To Automate or not too Automate? – The Power of Link Building in a 2013 Content Dominated Industry

Now, by “automate” i don’t mean spamming a couple 1,000 blog comments or some wiki articles. I mean a properly created and developed automation Campaign!

The softwares i use are either – Senuke XCr or GSA Search Ranker, both of these aren’t built to spam 1,000's of links, they’re built to create links in a targetted manner. My first lesson in automation is don’t do automation, now by that i mean don’t do automation to your client’s root domain!

My campaigns tend to start with me optimizing the onpage then pinging and re-submitting sitemaps etc… to Webmaster Tools. THEN I move onto creating WordPress, Blogger, Blog.com and various other such sites.

The difference between having a WordPress site & a Blogger site is massive, WordPress allows for more optimization in terms of themeing, widgets and generalm content/page creation but Blogger offers the country target’d TLD (or Domain for those who are less into OSI Layering and such, e.g. .co.uk, .com, .ca etc…)

I’m going to be giving you an example of a simple campaign i setup for my client -

Marble Creations @ MarbleCreations.co.uk

These guys specialize in Granite & Quartz Worktops in Bradford, UK but also delivery/install across the UK! – So taking a look at what they do (and more importantly how much they’re paying us) i started to build a link building campaign around this.

My first step was to setup both Blogger & WordPress, both blogs -

http://worktopsinbradford.wordpress.com/ & http://graniteqaurtzbradford.blogspot.co.uk/

I populated both with a custom written article for the 1st week and plan to add 2nd, 3rd and so on articles across the following weeks/months of our campaign (so if your reading this 2 months from posting, it’s still very much so worth it to track my progress). The articles ofcourse have backlinks (2-3 per article, with the related anchor text being the keywords i’m targetting).

Once the blogs look all shiny and new with great content on them already as well as a targetted domain name, i start the automated side of things. For this specific campaign i used Senuke XCr to Turbo boost these sites with targetted backlinks and campaigns, before heading into Senuke and paying for the full subscription, get the damn trial! Learn any software and see if it suites your needs before paying the extortunate fee every month…

Here’s a list of 75 Backlinks we’ve created with this tool for the Blog, the above campaign uses a number of great submissions and builds around 200 backlinks (I spread the submission over a 30-45 day period normally but for this example it was a quickly done to show example of how to go about doing this sort of campaign and i expect you to take the 30-45 day advice -

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_Nhr_ImiHBBX2tHT3pkcnZqODg/edit?usp=sharing

Repeat the automated link building side for all your blogs/external sites you’ve created, this’ll bring link juice to the external sites and even if you get bad links it won’t affect the client’s SEO unless your blog gets a blacklisted/completely f%$&@d by your automated tools.

Words of Advice - 

No “Nuking” – Wikis/PDFs/Blog Comments/Guest Posting mass links, i use GSA & Senuke as you can limit the amount of submissions you make /day or in total and you can target specific categories, sites etc…In your blogs, change themes, add header images, alt text etc.. Make your offsite blogs/sites as nice looking as possible and as Unique! as possible, if your putting effort into Unique content for the blog, why not put Unique work into the blog itself, especially as Google scans the sites code etc…

Who am i to tell you all these things?! - 

Well, i know this is my first Moz post but i have been doing SEO for the past 4 years, i’m currently 16 (nearly 17, as if that makes much difference in your world) and i’m based in Birmingham, UK. I work for a company – http://www.bootcampmedia.co.uk and i’m the Sole manager for SEO (except Content writing) for all their clients.

I also do indivual based SEO for my own clients as well in the weekday evenings and weekends. I spend most of my time on the computer and have a passion for gaming as well, my main focus at the moment is between college & work, getting both my qualifications and the work experience /money from my job.