What is White Hat Link Building?

If you read more about SEO techniques, you’ll notice that there are three techniques that you can use. White hat link building techniques, black hat tactics, and the gray lines (boundary) between the two. Today, we’ll focus on the “good” side of the spectrum and answer the question: what is white hat link building?

To summarize, white hat link building methods will not get you penalized by Google. These methods are considered “legal” link building techniques that don’t manipulate search engine algorithms.

It’s important to know these link building techniques because they are used by most website owners all over the world. Plus, getting penalized by Google is a serious matter. Getting a manual penalty could drag you back months, or even years, of SEO optimization.

White Hat Vs Black Hat Vs Grey Hat Link Building

What Can You Get From White Hat Link Building?

Employing white hat strategies to build links have many benefits. First, you’re safe from Google penalties. You won’t need to worry about getting penalized because you’re doing the right thing.

These methods are considered “future-proof” because these techniques are beneficial in the long run. These are golden standards in link building – until someone decides to abuse them for SEO purposes.

The Dangers of Black Hat Link Building

If your site participates in link schemes, such as link farms and buying links, you’re using black hat link building tactics. These were once effective strategies until they were abused just to gain links.

• Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
• Content cloaking
• Keyword stuffing
• Buying links
• Spamming comments

The results were low-quality, auto-generated content that brings low-quality links. Even more, these links are sketchy and search engines perceive these as products of black hat tactics.

Once you’re flagged, your only route is to do a full website assessment and fix all manual actions on your site. Only then can you submit your site for reassessment. This usually takes a lot of time before they can process your request.

Grey Hat Link Building

These techniques are borderline illegal and are still punishable by search engines. It’s like playing with fire, but the fire will consume your whole site if you’re not careful. LinkDoctor™ doesn’t recommend using these techniques to build links.

• Web directories
• Link pyramids
• Duplicate content

Stick with white hat link building techniques to keep your site safe from penalties. You can look more into our blogger outreach services and experience the benefits of white hat link building.

White Hat Link Building Techniques and Strategies

Content Link Building

As we all know, content is the key to establishing natural links. These links are valuable for search engines and increase your SERP ranking. By creating valuable content, you can attract links back to your site.

The secret to high-quality content is to make it about the reader and not your promotions. The more they can relate to what you’re saying, the more they will link back to it.

Satisfying the searcher’s intent is a plus factor for Google RankBrain. The more your content gives the users what they want, the higher you rank on SERP. Bloggers will see your site as an authoritative one, attracting more backlinks.

Guest Posting

This time, you’re making content to post on someone’s blog. This is a bit tricky, but our guest posting services make sure that you’re getting links from authority blogs in your niche. Guest posting requires you to follow guidelines set by the host website.

By providing high-quality content that’s relatable to the readers, your guest post has a high chance of getting accepted by the website. You can then ask for a dofollow link to a resource page on your website. As long as your content contributes to the niche and helps people solve their problems, they will see your guest post as authoritative.

Broken Link Building

When doing link building, some links wear out and break after some time. This can be because of a site overhaul or domains shutting down and changing ownership. These links are no longer functional and are considered broken.

This technique goes two ways. You can check for your broken links. After finding them, you can let the site owner know that the link is broken and should be fixed ASAP. You’ll get the broken links back after the site owner fixes the problem.

Do a quick check using Ahrefs Site Audit tool and see how many URLs have issues.

Using the Site Explorer tool, check for broken links on your link profile and see which links should take immediate action.

You can also search the keywords you’re using and find broken links that use the same anchor text. By letting the site owners know about the problem, you’re helping them with their SEO. You can suggest adding your link to the keyword and pitch what values your link can add to the website.

404 Link Reclamation

Just like broken link building, 404 link reclamation works on dead links. A 404 error means that the page you’re looking for no longer exists. You can search for a competitor’s 404 pages and use them to your advantage.

The idea is to offer a better linking opportunity than linking to a dead page. Make sure that your link is similar to the 404 page and provides the same (or more) value to the website. As the website owner, they’ll be inclined to say yes.

Unlinked Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are relative to the brand’s popularity. By creating linkable assets (like content, infographics, videos, etc.), you can get mentioned on someone’s blog naturally. These can be unlinked, thus offering an opportunity to build links.

What you need to do is search for brand mentions that don’t link back to your site. Reach out and thank the owner for mentioning your brand on their site. Give some compliments and humbly ask them if they could link back to your site.

Provide a reason why they should link back to you. A good one is because your link will give more value and insight to the readers. This tactic works wonders, depending on the popularity of your brand.

Press Outreach

Reaching out to the press is not an easy task. It requires you to make content that reporters and journalists would be interested in. Sometimes, you have to adjust your content just to make it newsworthy.

PR submission sites can be helpful. HARO, for example, is a well-known site for journalists searching for credible sources. You can also find opportunities manually.

For example, if you’re in the food business, you can look for news columns that feature food. From there, you can search for relevant news sites and reach out to them manually. You can then adjust your content and try to align it with the news column.

Necessary Link Building Tools

There are a lot of link building tools on the Internet. However, there are only a few tools that you need for white hat link building. The only tools necessary for link building are:

Ahrefs

According to a link-building survey made by LinkDoctor, Ahrefs is the most commonly used link building tool. The survey was conducted among link building experts.

It’s an all-around toolkit for SEO and marketing. If you need to check the backlink profile or the organic traffic of your competitor, Ahrefs has the tool for it.

You can also do broken link building using the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool. Find broken links, unlinked brand mentions, and so much more using this multipurpose kit.

PitchBox

Although it’s been some time since its first launch, this old-timer still packs a punch. PitchBox is the tool used by link building agencies, like us. And it’s been a huge help because you can see other SEO metrics needed to see the quality of a website.

You can also make templates that are useful for blogger outreach. From here, you can talk to your prospects and pitch ideas to gain links from them. You can ask them for a guest post or a niche edit.

Hunter.io

If you want to get the email address out of a website, then Hunter.io is the tool that you need. It helps you find professional email addresses from a website. All you have to do is enter the domain on the search bar and wait for the results.

It’s an easy tool to use, but it requires a paid subscription to see the email addresses. This tool could be helpful especially in email outreach.

LSIGraph

If you’re looking for keywords to rank your page, you can use LSIGraph to generate LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords. These are “secondary” keywords that are contextually related to your primary keyword. LSI keywords make search engines understand your content on a deeper level.

Just place your keyword on the search bar and let the tool find LSI keywords for you. You can do 10 keyword analyses per day if you sign up with your email address.

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a social listening tool that you can use to know what people are talking about. It lets you know what people ask about a certain keyword. Knowing what people ask gives you a general idea of the questions you need to answer on your content.

This tool gives you a good insight into the things you should include in your content. For people to find your content helpful and backlink-worthy, you should provide information that answers their questions. This would also optimize your content for web crawlers.

FAQs

Final Word

LinkDoctor™ recommends white hat link building. It gives you valuable results over time and high-quality backlinks. You can increase your SERP ranking and retain it, as long as you don’t do black hat SEO tactics.