Newsstand - Robbie Richards: 19 Actionable Strategies to Build Quality Backlinks


Staff member
BuSo Pro
Digital Strategist
Sep 3, 2014

I asked @The Engineer to toss this up on the newsstand (Don't miss the previous one on crawler traps either!). Robbie Richards runs one of the best SEO blogs out there and he just dropped a post about 19 Killer Backlink Strategies.

You'd think it'd be regurgitated stuff with that number, and while some of it is topics you've seen before, he's got a unique angle for each one:
  1. Build high-probability link channels with custom search engines
  2. The 3-step RLR framework
  3. DEEP broken link building (at scale)
  4. Reverse Engineer Mid-Tier Affiliate Link Prospects
  5. Building quality links with industry-specific tools
  6. Convert homepage links to deep "money" page links
  7. Mine Editorial Keyword Anchors and Turn Them Into Contextual Links
  8. Set a Link Velocity Target (and Stay Competitive in the SERPs)
  9. Landing authority links with "alternate content creation"
  10. Reclaim links from stolen images
  11. Tenant SEO (a powerful 1-2 Punch)
  12. The “ranking for links” technique
  13. Reclaim lost link equity in 404 pages
  14. Build links with blog comments (hint: this isn’t your usual spammy blog commenting strategy!)
  15. Quora hacking (and scaling referral traffic streams)
  16. Link reclamation (using Google Alerts)
  17. Mining roundups for quick link wins
  18. Drive Traffic (and Build Relationships) With “Targeted” Blog Commenting
  19. Video transcription
I'm not going to dig through all of these in this post, but I wanted to call your attention to them. Specifically I wanted to talk about #12.

Please start discussion on anything you find in the post you think deserves some extra attention. Here's mine:

The "Ranking for Links" Technique

The summary of this section is that almost 2.5 million posts are published every day. Tons of these are by journalists and bloggers that need some kind of reference for the stuff they're posting.

So how do they find these references? They google some related search term and then end up linking to one of the top 3 ranking posts, basically. I'm sure many of you have experienced it. I've gotten links from some of the craziest out-of-reach places for ranking for some weird and obscure stuff. A lot of times it's forum links, but many of those are dofollow. Sometimes you get a killer link. The other month I got a Forbes link, but unfortunately they went all nofollow. But you'll also get a ton of great contextual, dofollow links. It's a numbers game.

What Robbie Richards digs into is which kind of posts end up getting links like this. His conclusion is to rank for "reference" terms, which are basically stuff like:
  • How to...
  • What is...
  • Definitions
  • Statistics
  • Lists
And so forth. Some examples are stuff like "How do search engines work" and then shows just how many links Backlinko has gotten to his "google ranking factors" post (14.9K from 2.75K domains according to Ahrefs) +1 from this thread!

I meant to post this yesterday and forget but read a transcript from an interview with Jon Dykstra today (dude is killing it at like $30k profit a month only on stuff like this). All Jon does is post 3 or 4 times a day to his main site and only long-tail informational content. A lot of it is "reference" content based on things I've read from him. He says he does ZERO link building but gets tons of links. This is likely how it's done.

I'm imagining a scenario where you're trying to build topical authority for your site while driving traffic to a portion of the site monetized by display ads. You can get clicks on those ads, build authority, and get links all in one swoop with the right planning.

Quora gets an absurd amount of links from this tactic alone, as do sites like Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, etc. There's no reason we all can't get these passive links.
Apr 18, 2018
Thanks for sharing this! LOTS of light bulbs went off for me reading through this especially around creating reference content like you mentioned! Interesting point on how Fat Stacks is monetizing I haven’t followed Jon in awhile!

I also loved the parts about tenant SEO, and using CSEs for promoting to existing relationships.