Advanced link building includes tasks that are a little harder than intermediate level, but may be easier to scale, and that achieve links that are second to none on the value list. These tasks may require additional skills to complete. They range from things like instructographics to guestographics, creating original research, and becoming a thought leader within your industry.
Many of these approaches make things easier to scale while still moving forward with link building, which will continue to be effective for your site in the long run. In other words, you’re removing the human element from the equation and allowing your automation to take over.
Automation itself doesn’t necessarily mean that link building is advanced, because you can automate relatively simple tasks that will help you later.
When we talk automation, we are not talking about using automated programs to build links. We’re talking about automation that doesn’t violate Google’s guidelines—things like automating simple tasks, for example contacting websites or finding website addresses.
Advanced link building includes those techniques that set themselves apart from the rest of the pack, and let you concentrate on those other tasks that you want to spend your time on.
Create Your Own Tools
Creating your own tools is a recipe for link building success, because the more tools you create that turn out to be valuable for your users, the more people will share it.
This in turn helps to create assets that will be permanent link-builders for your site.
For example, if you’re an attorney website, you might want to create legal contract templates in a software program that people can then fill out and print. This software program could be linked directly back to you, so if they ever want to hire an attorney, they’ll be redirected to your website.
If you’re an SEO website, you might want to create automatic JSON-LD script creators, meta tag formatters, and page templates. All of these types of digital assets work to scale your link building so you don’t have to do much work on the promotion side of things.
There are limitless ideas in this category. Depending on your industry, you could find something that could lend itself well to digital media asset creation.
Create Wikis With Treasure Troves of Links
When you’re creating links on sites like Wikipedia, you could easily find yourself in the cross hairs of many thousands of people visiting these types of sites.
If you aren’t already doing so, you will want to create these. Starting with your own brand is a great place to begin.
Expert Roundup Posts
This is a great advanced link building technique! Think about it—who would this ego bait appeal to more than anyone who is listed in the roundup?
They are a great way to get links because this ego bait will (generally) earn links on its own through people who are listed in that post.
Find specific roundup lists in your niche. You’ll want to maybe get in touch with the curators of these lists and ask if they’d like to mention your resources.
Resources can be anything from your tool, your content, or your digital media assets with your brand name with a link attached.
That’s why expert roundups continue to be a staple of anyone’s advanced link building strategies.
Create Many Additional Formats for Your Content
This one is not exactly hard, but it can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t have assistance in this area.
You can create many different types of formats of your content based on one longform article: create a video, then an infographic, then a podcast.
All of these types of content formats lend themselves well to additional digital media assets that you can then use to build links.
And, once you get going on your own process for creating these, you can count on these formats to work their magic on their respective platforms as you continue promoting them.
You may want to develop a schedule that allows you to create at least 5-10 different types of formats of your content.
More examples of this type of content includes images for instagram, videos for YouTube, PDF training materials on document sharing sites, and others.
The goal is to increase your online presence on as many channels as humanly possible.
Actually Be Newsworthy
When you are newsworthy, you will naturally attract attention from the press.
This is what you want to do: become a newsworthy mention in your local press.
Doing something that’s unusual and noteworthy (and something that not everyone else is doing) is one of the best ways to gain attention from your peers along with the media.
Invent a Phrase and Monitor it for Online Mentions
You can create a brand-new industry buzzword that is something centered entirely around your brand.
However, not everybody is going to link to your site with the brand-new term.
So, you should set up Google alerts to track the mention of that phrase.
Do a weekly check to see how much that phrase is mentioned without being linked.
Perform follow-up with those webmasters to see if they would be willing to turn that unlinked mention into a link.
404 Error Link Building
Finding content that has 404’ed around the web is something of an art. The objective of this method is to help webmasters fix that errored content.
In turn, when you do, you can ask for a link. The idea is that they will be grateful that you reached out and like the free content so much that they will add a link back to your site.
The trick is to make sure that your content is significantly better than what they would have on their site otherwise (or at least a close match in quality, to increase the chance that they will include it).
Reclaiming Links That Are Dead
As it usually happens on the web, links back to your site die. They become dated, and they might not exist anymore.
That’s where link reclamation comes in.
The process is you look throughout the web for links that you once had, that are now dead for some reason or another.
For sites you have a relationship with, you could potentially reclaim those links by emailing said webmasters and requesting they re-establish your link.
Don’t forget about redirected links! These could be links on all external websites that have been redirected by these webmasters.
They could have at one point sent value back to you, but for some reason they were redirected.
Reclaiming both dead links and redirected links can work wonders in returning your rankings to where they once were.
Reverse Engineer Your Competition’s Link Profile
Guess what happens when you dig into your competitor’s links? Something magical.
You find out—exactly—what they are doing to earn those links. Whether it’s through guest blogging, influencer relationships, or local reaching out, you will be able to deep dive and figure out exactly how your competitor achieved the links they have.
You can do this by leveraging the use of Semrush or AHREFs. Assess who your top competitors are in the top 5-10, and download the CSVs of your competition’s backlinks.
This should allow you to sift through and find those gold nuggets that you can then use as your own link building targets.
It’s a great idea to really geek out and deep dive into your competitor’s link profile.
Become a Thought Leader in Your Own Industry
When you become a thought leader, public trust and brand loyalty become your ticket for building natural links the right way.
Thought leaders who have built up their brand loyalty along with a brand following tend to garner many more links as a result of their work.
If you succeed, the articles, videos, and other links you produce will become fodder for your audience, who will be enamored and entirely enthused every time you publish a piece of content.
In addition, it will become much easier to ask your audience for that all-important link on their social networks.
Becoming a thought leader in your industry can be done by:
- Speaking at industry conferences
- Getting on well-known industry podcasts
- Contributing to well-known industry blogs
- Adding your advice to expert roundups
- Creating social media content that has a high chance of going viral
All of these methods have the potential to create specific opportunities where you can ask for a link from your audience, and thus continue to build your backlink profile.
Reclaiming Your Links from RSS Feeds
This is a brand-new technique that Bill Hartzer shared on his YouTube Channel.
He coined it as RSS feed link reclamation via Feedburner URLs.
Here’s how Bill explained the method in his video:
Hi, this is Bill Hartzer from Hartzer Consulting and wanted to tell you today a little bit about the alternative link building method that I have actually been testing. I know a lot of people have been kind of waiting to hear of what this new link building method is. And I’m going to go through it a little bit today. I don’t want to take too long. I know there will be a lot of questions. So I may have to record some additional videos about implementation. But this is essentially a – you can think of it as I tried to put a name on it actually. RSS feed link reclamation, something, you know, something to do with that, when we go ahead and share my screen, and I’ll get into it.
Bill Hartzer
Okay, I’m going to move stuff around a little bit. So you should be able to see my screen here, I’m going to move things. Okay. So let’s say we have a website, this is a good example symphony.com. This were kind of a random site. And at about 10-15 years ago, what happened was we started to add, you know, social icons, and social media icons. If you look at the footer, the footer here, we have, you know, links to Github, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and so forth.
Bill Hartzer
But you’ll notice that there is an RSS feed icon. And if you look at that particular way that is feeds.feedburner.com/Symfony blog. Okay, now keep in mind, the new username is Symfony blog. Now here’s the concept basically, is that the concept of this is that you create an RSS feed, or you take the creating the RSS feed of your particular site. And essentially, you find on Feedburner, you find feeds that have links, that actually for whatever reason have been removed. And those Feedburner feeds are 404 errors. Now, if you find essentially, if you find the username of one that is a 404, then essentially you can claim the feed. And you can claim while you can, what you’re doing is you’re claiming that username – that unique username.
Bill Hartzer
And what you do is you claim that unique username, and then you then connect your RSS feed with that username. And instantly, I can tell you instantly, basically the feed will work again. And there’s Feedburner. So here’s the idea. Let’s go to majestic. And let’s look particularly at feeds of feeds.feedburner.com we want to look at the links, okay. And obviously it’s there’s over a billion links, millions and millions 245,000 unique domains, and so forth linking to Feedburner feeds. Well, if we look at pages in particular pages would be here’s a good example feeds.feedburner.com/erkeksporayakkabi. Okay, that particular name, for whatever reason, Google did not, or majestic didn’t crawl that. But they have found 213,000 links from 4188 domains.
Bill Hartzer
We don’t know whether that’s the 404 right now, however, if you are to use-take that particular name and see if that can be claimable. So basically, the idea is that you take your particular feed you go you know, you have to go and log into to a Google account. So something like sci fi, you know, it’s feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds and if you go to feeds.feedburner.com, you’ll probably get redirected over there. So essentially, here’s a few ones that I’ve claimed. What you’ll do is you’ll put in your feed name, your URL, your feed, hit next. And there’s an issue with that particular feed. So I’m not going to claim it, I have it. But essentially, what you’re going to do is you’re going to come to a page like you know, what you’re going to do is you can name it, put in a title, whatever you want. There’s your feed. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to put in the username that you found, okay. So essentially, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to find that feed. And what’s going to happen is this particular Futurismic feed that I found, and the username was futurismic_feed. I pointed to this as a sample and it had 67 subscribers. Well, that kind of is interesting because that is not only just…
Bill Hartzer
Let’s look at this right now, let’s look at the backlinks if you would actually look at the backlinks to that particular feed, and you can actually see that you know, there are 18 backlinks trusts arel 13 Citations are 10. And this, your futurismic is still linking to it. Okay, so the idea is that, you know, there you go, you’ve got three links, just by creating a re going back and recreating the feed, and pointing it creating, claiming the username, obviously. Symfony cloud, or, you know, the symfony, you know, Feedburner feed is still there, you know that and that’s fine.
Bill Hartzer
But what you’ll find is, if you go to, if you start to look at backlinks to feed.feedburner.com, and you look at pages and you start to kind of digging in a little bit, you will actually now we can actually enter in here, we can actually look at ones that there’s 118 feeds, right, they’re probably some of these are pages that cannot be claimed. Some of them may not. But if you start to dig around and do some, you know, unique searches, so here’s one realhotnewshiphop, okay, 875,000 backlinks, it’s as was a sports and boxing topic. And if you were to claim this particular feed on your feed, and pointed to yours, and use that particular username. Okay, let’s look and see real quick, I want to see what the backlinks kind of look like to that one.
Bill Hartzer
And, you know, just to verify, because I like to verify stuff, I don’t like to just, you know, go blind here. Here’s the thing is that, you know, 875,000 backlinks is probably a site wide, a site wide link from 875,00, you know, or a hundreds of 1000s of pages. There’s also a CTP. So you might want to also look, in particular at had that as well, they should keep a version. So here is a good, you know, here’s the HTTP version of that. realhothiphop.com. So this is you know, this if you’re if you have a music and related site, you may want to create an RSS feed and get some of these, you know, some of these links, I’m not a really big fan of trustful zero. But there are some links and it historically it had 875,021 links.
Bill Hartzer
So here’s the idea is that remember that there’s a couple different ways if people link to RSS feeds, you need to create your RSS feeds, you need to find ways on Feedburner that have 404s then then just basically use the my feeds and and recreate those, you will see there’s a couple of different ways that people link to RSS feeds and one is what most common are sitewide links that you’ll get and that will link to your feed okay to your feedburner. Then the next is in the code in the source code you may see on certain sites, where we see the way it gets there. Sometimes in the header section of the page, you may actually also see a rel link, RSS feed, and it will it will link there to the Feedburner. That’s another way that that that link will be there, that’s on automatically. The other third way is, is that a lot of sites actually use Feedburner, and feeds and content.
Bill Hartzer
So they may be pulling in automatically. Here’s an example. Not really an example. But it kind of situation where they are, you know, they’re pulling some headlines, these headlines, or even down here, these could be pulled automatically from an RSS feed. If you were to actually put that feedback, then your content and your links would then be on that site. I’ve seen that situation, that also you have the Yahoo homepage, where Finally, you have people who have customized their Yahoo homepage, with RSS feeds of their favorite sites. And somewhere on here, here’s the, you know, they will have their own, you know, weather, but they’ll also have their own custom RSS feeds that can bring traffic and clicks, I have one particular site that’s getting about 1000 clicks a day, because of the fact that it is in it actually is in some people’s Yahoo home page.
Bill Hartzer
So just to recap, if you if you, you’re going to need to create your particular RSS feeds, you’re going to be able, you’re going to have to have an RSS feed, a valid RSS feed. If you have WordPress, you can actually use something like Google News publisher to create those RSS feeds. Once you have the RSS Feed URL, which is could be your homepage could be also every any category well as I’ll also have an RSS feed, take that URL, find 404s of from feeds.feedburner.com, okay, find those links, find the pages, find the 404s and then go to your feeds and create the feed. It’s that simple. I have just even a few minutes ago added some more feeds.
Bill Hartzer
Feedburner is going into maintenance mode in July. But you will still be able to indefinitely create those feeds, there’s not going to be a problem with that. Also, I would also mention that – there’s two things, I’m releasing this information, because for two basically for two reasons. Number one, the main fact is that many need to be aware of if you are with your site, or if you are linking out to a Feedburner feed, you need to check it and you need to check to make sure that and who you’re reaching out to because somebody can be using that and taking that feed.
Bill Hartzer
Number two is that on the other hand, there are 404s and usernames that you can claim just like claiming a Twitter account claiming a you know, some other username on some other account. Finally, I’m just going to say that obviously, this could be considered, I would say probably grey hat marketing in grey hat SEO. And, you know, use it as you want to. And keep in mind that, you know, I personally think maybe the worst case scenario is that the site owner could ask you why your content is on their site. And the other you know and obviously you could you could take it down. The other part is that you need to be aware you know, this happens to sites and that people do create their feeds and they put their you know and and so forth if you have a 404 the other part is the fact that you know like I said the links at some point since this since people are probably going to be using this technique now.
Bill Hartzer
They could just not be good links anymore and just be discounted, and not be valuable anymore. So like I said, Go ahead. Go out and find the 404s on Feedburner. There are right now about 11 million feeds that are available. And so they’re after they’re out of the 11 million, I’ve just in a very small, limited crawling activity of the cup, you know of pay, you know, I have been able to find at least 100,000 that have 404s that are claimable. I’ve been doing I’ve been doing this for a few months and one term. After four months, it does look like the links are still good and everything’s working fine.
Bill Hartzer
If you have any questions don’t forget to make comment below. And if you do feel that this is a good link building tip, for you personally, and that I’m not asking for any payments or anything but I do ask that you consider donating to the DFWSEM.org and the Pay Pal address for them is info at DFWsem.org – Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association.
Bill Hartzer
And they’re a great group and they’re a nonprofit, and the whole idea of DFWSEM is to help promote knowledge in this industry and that’s why I am giving out information like this, so you can be a better marketer and a better SEO. Thanks for watching. Feel free to subscribe because I will be coming back and sharing some other tips and like this fairly soon.
You can watch his video demonstrating the technique here:
How Do You Plan on Building Links Next?
There are many ways to build links. Almost as many ways to build links as there are creating websites.
While that might be an exaggeration, it’s mostly true. These are just a small sampling of the ideas you may encounter as you continue building your brand and working through building your link profile.
Just make sure you stay on the right side of Google’s guidelines (or that you don’t get discovered pursuing more aggressive and riskier methods).
At the end of the day, the person with the best quality link profile wins, and that doesn’t always mean the most links.
How do you plan on building your own links next?
Image Credits
Featured Image: Shutterstock / July 2021
