I’ve been building websites since the nineties, and the backlink game has been gamed, sold and scammed the whole time. The links that still matter are the ones somebody gave you because your work was worth it. Moving from the bottom of page one to the top can mean thousands more visitors a day. That kind of payoff is why people cheat.
The inbox of anyone with a website fills up with offers to sell links from sites nobody reads, and I resent that industry. Some writer buys the package, watches the traffic spike, then watches Google bury the site for a year.
The links that still matter are the ones somebody gave you because your work was worth it.
What follows is the plain version of how I’d build links for an author site, slowly and without tricks. There are fancier methods, and most of the fancy ones are how people get penalized.
Start by Defining Your Brand, Message, and Target Audience
If your site isn’t on the first page, you won’t get much traffic.Share on X
Begin the process by defining your brand, the message or messages you want to deliver, and your target audience.
If you’re a non-fiction author, you want to build a blog that shows your credibility and shows that you know your subject. Your message is related to the content of your books. Your target audience is the people you’re writing for. Define your audience well before you begin writing your books. For more, see how blogging on your author website sells books.
Brand is the image you want to portray. In the case of a person, this would be their appearance, mannerisms, reputation, abilities, skills, and expertise. For a product, it can be as simple as “our soda is cold and wet” or “our cables hold up bridges.” A brand is the idea you want to put into the minds of your target audience.
Message is the concept or concepts you want to deliver to your target audience. Target Audience is your customers or whoever else you’re trying to reach.
It’s impossible to reach everyone, and the more precise your target audience, the more accurately your message will be delivered and the more likely you’ll get results. The wider your audience, the more difficult it is to deliver a message and the less likely you’ll make sales.
Once you have those defined, the next step is to create good content that targets keywords and phrases related to your topic. Here’s a still-relevant overview of how small sites can build authority through quality content.
Create Good Content for Your Audience
Content is the published material on your website, including:
- Pages that contain text and other media
- Images
- Videos
- Slideshows and infographics
Create quality content that other people want to read and that other blogs and websites want to point to.
Mix text, images, videos, infographics, and anything else that helps readers understand your message. Link out to authority sites when it helps, because it builds trust with your audience. I discuss these aspects of SEO in my article SEO for Blogs for Authors: Optimize for Google and People. Keep the site organized and free of gross errors, too. Sloppy sites don’t get linked, and I don’t blame the people who won’t link them.
Why Do Backlinks Matter?
Backlinks can point to your main site or a specific page. It’s important to get a mixture of both.
Anchor text, the clickable text of the backlink, is also important. Search engines use it to understand the topic of your page or site. For my site, The Writing King, backlinks with anchor text of “The Writing King” establish that as my brand. Additional anchor text of “ghostwriter” or “book coaching” gives search engines more information about what my site covers.
The main point about anchor text is that it tells search engines what others believe your site or page is about. By building backlinks with many anchor texts, you widen the net you’re casting and get more results from searches. Backlinks matter for SEO because they establish the credibility of your site. Other people have stated, by adding links to your content, that your information is a good fit for their readers.
How do you get backlinks when nobody knows your site yet?
Go after links from sites with more authority than yours. A link from a nobody does nothing.
- Domain Authority (DA) was developed by MOZ to predict how well a website should rank in search engine results. Websites are rated on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being best. New sites always begin at one, and as sites mature in a white hat manner they’ll get higher scores.
- Page Authority (PA), also developed by MOZ, measures the ranking strength of an individual page.
- Page Rank (PR) was Google’s original metric indicating the quality and quantity of links to a page on a scale of 0 to 10. Google no longer publishes this number, but the concept behind it still influences their algorithm.
If your site is relatively new with low DA and PA values, how do you get inbound links? This is the classic chicken and egg problem. You need links to rise in the rankings, but you can’t get links until you rise in the rankings. The answer is you create great content which other webmasters want to reference, and you use techniques such as guest posting and media outreach. Also establish relationships by networking with other bloggers, businesspeople, and webmasters.
Why shouldn’t you build backlinks too quickly?
If you’re like most bloggers and businesspeople, you want search engines to take notice of your site as quickly as possible so you can start building an audience.
Slow down. Get a few good quality backlinks a week, at most. If you go too fast, Google may decide you’re attempting to spam them. This can result in a downgrade for your page or site. If you write good quality content, people will naturally want to share it. Get more people to look at your content through social media and other methods. If your quality is high, you’ll find it shared across the web. Be patient.
The people who get hurt here are usually new bloggers who trusted somebody’s promise of page one in a month. They didn’t know the rules and the seller did, and the seller’s long gone by the time the penalty lands. I think anyone selling fast link packages to beginners knows exactly what’s coming for the buyer.
I’ve been one of them. I paid a cheap SEO provider, and they loaded my site with spammy links and all kinds of bad stuff. I spent a lot of time in Google Search Console with the disavow tool, telling Google which URLs were spam, and I had to get rid of hundreds of them. Big mistake. Google says it ignores most spammy links now, so I wouldn’t treat disavowing as routine.
In February 2011, The New York Times reported that J.C. Penney had ranked first on Google for months on searches like “dresses,” “bedding,” “area rugs” and “skinny jeans.” It even beat Samsonite’s own site for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Doug Pierce, a search expert at Blue Fountain Media, found 2,015 pages with dress links pointing to JCPenney.com, on sites about cars, dogs, snoring, jokes and dentists.
Google’s Matt Cutts told the paper the links violated its guidelines, and Google took manual action. Within hours, “Samsonite carry on luggage” fell from No. 1 to No. 71 and “living room furniture” fell from No. 1 to No. 68.
J.C. Penney said it hadn’t authorized the links and fired its search firm, SearchDex. According to Search Engine Land, the penalty lasted about 90 days.
That was a national retailer with lawyers and a marketing budget, and a link scheme still cost it months of its best rankings. A first-time author with a small blog has no cushion at all, and I’d keep every paid link package far away from my site.
Networking Is a Great Way to Get Backlinks
Networking with other professionals is among the best ways to create backlinks, especially if your site is relatively new. These professionals could be:
- Peers in the same or a similar niche or genre
- Co-workers
- Suppliers and vendors
- Consultants
The idea is to get others to know, like, and trust you, and to create great content on a well-optimized site. These relationships will naturally result in cross-linking. Things to be careful about:
- Don’t use link exchanges. Search engines frown on obvious exchanges where you put a link on your site in return for a link on theirs. Add links that make sense and ask for links that make sense, and make sure your networking partners understand it’s not necessarily an even exchange.
- Don’t link to or ask for links from low-quality sites. If the sites or blogs aren’t of high quality, don’t consider them in your link strategy.
- Avoid thin sites. These are sites with little or no real content.
- Stay far away from any black hat SEO. Google and other search engines will catch you.
Link Building Methods That Work for Authors
The following methods are techniques I’ve found useful. Many of them require writing content. That fits right into what I do every day.
Design a workflow of tasks to accomplish on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This is a brief list. There are many other methods. Use the ones that fit best with your style. Over time, you’ll discover what works for you. What counts is steady, regular work. You can’t build backlinks quickly. The search engines frown on that because it’s not natural.
Blog Commenting
Commenting on blogs generally won’t improve your search ranking directly because most commenting systems mark links as NOFOLLOW, meaning search engines will mostly ignore them. However, by making intelligent, thoughtful comments you can gain the attention of the blog owner, and they become a networking partner. You can ask them to link to your site, write guest posts for them, and build a relationship. You may also get traffic from people who click on your comment links to check out your site. Here’s a useful overview of how blog commenting fits into an overall link building strategy.
Get Interviews
Find podcasts, radio shows, and bloggers who want interviews, contact them, and offer to do an interview. These outlets are always looking for content, so you have a good chance of succeeding. You’ll most likely get a backlink from their site for the interview. Sometimes these interviews will be a written questionnaire, sometimes audio podcasts, and occasionally video. To get more value from the effort, ask for copies of the interview in audio or video format along with rights to republish. This gives you content for your own blog.
Guest Posting
A strong method for getting backlinks is to write guest posts on other blogs.
Find a blogger and start communicating with them. Comment on their blogs, join their email lists, reply to their newsletters. Once you’ve established a relationship, ask to do a guest post.
Ensure these posts are of the same or better quality than what you publish on your own blog and include a link or two back to your site. If possible, write more than one article for each site. Otherwise, it might appear that you’re posting articles simply to get backlinks.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
An excellent technique for getting backlinks is to join a media query service as a source.
You’ll get regular emails with questions from reporters. By properly answering their query with a well-crafted pitch, you’ll get responses, and most of these will result in backlinks to your site. On occasion, you’ll encounter a reporter for a print publication or a site that doesn’t allow backlinks, but that’s part of the process. If you focus on answering their query and explaining why you’re a credible source instead of selling your products and services, you’ll get responses. After a while, the same reporters may come back to you for more material.
I think media queries are the most underrated link source an author has. You’re answering a real question for a real reporter, the link comes from a site with real authority, and nobody at Google will ever call it spam. It takes patience and a lot of unanswered pitches, and it’s still worth more than any shortcut on the market.
Write Testimonials
You’ve bought products and services from companies that have a web presence. Send them a short, real testimonial and give them permission to republish it on their website. Include your link. This often results in a link from their home page or testimonials page.
| Method | How to do it | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Networking | Build relationships with peers, co-workers, suppliers and consultants | Natural cross-linking over time |
| Blog commenting | Leave intelligent, thoughtful comments | Mostly NOFOLLOW links, but a networking partner and some traffic |
| Interviews | Offer yourself to podcasts, radio shows and bloggers | Usually a backlink, plus content to republish if you ask |
| Guest posting | Build a relationship first; write at your own quality or better | Links back to your site; the most effective method |
| Media queries (HARO) | Answer reporters’ questions as a credible source, not a seller | Backlinks from sites with real authority |
| Testimonials | Send a short, real testimonial with permission to republish | A link from a home page or testimonials page |
What Destroys Your Search Rankings?
Any of the following actions can cause your site to be banned, temporarily or permanently, from search engines. This isn’t a full list of black hat SEO techniques, but it’ll give you a clear idea of what to avoid.
- Article directories: Google will most likely ignore these as they’re generally only intended for linking purposes.
- Link farms: Pages stuffed with hundreds or thousands of links, built for no reason except to fool search engines.
- Keyword stuffing: Repeating keywords and phrases over and over in an attempt to fool search engines.
- Unrelated keywords: Adding extra, unrelated keywords in an attempt to get search engines to send more traffic.
- Hidden text: Making text very tiny, using colors to make text invisible to readers, and hiding links so they can be picked up by search engines but not seen by viewers.
- ALT stuffing – Loading your image descriptions and ALT text with keywords.
- Cloaking: Making your pages appear different between search engines and human viewers.
- Doorway pages: Creating pages on different domains with duplicate or similar content, often redirecting users to a primary site.
- Page swapping: Once a page has been indexed, swapping it out with a different page.
- Duplicate content: Copying content from other sites and using it on your own.
- Spam or automated blog posting: Creating blog posts that are garbage just to get people to click on links.
- Comment spam: Posting links in comments on other blogs which add no value, especially in an automated way.
- Trackback spam: Using the trackback mechanism of WordPress to generate artificial links.
- Pingback spam: Abusing ping services by notifying them of your content over and over to make them think it’s new when it’s not.
- Cybersquatting – Registering domains similar to popular domains.
- Social network spam: Using social networking in a spammy way to drive clicks. For example, posting a cat video which links to a get rich scheme.
- Article spinning – Creating multiple variations of the same article.
- Content automation – Using automated programs to create content.
The way to get your site ranking well in search engines is simple:
- Create excellent quality content.
- Earn links from sites people trust, the slow honest way. Anything else is a con, and Google eventually catches it.
Here’s an overview of negative SEO and why these techniques backfire.
Should you link your own websites to each other?
Be careful about linking together different sites that you own, especially if they’re on the same IP address. This is common when using shared hosting services, because they often allow multiple blogs or websites with their own domain names to be defined for a single account. For example, if you own mywebsite.com and want to create myproduct.com, anotherproduct.com, and myservices.com, it might seem advantageous to link all these together and include all those links in the menu on each page.
While it won’t hurt to include a link here and there to other sites that you own, avoid including those links on every page of all your sites. Instead, create a hierarchy in your main site which includes each of your other sites as subfolders. For example, mywebsite.com/myproduct, mywebsite.com/anotherproduct, and mywebsite.com/myservices works much better for SEO purposes.
My take
Backlinks still decide most of the gap between the bottom of the rankings and the top, so earn them slowly. Write content worth linking to, then network your way into links from people who know your work. Don’t build them fast. And don’t wire every site you own together in the menus, especially on shared hosting. Put the extra properties under your main domain as subfolders.
How do you earn backlinks to a blog?
If you want to get your site ranked in search engines, start with excellent quality content that others will want to share. Use your writing skills and include graphics, videos, and other media.
Once you have quality content, create a plan to contact other webmasters and bloggers and ask to do guest posting. This is the most effective way to get traffic to your website.
The other methods, such as blog commenting and testimonials, can help. Just don’t overdo it. Stay away from anything related to search engine spam. Avoid any kind of free backlink builder or free backlinks submitter. Most of these don’t work, they’re spammy, and they can get your site penalized. I’d take five links from people who read my work over five thousand from a machine.
If you follow these recommendations and build links at a regular pace over time, you’ll find the search engines take notice and you’ll get more traffic. For more on building your online presence as an author, see the Author Platform Handbook and the Substack Handbook.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project.
If somebody offers to sell you a thousand backlinks, run. The paid link business has been chewing up honest writers since the nineties, and it’s a plain cheat, because the seller walks off with the money and the author walks off with a penalized site. Earn your links with work people want to cite. It’s slower, and it’s the only kind that won’t blow up in your face later.
Links still count, but the traffic has changed shape. The Day Your Website Died is my book on answer engine optimization and getting found in AI search.
Frequently Asked Questions
- 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings, Search Engine Land
- How JC Penney gamed Google, Digital Trends
- Spam Policies for Google Web Search, Google Search Central
