Home » seo » How to Create Backlinks without Spending a Dime (For Beginners and Bloggers)

How to Create Backlinks without Spending a Dime (For Beginners and Bloggers)

Palla Sridhar

One of the key strategies to boost up your traffic is getting higher rankings in Google. Generally about 52% of the users on a search result page click on the first SERP. Only about 15% people deep dive next to the first page result. This shows the importance of ranking higher in search engines.

The technology behind improving rankings is called SEO. Though I’m not going into deep on this subject, it’s worthy to note that if you have more backlinks, it’s better for your SEO campaign. For example, Page A links to Page B and Page C. Then the link juice of Page A is equally divided between Page B and Page C, provided there are no other internal and external links.

So if more and more links point to page, then more is the importance of the page. Strictly speaking, it’s only by the virtue and quality of the page, that generally bloggers and other website owners will tend to link to a particular page. This is called natural-link-building.

Find more — How to Find Profitable Keywords using Keyword Planner

But sometimes, in my experience, it becomes very difficult to get backlinks if the web page is not ranking well in Google, Bing or Yandex. So for this, you artificially need to create an awareness among other website owners to include a link to your site on their article or post. This is what I call “artificial-link-building”.

In this method, there are white-hat and black-hat techniques. Using black-hat link building techniques, you can reap benefits in the short term, but Google will catch up in the long run and your profits will drop after a time. But white-hat techniques are gradual and remain for time-tested and can add value to your SEO strategy.

Read More — How to Make Money With Google Adsense?

One of the method I came to know from Brian Dean of backlinko.com is called the “Moving Man Method”.  This is somewhat closer to the “Broken Link Building” technique, but is different considering the technical details.

Actually in the later method, you find the URLs that are giving 404 ERRORS on a page and you contact the web site owner to replace the URL with your site URL. But in the former technique, you will find URLs, which are re-directing instead of giving 404 ERRORS. But the later steps are the same.

Steps in the Moving Man Method

#1 – Researching sites or URLs that have changed their names, shutdown, moved or redirected.

#2 – Finding sites and URLs that are linking to the redirected or old article or link.

#3 – Contacting the owner of the site or URL and correct the redirected URL or old URL.

Now the CTR for this scheme, will not be 100%. For example, if you found a resource like that above and you contacted 50 web owners, you will get a result of 4 to 5 likely. But it depends on the quality of your article and the content of the email message you send.

Step #1:  Find Resources that are Incorrect

In this step, you are going to find resources in your niche that have changed names, moved to a new URL, stopped offering a service, stopped updating a resource, shut down, redirecting link etc. There are several ways by which you can find these resources.

#1 – Keep an eye on sites in your niche that have rebranded

For example, you can search PRWeb, which a public relation site, for “<niche> rebrand”.  If you are in the tech niche, you can just do “tech rebrand”. This will list most of the press releases, that have rebranded lately. You can also use the same process with Google News.

#2 – Use search phrases to find site features that no longer exist

Some of the popular services or resources might have been brought down or removed. Since they rank well in search engines, they might have got lot of backlinks from authority sites. You can use the following search strings to find such resources.

• “service not available”
• “page no longer exists”
• “this website is no longer updated”
• “this page is no longer updated”
• “no longer available”
• “website closed”
• “service no longer available”

Step #2 – Find Domains and URLS linking to the Old Resource

Now this is the crux of the concept. You can use different SEO premium tools or backlink checking tools like ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, SEMrush to find all the backlinks linking to this old resource. Most of these tools have an Export feature using which you can export these links to an Excel or CSV sheet.

Step #3 – Contact Web Owners to replace their outdated URLs with your Valuable Content URL.

This last step is also crucial for your success. You should not sound like a link exchange scam or spammer trying to build links. Your email should be such that, you are pointing the web owner to the wrong URL of theirs and proving a resource which is valuable, that can be replaced with this outdated link. Most of the web owners may ignore this message, but even if 7% CTR could bring good results to your domain.

Conclusion

Though this process is time-consuming, it is one of the white-hat techniques of link building to your site. Since this is also not an automation process of links, Google will see that the quality websites are linking to your site and may rank you higher.

In my experience, the difficulty I faced was finding the old link for a rebranded health site. I had to go to Wikipedia, to find that old domain and insert that link in SEMrush backlink checker to get all the links.

Also be sure that your article is relevant to the resource. Only then web owners will be interested to replace their outdated URL.

Sources:

• http://backlinko.com/high-quality-backlinks
• http://www.mustajaab.com/