Earned links encompass all natural links. These are links you have earned and recommendations you have gained solely because others have found your website and deemed it attractive enough to create a link pointing to it.
The reasons you have earned links can be many, but in one way or another, you have distinguished yourself enough that someone has chosen to place a link on their website pointing to yours. Essentially, they have recommended what is being linked to and thus your website.
Can you influence earned links, i.e., increase their frequency or quantity? Absolutely. By creating outstanding content and marketing it to the right people, you can significantly increase the opportunities to obtain more inbound links.
Often, when trying to influence others to link without explicitly arranging it, you work with what is called link bait.
Link bait is the art of creating something that attracts attention (bait) and discussion for your website, thereby generating inbound links. It can be through images, videos, text, and much more, but ideally, it should be something you can showcase on the site you want links to, so it can serve as a reference point.
Here are a few general ideas for link baits:
- Timeliness: Is something exciting happening in the world right now, and do you have something to add? If you are an expert in a field or can angle your expertise to fit something current.
- Going Against the Grain: Be provocative or controversial. “Bad publicity is better than no publicity,” as an old saying goes. Even though this might not always hold true today, you can create a lot of interaction and interest by being provocative or controversial.
- Information and Resources: Be the ultimate resource on a topic so that it doesn’t make sense to link to anyone but you. Create beautiful visualizations of any data, add videos and images, and ensure your article composition is perfect.
- Humor: Find a funny way to present data, for example, alternative interpretations or presentations of data. A good example is Sinful.dk, which annually conducts a survey mapping Denmark’s naughtiest city based on their sales data. These are often mentioned and linked to.
- Acquired Links
All types of links where you actively participate in the actual setup of the link are called acquired links. Examples of this could be adding your link to a link directory, an article directory, a guest blog, a social bookmarking service, a business directory, etc.
All forms of purchased links also fall under acquired links, whether they are created as a sponsored collaboration, marked otherwise, or not marked at all. It’s important to remember that in Denmark, we must mark purchased links as sponsored; otherwise, it’s a violation of the marketing law.
Google also requires that all links set up as part of an agreement be marked as nofollow and additionally tagged with rel=”sponsored”. This is a newer initiative, and the update affecting this function primarily looks at the sites linking out rather than the sites receiving links.
Google attempts to nullify the value of all links that are, in one way or another, purchased. Therefore, you can never be sure that a purchased link will actually impact your search engine rankings. Only Google knows which sites have had their ability to transfer PageRank (link value) nullified.
Can you risk buying links with no value? Yes, absolutely. Does this mean you shouldn’t buy links? No – because even though some links might not work, others will. In a country like Denmark, it’s very difficult to compete if you do not use acquired links, as it has become the de facto standard for links here. It can therefore be difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with competitors if you do not use this type of link building.
How Are Rankings Calculated Based on Links?
Googlebot finds and follows all new links it discovers on the Internet, which naturally includes links to your website. Googlebot primarily crawls pages to discover new content, and it does this through the links it encounters during its crawl.
Every time a link to a webpage is detected, Googlebot registers this. These pieces of information are then collectively sent to a sandbox for your website.
The value from links rarely appears immediately; the link graph, which is a large calculation ranging from the weakest to the strongest website, must be continuously updated. It is only when this is updated that rankings change in the search results.
Google performs a complete calculation of all websites it knows and assigns them a numerical value. This value describes how popular the website is and is known as PageRank in industry terms. PageRank is an essential part of Google’s algorithm and also what made Google the world’s most popular search engine.
Before Google included links in its calculations of a page’s importance, there was no hierarchy in the search results, and results were displayed based on simple relevance scores, for example, by counting the number of times a keyword appeared in a text. Unsurprisingly, this did not provide fantastic search results.
