Don’t Ask For a Link, Let Me Link To You Instead
By Anna Johnson on January 27th, 2009It never ceases to amaze me how far people will go to avoid thinking or doing something that actually makes sense. Sending out random link requests is a classic example of this.
There are so many things wrong with sending out non-personalized, template-based link requests that I don’t know where to start. But let me focus on just one aspect of why it’s so dumb: you could be asking someone to link to you who would already happily link to you… if you bothered to do a bit of thinking!
If I sound a bit fired up about this, it’s because we constantly get requests for links. Either someone – who obviously hasn’t kept up to date with the latest search engine optimization (SEO) thinking – is still teaching people to request links… or various people are still following the same steps taught a few years ago.
In any case, here’s the thing: we WILL freely link to your site.
All you need to do is write an insightful comment on one of our blog articles i.e. that adds to the discussion and you will get your link.
Oh, so it will be one of those nasty ‘no follow’ links that don’t give you any SEO benefit.
Well if that’s not quite what you had in mind and you want a ‘real’ link, here’s another suggestion: submit a sensational news story or article (based on our guidelines for submitting articles – http://www.kikabink.com/news/article-submission-guidelines/ – or press releases – http://www.kikabink.com/news/press-release-guidelines/) that includes your link in an appropriate, non-hypey way.
If that’s too hard… then maybe don’t ask for a link.
In fact, I find it strange that people who sends us link requests actually expect us to link to them, when we don’t have any kind of ‘links’ page. Where exactly do they expect us to publish their links?
Again, this simply betrays a lack of thinking.
A lack of thinking about what could possibly be ‘in it for us’ in terms of linking to their website (sorry, a link back is not enough and could actually be harmful if it’s from a page full of links, especially if they’re unrelated to our main area of interest, Internet marketing).
And a lack of thinking about what our site is about, which might provide some practical ideas for what else they COULD do to get a link from us.
Of course, a link from Kikabink News may or may not make much of a difference to someone.
But if they take the same approach to EVERY site – some of which could provide significant traffic and SEO benefits – they are doing themselves a disservice.
Isn’t it more worthwhile to do a little thinking, pay a bit more attention, and do something that has a much better chance of getting that link?
January 27th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
This is great advice. The key is, like you said, that the comment actually adds to the discussion. I’ve received several comments on my blog that include links, but the commentors clearly did not read my post. They simply Googled blogs with similar topics and pasted the same spamy comments on each one. Needless to say I delete those comments. But I do appreciate those that have something to say about my post, and encourage those people to link back to their own sites.