Tiered link building was once really popular to generate links for websites that are striving hard to rank in search. It was also a good strategy for websites to drive link juice coming in and manipulate their SERPs hoping to increase their CTR and organic visitors.
Tiered link building, however, is known as a black hat approach by many SEOs and could lead to unnatural and manipulative links. How do you make your tiered link building strategy remain white hat that won’t negatively affect your website? In this post, I’ll show you how you can do it in a right way without having to worry about your website being penalized. Let’s get cracking!
Tier #1
Guest Contributed Content
Contributing content to different higher ranking websites in your industry is the most important way to build high quality link for a website. Since higher ranking websites tend to have higher domain authority level, they can help pass authority to your website giving your domain a ranking power to compete in search.
First and foremost, you need to create a list of websites with high ranking in your industry. You can consider using Ahrefs Site Explorer tool to determine ranking authority of a particular website before putting in that list. A website with a domain rank ranged between 71 to 100 is considered as very popular according to AhrefsRank (AR) algorithm. I, however, would suggest that you could expand your list a little bit by including all websites with minimum AR of 50.
Alternatively, you can also check domain authority of those websites by using opensiteexplorer.org to identify the qualified and non-qualified websites that you have. Same recommendation, you only should include websites that have at least 50 of DA to limit the quality of websites you will contribute.
Once you have the list ready, the next step is to come up with a strategic plan allowing you to regularly contribute content to those shortlisted websites to show your strong relationship and commitment.
Assuming that you have your author profile on the websites that you’ve selected with your contributed content, create an author bio that connects all your author page section. You can create your author bio like this:
Joseph Gojo Cruz is the owner of Rankingelite.com, a blog about link building, content creation, social media and SEO strategies. He is also a contributor on Search Engine Journal, Ahrefs blog, Growmap, etc. You can connect with him on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.
By having your author bio distributed to other websites with links linked to your websites and other author profiles, you can make sure that your site will receive link authority from those websites.
Tier #2
Comments and Forum links
Blog comments and forum links can be used as your second tier link. By using your guest contributed content on other websites, you can build links to it to benefit your website and keep passing authority to your blog for better search engine performance.
You can do this by looking for topics related to your post that you’re building links for using these search queries:
Inpost:”topic”+”industry”
Inurl:”topic”+”industry”
Keep in mind that you need to keep the relevancy of your post by linking only to pages that you are commenting to avoid having “irrelevant link issue” that might cause your website to face penalization issue in Google Webmaster Tools. Since we all want to obtain the white hat approach, it surely wouldn’t be a good idea to link to irrelevant website.
Creating profile links
Profiles are good way to help people discover your website. Profiles can also help you increase your online popularity through your name being linked everywhere online. By using your author section on the websites that you’ve contributed your content to, you can register to profile sites and increase the visibility of your author page section throughout the Internet.
Assuming that each of your author page section has a link that points back to your website, your website will benefit from the authority it will receive on the profile sites.
Sample of some profile sites:
For more profile creating websites, you can refer to this post.
Final thoughts
Tiered link building is simply building links to your backlinks by making your 1st tier links increase their page rank and page authority by applying the strategies above. And this link building technique can benefit your website in the long run. Just keep in mind that you don’t have to do this approach aggressively and manipulatively. Content quality & relevancy are still the most important keys that guarantee the highest rate of success for a website to rank on the SERP, not the links.
