Link Diversity

Just a brief article to let you know that SocialMonkee recently published a blog post on the importance of link
diversity. The game has changed, and if you want to keep up you need to have a wide link profile so make
sure you check it out.

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have changed the game for many of us, and if you want to keep up you need to have a wide link profile, with all sorts of links pointing to your pages… Link diversity is one of those few things that can help you get (or stay) off Google’s radar.

Link Diversity: Why It’s Important

Imagine you have created a new page, and you want it to rank in Google’s Top 3 for the keyword of your choice. You submit the URL to SocialMonkee, to get 25, 100 or even 150 backlinks. That’s great, but at the same time you should build other types of backlinks, from other sources… If Google sees your page ‘only’ has 25, 100 or 150 backlinks, all coming from social bookmarking sites, they will consider those backlinks as unnatural. That’s why we encourage our users to build links from other sources, in combination with links from SocialMonkee.

All our social bookmarking sites are hosted on unique C-Class IP addresses, and with all the 3rd party social bookmarking sites we recently added to the network, it is quite unlikely that link IP diversity becomes a problem… BUT if you want your backlink portfolio to look natural, you should create other types of links. For more information on link IP diversity, make sure you read this blog post by Jon Leger, who is the creator of The Best Spinner…

The goal here is not to only build high-quality backlinks, or dofollow backlinks. The goal is to build all sorts of backlinks, dofollow backlinks, nofollow backlinks, high-quality backlinks, low-quality backlinks, links from sites located in North America, links from sites located in Europe, links from sites located wherever you want your pages to rank, links that use your keywords as anchor text, and links that don’t… In short: a diversified backlink portfolio.

By link diversity we mean:

* IP diversity, with links from sites hosted on different servers and C-Class IP addresses
* Dofollow/Nofollow diversity, with a combination of dofollow and nofollow links
* PageRank diversity, with a combination of links from low PR and high PR sites
* Anchor text diversity, with links that use your keywords as anchor text and links that don’t
* Script/Platform diversity, with links from sites built on WordPress, Joomla!, Movable Type…

Anchor Text Diversity?

Before Google’s Penguin update, most of us wanted to build links using our keywords as anchor text. You can still do that, but you should also build links using different anchor text, like the name or URL address of your site. For example, if we wanted to build links to SocialMonkee, we could use ‘SocialMonkee’ or ‘www.SocialMonkee.com’ as anchor text, as opposed to ‘Link Building Solution’ or any other keyword we might want to rank for. Ideally only 10-15% of your links should have your keywords as anchor text.

Link Diversity: How To Do It

You could for example build backlinks by syndicating articles to BacklinksKingdom, or Unique Article Wizard, so you get links from Web 2.0 sites, article directories, WordPress sites and blogs… You might also want to publish your articles on popular article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare…

Other places where you should consider getting links from include: social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest, popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Delicious, blog networks like ArticleRanks and Traffic Kaboom, but also Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and HubPages, topic-related discussion boards, guest blogging communities like MyBlogGuest… There are hundreds of different places where you can get links from.

With link diversity, your backlink portfolio will look natural to the search engines. That way you can get off Google’s radar, or even better, never get in… If you still don’t think link diversity matters, ask yourself the following questions… What sort of site only has dofollow backlinks? What sort of site only has links from high PR sites? Sites owned by people who don’t seem to bother about link diversity, and who are quite likely to receive or have already received a notification from Google.

Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 Link Building

Also, remember that you can use SocialMonkee to build backlinks (Tier 2) to your existing backlinks (Tier 1). That’s called Tier 2 Link Building. Building Tier 2 backlinks to your Tier 1 backlinks will also give them more authority, and will pass more ‘link juice’ to your own pages.