With over a billion websites online today, a lot of content is uploaded virtually every single minute. As such, Google needs to filter through the content for the search engine to give users the best and most relevant results.
That’s where link building comes in.
Link building involves earning a clickable link to your website from a 3rd party website so web users and search engines can find and visit your page.
Websites with plenty of links are deemed ‘authoritative’ and Google rewards them with high rankings on user search results. On the other hand, websites with little to no links are unfortunately doomed to obscurity on the search engine.
As you can see, links are somewhat of a critical currency when it comes to effective SEO. But not all links are equal. So, what is the best link type?
If you have considerable SEO experience, you’ve probably come across White Hat and Black Hat link building. What you probably didn’t know is that there are numerous grey areas between the two approaches referred to as Grey Hat link building.
This article breaks down everything you need to know about Grey Hat link building, including what it involves, what makes it different from black and white hat link building, as well as a few effective techniques on how to leverage the process for effective SEO.
Grey hat link building – what is it all about?
As its name implies, grey hat link building lies somewhere in between white and black link building. For you to have a firm understanding of what grey hat link building is all about, we need to shed some light on what black and white link building involve.
Back in the 1920s, Western films had protagonist characters wear white hats while the antagonists wore black hats. This made it easy for the audience to see who the hero and the villain were in the movie.
The concept has since been adopted in various industries, including SEO.
White hat link building involves using legitimate SEO practices such as guest blogging and creating linkable assets. On the other hand, black hat link building goes against search engine guidelines and exploits loopholes in the system, such as keyword stuffing or web content plagiarism.
So, where does grey hat link building fall?
Grey hat link building involves processes that are not entirely disapproved by search engine guidelines, but aren’t considered white either. However, grey hat link building is akin to playing with fire. The rules keep changing, and if you’re not entirely sure of what you’re doing, you might end up on Google’s bad side by practicing black hat link building.
That said, let’s take a look at a couple of common grey hat link building strategies.
Tiered link building
A good link building strategy involves making sure your existing links are credible and one of the best ways of making them more effective is through tiered link building.
Although link wheels, link pyramids, and other relevant intricate techniques are highly popular, they can be more trouble than they’re worth. In worst case scenarios, they tend to simply direct junk links to links that don’t provide any real value to begin with such as blog comments or forum profile links.
A highly effective approach is to juice up your existing guest posts, submission links, Budget Tier 1s, or other high-value links using a single additional tier.
Here’s how you can do it:
1. Use spinner software to spin your articles
Using spinner software such as ‘The Best Spinner’ to spin an original article is a great way of making sure your second tier is indexed. Spinner software uses synonyms to spin an article by replacing certain words and phrases with their synonyms while maintaining the readability of the article.
2. Create authentic Web 2.0 properties
The truth is Web 2.0 properties may not be the backlinking powerhouse they once were. But Google still values web 2.0’s that look legit and are still full and active. This makes them incredible tools to send some serious juice to your links so try and consider building dozens of web 2.0’s using spun articles that we discussed in the previous point.
We have put a local spin on web 2.0’s with Local Mini Sites and highly recommend checking it out if you have any local clients. All content is unique in this service, however, and not spun.
All you need to do is first create a blog on a web 2.0 site such as Blogger or WordPress, and create a post with a keyword-heavy title. Include one of your spun articles with a link back to your site, publish the article, and you’re all set.
Establish an authoritative blog network
A killer backlink should come from a website that Google strongly considers authoritative and is strongly relevant to your own site. While white hat link building techniques such as guest posting can land you such links, sometimes, it’s better to create them by creating a powerful blog network.
The fastest way to create a blog network is to buy expired domains. Instead of competing with everyone for expired domains on GoDaddy Auctions, you can use the Xenu Link Sleuth broken link checker program to find strong expired domains.
Once you find these domains, you will need to register them under different sites. However, to operate effectively under Google’s radar, you might have to host each site on different IP addresses. Now all you need to do is fill the site with unique content containing links back to your site.
Are grey hat back linking techniques worth the risk?
Any SEO professional will tell you how challenging link building truly is, but it falls among the most significant aspects of any SEO campaign. You’ll have very slim chances of earning a high ranking without relevant links directing web users back to your website.
