Requesting link sharing partnerships
Over the past few months, our company has been approached several times by companies requesting a link sharing partnership. Provided that they have good domain authority, we are usually willing to work with people in this way, offering backlinks to their site in a blog article that we write. In exchange, our app is featured on their integrations page, blog, and/or social network.
I'd love to read more about peoples' experience with this. Do you think that this is a legitimate way to build improved SERPs? When monitoring direct referrals in Google Analytics, the backlinks themselves provide very little traffic. Apparently google's hummingbird algorithm looks to see how many backlinks you have when establishing your domain authority and search ranking, but it's been difficult to quantify this.
What are the best ways, in your opinion, to go about engaging in link sharing with other companies and how do you test to confirm that the campaigns are delivering value?
You seem to get the gist of it already. :)
How much value is tricky to measure unless you're actively tracking traffic with UTM parameters, and even that is only part of the story. Much of the value won't be in the traffic, but in helping your domain authority get better. But that part is AFAIK impossible to measure in any reliable way (unless you can correlate an increase in search traffic to these events, but SEO is slow...).
It can be a great marketing activity, though, providing you're reaching a relevant, targeted audience.
I want to echo what others have said here, though:
I would be very careful with any type of link exchange schemes. Google actively discourages them and even have public guidelines for what's ok and what's not (from their perspective).
You are of course free to ignore them, many SEOs do, but it's probably not a good idea long term. Sooner or later anything sneaky tends to bite you in the butt (via an algorithm update for example).
Relevant info from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
I think in general, links on integration pages and such should be ok (pretty natural on the web, right?), as well as announcing such integrations in blogs and newsletters (and even press releases). But don't overdo it.
I don't know what you've been doing exactly, but make sure you don't link to, or get links from, pages that are not relevant to your industry (even if they have good domain authority).
Link building via content marketing (or its cousin: free, publicly available tools) is the way to go, IMO. I may be biased because it's what's worked best for me in the past: Deliver real value, get links.
Hey Ptrei. I wonder if the expression "linksharing" has connotations that I'm not aware of. Our approach has been slow and exhaustive, usually taking 2-6 weeks to nurture connections with other companies that have comparable domain authority to our own site. All of our links are nested within comprehensive, relevant content for our audience, showcasing the company's features and how they integrate with ours.
I think what you're describing here is just natural, organic link building. It should only be positive, both from a UX perspective and SEO perspective (you always need to consider both). B2B products do this all the time and it should be fine.
I think when you said "link sharing", that reminded some people of the old-school days of SEO when sites would just exchange links for SEO juice, nothing more. It was back when links were much more important for ranking and Google's algorithms were less sophisticated than they are now. It worked. Until it didn't.
Okay, link building not link sharing. Duly noted!
Thanks again :)
No worries. Also be careful with the term "link exchange". Same thing. :)
I do recommend you read through the "link schemes" page from the Google quality guidelines that I shared above if you haven't already. Useful to be aware of this stuff.
Will research link schemes and get informed. Appreciate you!
Reminds me of the web ring days of old
I wouldn't expect many people to click on the links, but that's not the purpose. If you are in similar industries, a single link can provide a ton of SEO juice to your site.
Backlinks still make up a huge portion of SEO, but you are right that it's hard to tell how a single backlink contributes to your overall rankings.
SEO is opaque by nature, but there's SEO experts out there that try to test and quantify what works, so consider looking into that.
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Hi Shiva, thanks for your feedback.
Can you help me understand what's fishy about networking with other companies, testing their product, developing personal relationships with them, and building backlinks to each others services? To me it seems like a healthy sign of interdependence, especially because we use Zapier which serves as an integration portal with most of the companies we partner with.