There are many link-building myths that are floating around out there at any given time. Our New Year’s resolution here is to help to do away with four of the most persistent ones:
#1 Infographics Help Link Building
True and false. If your infographic makes a complicated subject easy for someone to grasp, and it was made by someone with background in the subject and that person has some design talent, then yes, you will be able to attract some good links and boost your site’s search engine results. But if you just take a hunk of text with a nice font and throw in some clip art, no, you’re not going to get much link building done there.
Basically, like anything else, you get out of infographics precisely what you put into them.
#2 Links Pages Are Not Trustworthy
This myth has been around forever, and it just is not true. If you visit this Harvard page, you can clearly see that this page is very helpful for people in that niche. For some reason, some people think that a links page is bad just because it is called a links page. If that was true, then we know that no company with anything to do with sustainability would look for a link from Harvard for the page agove.
#3 Inurl: Submit
This is the classic Google operator that lets you find sites that accepts submissions. This works because they have put the word ‘submit’ in the submission page URL. The wisdom you hear at SEO conferences is that any site that looks for submissions is not credible. It’s not true. It all rests with the credibility and the intent of the owner of the site.
#4 Guest Posts Are Not Helpful
Another silly myth that came about because of a few webmaster videos and anecdotes. Think about this: What is it that separates a good guest blog post from a bad one? First, consider the blog. Has it been around for a long time? What is its purpose? Does it only have guest posts? What are the topics of the posts?
You should be trying to guest post for sites that have been around for a while, and have a specific audience. Do not write for sites that take a shotgun approach and have many different subjects. You want to write for specialty blogs. If you choose your blogs carefully, your guest blog posts can be highly effective in getting your site more links.
Good luck in your link building in 2013, and may your links never be broken!