Creating a Link Building Machine

by Patrick Altoft on May 12, 2008

Social media, linkbaiting, link building, blogging and building an audience are hugely time consuming tasks that require a lot of skill, some great ideas and most importantly a long term vision.

Intelligent online publishers have been creating Link Building Machines for years but others try to rely on short term fixes. The short term fix (as you might have guessed) isn’t a good long term business strategy.

Put simply a Link Building Machine is a site that attracts thousands of links every month and hundreds of links to each one of their recent stories or blog posts without any direct marketing being carried out to create those links.

The BBC is a Link Building Machine, so is Wikipedia, so is Engadget, so is the New York Times. They are all sites that have the following key components making up their Machine.

A large number of fans who love to read their content
A fanbase that likes sharing content across social networks
Fans & readers who publish content on blogs & other websites – the linkerati
Good search engine rankings

Any website that has these elements is a Link Building Machine. Take a site like Wikipedia for example, it doesn’t have any RSS subscribers but Wikipedia ranks highly for so many informational queries that the articles are used as citations and reference links thousands of times every single day.

A site like the BBC can release a news story and find it being shared across thousands of blogs and social networks without the BBC having to do any marketing whatsoever.

One of my favourite examples of a Link Building Machine is a site that has thousands of well optimised images attracting millions of visitors from Google Images every single year. This site cleverly uses this script (this one is good too) to build thousands of new links every month with zero effort.

Creating your machine

Publishing one off linkbait articles is great for traffic and links but it isn’t a particularly effective long term strategy – unless carried out as part of the Link Building Machine development process.

Publish one linkbait article and it might get thousands of readers and hundreds of links but if you can replicate that success and publish similarly high quality articles every day for 6 months you might just end up creating a Link Building Machine.

Forget about building links to your site today – concentrate on your long term goal of finding thousands of people who love your website enough to tell the world whenever you write a new post.

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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }

Glen Allsopp 12 May 2008 at 6:40 pm: Great post and I completely agree with you. There are some big link machines that actually have people helping push their content socially but thats not all the traffic they get.

Submitted to SU!
pankaj gupta 13 May 2008 at 6:15 am: Well said patrick and i agree with you but these days it’s getting very competitive in terms of social bookmarking too.
Diamond On Wheels 14 May 2008 at 10:16 pm: Great article. Providing good content is still the key to any website becoming a Link Building Machine!
Greg from Make Money Online 28 May 2008 at 7:10 am: That was solid advice. The hardest part of starting out is creating a buzz when no one is reading. Keep posting and social bookmarking and you will be a success.
Aditya 19 Jun 2008 at 1:33 am: Great article, Proving cool info.

thanks
Media Training 04 Aug 2008 at 1:37 pm: I am also trying to build in some kind of link building program on our own media training website by using up to date content, but its not working yet! I am resigned to the fact it might take time, but yes content is king!
SEO company 08 Oct 2008 at 4:38 pm: Link Baiting is a really good way of getting inbound links!
SEO Geeza 15 Oct 2008 at 9:40 pm: I also agree that link baiting is the way forward, you can however spend ages managing media buzz, articles and press releases so I think it is important to continue with a constant allocation of time on other link building methods as well, video, bookmarking even directories – I think a combination of many different elements will sustain position due to a more varied collection of links pointing back to a website.
SEO Experts 22 Oct 2008 at 7:54 pm: Well Said! It’s good to see some companies agree with the natural way of link building. Likewise.
Vacation Rentals By Owner 19 Jan 2009 at 10:06 am: I love that script you guys made! The code for the script disappeared tho…
SEO Outsourcing 20 Jan 2009 at 12:14 pm: Natural Way of linkbuilding is really bets and effective as compared to other methods of link building. Great post.
Hypocrits 14 Feb 2009 at 3:07 pm: You guys are complete hypocrits. I see the same people here putting links to their sites saying “Yeah great article” – but then leaving links for themselves. I have done searches on a couple of ths above bloggers – and one SEO company based in brighton, has 1000s of links.

I agree with the premise of this article entirely – how many of you will link to it if you think it’s so great?
SEO companies and baiting is ruining blogs.

Good article
Jonathan Jenkins 08 Mar 2009 at 3:25 pm: Leting people like us leave comments is also a way to generate free content automatically, and the payback for that is letting us leave our links here!
It is a useful post though, and I really am researching link-building strategies for my site.
Coach Hire 14 Mar 2009 at 11:18 am: I opinion is almost same when it comes to long-term strategies. For over the years I have been using other methods to promote my coach hire business in the UK, and then further to Ireland, Scotland and other Europe and I may proudly say, after reading your post I tried many of the aspects you stated and now the daily rent more coaches, minibuses and van’s than ever before.

I remember an year back whilst we started our new business on the name of Accommodation in London, I have been looking to target some keywords like “cheap hotels in London” “rooms” rental properties in London, but since all these keywords were very much competitive it took a lots of time to get number of visitors visit our website.

Just a sunny afternoon, I crafted a question, and posted it in the Yahoo questions, I myself posted an answer lately and yeah around 1000 publishers posted my post on their blogs, website’s, articles, and even press releases and it had helped me get thousands of quality in-links.

Either it is a coach hire or vehicle rental business or even other travel and tourism, good strategies like you stated will always work!

Great post and it has already helped me a lot

Thank You

Sophia John
London UK
SEO Tampa 20 Apr 2009 at 10:34 am: Thaks for the Information.
SEO Expert Services 27 Apr 2009 at 4:19 am: Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building strategy. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.