Keeping It White Hat with Backlinking and Tiered Link Building

On today’s internet, shady black-hat tactics for link building via spam and ads are going by the wayside, and we say Good Riddance. Overwhelming targets with spam and Ads, while annoying, formerly had soft conversion rates of 1% to 2%. With the proliferation of white-hat SEO campaign builders, spam now has almost no effect – In fact, users tend to ignore it 100%.

When it comes to driving SEO, White-Hat Backlinking and Tiered Link Building are surefire ways to claim engagement and views. Lucrative and powerful campaigns are built on the backs of meaningful content, and cross-tagging your content so that it builds a broader picture will lure in users. You’ll provide your readers with an interesting story-line that depicts a scene and leaves them thirsting for more. It will also encourage them to subscribe to and share your content!

How does the process work?

Backlinking and Tiered Link Building are similar in that they both direct traffic towards your site or content, but they differ in meaningful ways, as we’ll discuss.

To begin with, Backlinking occurs when an external site links to your content. The best way to get the most bang for your buck when sites start backlinking to you is to have already built a strong foundation with your site and content.

 

 

Here are a few ways to ensure your foundation is strong:

1. Content is User-Friendly. This means optimizing loading speeds, ensuring platform readiness (phones, smart TVs, etc), clearly META tagging data, and proper website indexing.
2. Your Servers are Load Balance Ready. Servers are equipped with load balancers (or load balancing software), stable, and ready for scaling.
3. Your Website Features Strong Site Architecture. Many experts are using a “Reverse Silo” strategy where backlinks point to content rich websites like blog posts or information-driven pages.
4. You are Producing Linkable Assets. As mentioned above, the Reverse Silo strategy uses backlinks to point to information-rich pages. Over time, these pages can build an infrastructure of Linkable Assets that add scalable value to your link building campaigns.

 

Tiered Link Building, on the other hand, relies upon building layers of quality posts that all point back to the top tiered link. The Black Hat version of this practice used to be incredibly common, wherein a poster would write a handful of high quality “Tier 1” articles, then create hundreds or thousands of “Tier 2” and “Tier 3” spam posts that linked back to the original. This method worked because, even if a Tier 2 or 3 link received a red flag for spam, removing the associated Tier 1 article would eliminate the red flag attached to the campaign by the offending Tier 2 or 3 article.

The White Hat version of this practice is far more genuine and, nowadays, far more effective. The modern-day consumer has a knee-jerk reaction to Ads and Spam that honestly make us wonder why Black Hatters still mess with it at all. In any case, White Hat Tiered Link Building methodology looks a bit like this.

 

Step 1: Establish relationships with Tier 1 and Tier 2 website administrators wherein you offer to create high-quality content for them.

Step 2: Create high quality “Tier 1” articles or posts and find the most influential places to post them.

Step 3: Create unique, but shorter “Tier 2” articles on lower-tiered but still respectable websites and blogs, then backlink to the Tier 1.

 

This diagram illustrates the entire process quite nicely:

 

We can think about it this way: Tier 1 Links are high-quality pieces of content or a website to which we wish to drive traffic, and Tier 2 links are shorter spot pieces or backlinks which still provide value and link back to the Tier 1 content.

 

The Final Word: Black Hat vs White Hat

Black Hat Link Building is a dying practice that refers to when Tier 1 content is support by low quality or spammy Tier 2 and 3 links which use force to generate clicks rather than quality. Typically, the Tier 1 links tied are still high quality but are readily and easily removed when link clusters are penalized due to their spammy nature.

White Hatting, preferred by most everyone these days, refers to when a Tier 1 link of valuable content (or information-driven post) is supported by Tier 2 links which are legitimate pieces of content in their own right or are backlinks from authoritative, high-ranking websites.

 

It’s important to remember that White Hatting adds value, while Black Hatting detracts from value.

 

White Hatting means you’ve built a piece of content that is unique and insightful. Your goal is to build a genuine community that interacts with each other, with you, and with your content. A personal touch is key when building trust and long term engagement. We at Got.Media are gung-ho about bringing White Hat to the forefront as a safe way to increase engagement for your business while creating a community of ravenous fans who are eager to consume your content.

Stay tuned with us for more on emerging SEO trends and other hot topics in dynamic age of digital marketing, and as always- Thanks For Reading!