamiq. If you can’t think of anything, rework distilled.net homepage & send me it
- 100. Remove someone from a photo Before After
- 101. Rewrite / redesign a landing page Cheri Percy wrote about our own conversion rate trials and tribulations
- 102. Write for a publication you’ve previously bought Bonus points for calling yourself a “published author”
- 104. Thanks. WILL CRITCHLOW will.critchlow@distilled.net @willcritchlow
- 105. Image credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/440479819/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/cabbit/5443790000/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ballookey/265114990/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/latzko/6928444437/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/theseanster93/5027792986/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/timriley/246432530/ http://maddieonthings.com/post/45025427385/austin-tx-sxsw http://www.flickr.com/photos/johngreenaway/3356358479/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/99411713@N00/6170567978/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulmatsherm/2221223106/ http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/New_York_Stock_Exchange_Boardroom_-_New_York_-_Flickr_-_hyku_(3).jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrherndon/4630505899/ http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Al_Jazeera_English_Newsroom.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/jfraissi/3710938389/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/alreadytaken/1338047903/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcpl/5125999205/ http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png/1024px- TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/3300485968/ http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Seattle_Ugly_Mug_02.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2596039804/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugosimmelink/1505553447/