What Is White Hat Link Building and Its Strategies

As mentioned previously, white hat link building is the ethical SEO approach to the practice of obtaining links from other sites which connect to your own. 

The purpose of earning these links is to have your website appear higher on search engine queries. This happens because search engines like Google see links as votes of confidence. If your site is gaining links from other relevant, high quality websites with an established reputation, search engines see that as an indication of your own site’s quality, appropriately raising your own page up the search rankings. 

A backlink is white hat if it is earned through methods which are ethical and follow search engine guidelines.

But what does a search engine even consider to be ethical? Well, it’s important to note that people have always tried to exploit the oversights in how search engines value links. By using manipulative strategies such as placing links in bulk on a dead website or making a site with the sole purpose of placing links on it, brand owners manipulate search engines into seeing the base number of backlinks and assuming it’s a direct correlation with quality.

What’s key to recognize though is that those manipulative links don’t actually provide any value to the website they’re on, they’re just links. This is a clear separator between what search engines consider to be ethical or not. If your link truly brings user value and fits with the surrounding page, then it’s ethical by search engine standards.

You should focus on earning white hat backlinks because they’re valued by search engines and don’t run the risk of penalties.

Favoring white hat links is more than just a matter of following rules, it’s about acquiring links that’ll yield actual results for your site. Search engines want high-quality content to be on the top of their results, and white hat links are perceived as signs of quality. In contrast, search engines are adept at recognizing manipulative link building schemes, and links which are exposed as violators of guidelines are promptly met with intervention. 

Most of the time, these links will be stripped away of any value they can send to another website, making them obsolete and leading to the page receiving those non-ethical links plummeting down the search results page. If worst comes to worst, a search engine may deem it suitable to place a penalty on your page. These penalties can either affect your ranking and take you from the top of the results to somewhere along the bottom, or simply de-index your website, not giving it so much as a chance to show up in search queries. 

Now, you might be wondering how someone can earn these white hat links.

While search engines want you to simply create content which will naturally be used and linked by other sites in your industry, it’s reasonable to question the likelihood of that happening. According to Ahrefs, 96.98% of clicks happen in the top 10/first page of search results. So your page, even if it’s well made, will probably struggle to gain any attention without you knowing some of the intricacies of how to make a page that ranks.

 

 

Luckily, you don’t have to climb the search engine mountains in order to acquire quality white hat backlinks. There’s plenty of white hat link building techniques you can deploy while creating content or reaching out to others in your niche which maintain the wishes of search engines of maintaining user value, while also having a real shot at bringing you some positive results.

Regardless of whether you’re entrusting your needs to white hat link building service providers or if you’re conducting the process by yourself, it’s useful to understand the intricacies of some of the most popular techniques. 

Link magnet article

A link magnet article is an article which contains valuable information that is designed to naturally attract links

Making a link magnet article is a lot easier said than done. Instead of turning to outreach for links, you publish definitive resources like fresh statistics, new research or maybe a novel tool or template which can naturally help people in your field. There’s tons of data, research and information out there, so your work needs to be truly original. 

• How is it white hat link building: Link magnet articles gain links naturally thanks to how valuable they are for users, making them a search engine favorite. 

To make things easier, here are some core attributes of a link magnet article that should be taken into consideration:

• Originality: There needs to be a facet of the article which can be found nowhere else on the web. Be it data, information or insights, there needs to be something that stands out.
• Public accessibility: No matter how valuable your piece is, it needs to be accessible to the masses in order to be linkable. 
• Keyword optimization: You want to make it easy for others in your industry to find your answers to their questions. Using SEO tools can help you find keywords that other writers and creators are using in their well-performing works. 

Listicle mention insertion

Listicle mentions are references of a brand or its products inside of articles structured as a list. You can get a backlink from such articles by finding listicles which are numbering companies and brands similar to your own, and asking the listicle owner to add your brand. 

Listicles are usually in the form of comparison, alternative and “best of” articles. They provide an inventory of different brands, services and tools to help users find the one that’s right for them specifically. More importantly though, their nature of referencing specific names meshes well with AI models and their processing method through semantic association and context. This means that targeting listicles can make your company especially visible in AI responses. 

How is it white hat link building: Listicle mentions are considered white hat if they’re placed appropriately, because in that case they provide a bigger pool of information for users, thus acting as a helpful part of the article as a whole. 

When trying to insert your company name into listicles you should:

• Find articles: Using SEO tools, find listicle articles which are already ranking for your brand’s targeted keywords.
• Contact publishers: Once you’ve found your listicle(s), contact the publisher(s) and pitch your brand. 

Broken link building

Broken link building is the practice of finding links on sites which lead to dead or non-existent pages, creating similar content, and asking the owner of the site to replace the dead link with your own.

Links can stay on a webpage for years, and owners will often fail to notice that some of those links may be going to pages with a 404 error. If you’re able to spot those links though, you’ve got a chance at making a 50/50 proposition with a site’s owner by replacing that expired content with your own.

• How is it white hat link building: Broken link building is white hat because it promotes mutual value and improves user experience. 

If you’re conducting broken link building you should:

• Find broken links: Using SEO tools or browser extensions can help you search for and find these dead links.
• Create a replacement: Try to estimate what the link contained and make content which fills the void left by the dead link.
• Contact owner: Get in touch with the owner of the page you’re looking to add your link to, and ask them to add your link to the vacant spot left.

Skyscraper link building

Skyscraper link building is the strategy of locating content with a wealth of quality backlinks, creating superior content, reaching out to site owners that are linking to the original work and asking them to replace it with your own. 

Additionally, if you’re truly able to make something that improves upon your target predecessor, the value you can potentially provide to the host website should be apparent for them.

• How is it white hat link building: Skyscraper link building is an approach search engines love, because it maintains their wishes of serving users by increasingly enhancing the media available to them. 

If you’re conducting skyscraper link building you should:

• Find content: Using SEO tools, look for informative and high-performing articles within your industry that have a number of quality links pointing towards them. 
• Improve upon it: Make your own article which expands upon the provided information, verifies claims by backing them up with research and just generally improves upon the target.
• Contact owners: See which websites that are linking to the original article can actually bring you value and contact them with the proposal of replacing the first piece with your own. 

Suggest any service in return

Finally, you can always offer to provide certain services to a website in exchange for a link.

This can mean absolutely anything, from writing to web design to coding, anything goes so long as you’re willing to do it and it’s beneficial for the website you’ll get the link from. 

• How is it white hat link building: This method is white hat since it’s a mutually beneficial exchange where your help not only improves the quality of the host site, but also ensures a better user experience as a result.
  (Important note: Don’t suggest a direct link exchange as your end of the bargain, since such exchanges go against Google guidelines.)
  

If these strategies seem like too much work or too complicated, it’s always an option to outsource your link building needs to one of the top white hat link building agencies in the market.

Black hat link building is link building done using methods prohibited by search engines. 

To every yin there is a yang, and black hat link building is the polar opposite of its white hat counterpart. While white hat methods work within the rules established by search engines, black hat strategies seek to manipulate and trick search engines for a higher ranking. These strategies include receiving a high volume of links from sites like link farms and PBNs, paying for links directly or using automated tools that spread links out across unrelated websites.

Black hat link building is defined by: 

• Search Engine Condemnation: Firstly and most importantly, black hat link building is outlawed by search engines.
• Quantity over quality: Black hat methods seek to imitate the quality and authority attraction of white hat links by creating links in bulk.
• High-risk: Because of possible search engine intervention, black hat link building always runs the risk of a loss in authority or even greater penalties.  
• Low-cost: Due to their risk, high-number, and often automated nature, black hat links are strikingly cheap. 

As mentioned previously, links considered to be unethical are looked down upon by search engines like google. So, tread lightly and make sure you stay away from such practices.

• If you’re gunning to get a link from a specific website to the extent where you’re ready to pay for it, then make sure that the editor of the website sets the link tag as “sponsored.” Otherwise, you run the risk of being flagged by search engines.
• If you want to do a direct link exchange with another website, you should set their link and request your link to be set with the nofollow tags. Direct link exchanges are a violation of search engine guidelines, but setting the nofollow tag will clear things up, and it can still provide value for you by means of clicks. 
• White hat link building isn’t about metrics. While you should be targeting sites with high authority scores, they shouldn’t be the end all be all. What’s more important is the quality and relevancy of the page you’re getting a link from. If the choice is between a website with high authority but little relevancy to your own and a site with less authority but directly correlates with your content, then a backlink from the latter will likely yield better results.
• You should always stick to strict white hat standards when it comes to the structure of your links as well. Google updates constantly resolve any oversights there are in their systems, so a trick/shortcut that you’re constantly employing can be completely outlawed after an update. Strictly adhering to white hat link building likely guarantees that future updates with Google’s algorithm won’t give you many headaches.

Link building should be done right, and white hat link building is what’s right. Focusing on white hat strategies isn’t about simply following rules, it’s about making sure that the effort you’re exerting truly brings you positive results. White hat backlinks can give a massive boost to your brand’s visibility, so always try to put your resources into a white hat approach.