SearchWorks 2019

1. Effective Link Development
for Individuals & Agencies
Dean Chew – Managing Director of Ayima Asia
A-Venue Hotel, Manila – June 22nd 2019
/DeanChew

2. ● Friends call me “Chewie”.
● Built my first website Chewie.co.uk whilst at school.
● Moved into PHP and system admin in year 2001.
Built first commercial website using coding and SEO
knowledge in 2003.
● Joined Ayima as an SEO Consultant in March 2008.
● Moved to Asia in 2009.
● Have spoken at SMX, SES, Moz Whiteboard Friday, Local
Conferences and workshops.
● Hobbies include video games, competitive pistol
shooting, golf, watching football (soccer), generally being
a geek.
● Short-lived career as a child model 😱👶🏻
Dean Chew – Managing Director for Ayima Asia

3. Goal of today
Udemy.com

4. Natural link landscapes & backlink profiles

5. The basic elements that make up a backlink profile
• The total number of links into your site
• The number of referring domains
• How those domains interlink with each other
• The genre or topic of the sites that link out
• The type of link (text, image, nofollow, etc)
• The anchor text used and its categorization
• Some kind of authority score metric
• Some kind of trust score metric

6. ● Free Guest Posts
● Paid Guest Posts
● PBN Links
● Link Reclamation
● Resource Links
● Niche Edits
● Hacked Articles
● Link Exchanges
● Forum Spam
● Comment Spam
Typical types of linkdev links
Least Risk
+
Most Effective
Most Risk
+
Least Effective

7. ● A full article written on a good quality website
● Website is usually topically relevant to the target site
● Usually contains multiple links to other non-
competitor websites in the article
● Generally 300-800 words
● Webmasters will usually want to see previous work or
author bios
● Should not contain ”Guest post”, ”Guest Article”
● You should ACTIVELY AVOID using search strings such
as “Guest post”, “Guest Article”, “Guest Author”
when farming/prospecting sites to guest post on.
● Almost impossible for Google to detect from a
“genuine” post by the webmaster
Free Guest Posts

8. Paid Guest Posts
● A full article written on a good quality website
● Website is usually topically relevant to the target site
● Usually contains multiple links to other non-
competitor websites in the article
● Generally 300-800 words
● International webmaster cost is around $100
● Philippines webmaster cost is around $50
● Should avoid websites promoting “paid submission”
● Paying the webmaster gives you a little more control
to push the article exactly how you want it.
● Very difficult for Google to detect from a “genuine”
post by the webmaster unless other irrelevant paid
articles are on the site

9. (Good) PBN Links
● A “network” of blogs that are usually setup for the
process of generating links in the future
● Contain genuine content updated regularly
● High barrier for entry with difficult setup costs
● Resource intensive requiring active writers
● Mostly used to kickstart a linkdev campaign
● Or to be used as “tier 2” links into guest post style
● Can be brought down by Google once patterns or
footprints emerge
● Also run the risk of publishing too many irrelevant
links to try and make a profit
● Established PBN providers can avoid being detected
due to diversity

10. Link Reclamation
● Still a simple and easy way to increase link velocity
● Look for sites that used to link to you but no longer do
so (lost links)
● Look for sites that include your brand but have no link
● Look for sites that link to old 404 pages and ask them
to update to working pages
● Very unlikely for Google to penalize you for doing this
if you do it inline with new link acquisition

11. Resource Links
● Traditionally “old school” style linkdev
● A resource page provided by the WM is updated to
include your target link
● Very common to see on local US religious sites
● Links can still provide juice on clean pages
● Very easy to generate links with usually little or no
negotiation require with the webmaster
● Can be overrun with irrelevant links being added
● Very easy for Google to stop links on pages like these
passing any link equity
● Still have a place in a link profile for noise

12. Niche Edits & Hacked Articles
● Traditionally “old school” style linkdev
● A niche page with history is updated to include a
paragraph with your link
● Can be very useful for difficult niche websites
● Very easy for Google to detect
● Usually grey hat but can cross over to black
● Blog post content can be hacked to very subtly
include a link to your target site
● Oftentimes the webmaster never notices
● Can be detected by Google and includes a high risk of
a manual penalty if caught
● Niche edit != hacked site

13. Link Exchanges/Forum &
Comment Spam
● Very “old school” technique
● Link exchanges are generally safe if you use a clean
site
● Very little (if any) link equity passed back and forth
● Forum and comment spam can be used to rapidly
increase link velocity for a new burner site
● Also can be used for a negative SEO attack
● Very easy for Google to detect
● Should never be used as a technique on a genuine
website

14. Authority
Trust
Relevancy
Important linking signals?

15. 1. Authority

16. Measuring authority with link tools
Source: Ayima Data Warehouse
Sample Size: 363,000 Websites
Randomly chosen from a database of over 100 million active websites

17. Metric analysis of 363,000 websites

18. Metric tools comparisons
Moz.com ahrefs.com Majestic.com
Lowest Price $99 Per month $99 Per month $49.99 Per month
API Access? No Yes Yes
Other Tools? Yes Yes No
https://backlinko.com/best-backlink-checker

19. 2. Trust

20. Majestic Trust Flow

21. Visual website inspection
● Looking at the posts gives you the best indication of
trust
● Check for blog post titles for unrelated topics
● Look for webmasters having a page that advertises
they are open to guest posts
● Check the content of the blog posts, they are usually…
● Poorly written
● Contain 1 or 2 links only
● Contain freebies, signups, or promises or riches
● Have multiple posts per day by the same author

22. Backlink inspection

23. 3. Relevancy & Naturality

24. Trust Flow & Citation flow
Citation Flow Trust Flow

25. MensHealth.com
Sauna Website
Relevant Topics

26. Vary link types

27. Backlink breakdown & anchor distribution
< BBC.co.uk >
< PaddyPower.com >

28. Don’t over optimize anchor text

29. Make sure your link looks natural on the page

30. A link landscape grows over time
And so should traffic

31. Compare against competitors

32. Language, Location & ccTLD’s

33. Generate Social Signals

34. Linkable Content

36. Crafting linkable content
● Natural link generation is very difficult
● It is very difficult to get webmasters to link into
category pages, sales pages, money pages etc
● Use a keyword tool such as ahrefs to see what niche
questions people are asking in Google
● You don’t NEED to create content that ranks
● You can create content with the sole purpose of
getting paid/free links into it
● Find articles that have a lot of backlinks and then
improve upon them
● Contact the same webmasters who linked into the
original content and explain how yours is better

37. Lead Farming

38. Do’s & Don’ts for link farming
1. Understand your client - services, target pages, target
audience.
2. Be familiar with Advanced Search Engine Operators
3. Use synonyms (e.g. Travel -> Journey -> Expedition)
4. Use string variations per keyword, e.g. for “Travel”
use “Travel Blog”, “Travel Articles”, “Travel Guides”
5. Try keyword generation tools such as
https://app.kwfinder.com/ & https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
6. Bulk process - e.g. SERPS CSV bulk export, check and
filter (by metrics, remove duplicate domains etc in
Excel or GDocs)
7. Avoid using commercial terms as keywords, e.g.
“Rubber Shoes” or “Best Laptop” as will likely result
in other same business or competitor sites

39. Example success rates
7 Links Live (3 Man Hours)
20 Articles Written (28 Man Hours)
24 Negotiations (19 Man Hours)
59% WM reply rate
65 Initial emails sent (11 Man Hours)
925 Leads manually reviewed (48 Man Hours)
14,643 Leads Farmed (5 Man Hours)

40. Effective Outreach

41. Spam filters
● Spam filters are becoming very difficult to bypass
● Tech knowledge is required and if you are using your
own domain you must have DKIMs and SPF records in
place
● Your emails must have an unsubscribe link and should
have an unsubscribe header
● Individual mailboxes such as john.smith@domain.com
have less trust than generic newsletter@domain.com
● Postmaster tools will aid you with the latter
● You should “warm up” your mailboxes and increase in
outgoing volume over time
● You can use litmus.com to test your email templates
and check for services blocking you
Spam filters
● Spam filters are becoming very difficult to bypass
● Tech knowledge is required and if you are using your
own domain you must have DKIMs and SPF records in
place
● Your emails must have an unsubscribe link and should
have an unsubscribe header
● Individual mailboxes such as john.smith@domain.com
have less trust than generic newsletter@domain.com
● Postmaster tools will aid you with the latter
● You should “warm up” your mailboxes and increase in
outgoing volume over time
● You can use litmus.com to test your email templates
and check for services blocking you

42. Outreach emails
● Keep them short
● If offering cash, say the amount straight away
● Outline as much info as you can quickly but don’t give
away the client
● There are tons of examples of the web, check out
Jason Acidre’s templates - https://kaiserthesage.com/outreach-
templates/
● Female names nearly always perform better
● Don’t be afraid to follow up twice over the course of a
week or two
● Don’t get disheartened by low response rates. 20% or
higher is decent
● The more emails you spam send, the higher the
chance of converting!
Hi Webmaster
I saw your website, Example.com, and I wondered if
you accept outside submissions? I’d love to submit
an article for your readers to enjoy.
I’d be looking to reference some other websites in
this article, so I’d be happy to offer you $75 for the
admin time it takes for you to upload everything.
I can send you a draft article within 24 hours, and if
you have any questions please just ask.
All the best,
Linkdev

43. Manual action penalties & negative SEO attacks

45. ● Majority of backlink profile is just high or low
metric links
● Target URLs that link to a small selection of pages
● Targets that link into index or category pages
● Same style of anchor texts, especially commercial,
e.g “Play Poker”
● Links built on a narrow selection of topics
● Client site that is not often referenced naturally by
other websites that suddenly starts getting links
● Has no linkable assets on their website to
reference
Unnatural looking links
● Majority of backlink profile is just high or low
metric links
● Target URLs that link to a small selection of pages
● Targets that link into index or category pages
● Same style of anchor texts, especially commercial,
e.g “Play Poker”
● Links built on a narrow selection of topics
● Client site that is not often referenced naturally by
other websites that suddenly starts getting links
● Has no linkable assets on their website to
reference
Unnatural looking links

46. Be careful of cheap link providers
https://ca.royalvegascasino.com/table-games/ https://nodepositpoker.co.uk/
http://www.luckynuggetcasino.com/au/casino-bonus/ https://www.g1x.com.au/news/tips
https://www.teramusu.com/

47. Disavow files

48. Reconsideration Requests

49. Linkdev services & tools: Done for you services
https://authority.builders
15% off discount code “SEARCHWORKS”

50. Linkdev services & tools: Outreach & verification

51. Linkdev services & tools: Linkdev systems

52. Linkdev based ranking increases & traffic boners

53. Philippines fashion retailer

54. My Philippines beauty site

55. Looking to the future

56. Salamat
www.ayima.com
www.chewie.co.uk
Twitter.com/DeanChew
Facebook.com/DeanChew