So What Is Link Diversity?
It simply means having backlinks from various different sources and not having all your links coming from the same places. A.K.A. not having all of your eggs in one basket.
Let me give you an example.
If you had a website and all of its backlinks were coming from 1 article directory that wouldn’t be very diverse. Even if you had 45,000 links from this 1 article directory.
However, if your site had backlinks coming in from 400 different article directories, 50 different press release sites, dozens of bookmarking sites, various different comments on blogs around the net, several different forums and other online communities you’d have much more link diversity and this is good.
Usually when someone says they got stomp by Google in the seach engines is because they don’t have very diverse link building going on. Yes, I know there are millions of examples where legit sites that had everything right, still ge penalized. It sucks and unfortunately that’s how this biz can be sometimes. But, you must divesify your links as much as possible for the best possible success of your website search engine rankings.
I show my students several ways to build backlinks to help prevent stagnant link diversity. However, I understand that as we get busy in our day to day lives it’s easy to get side-tracked and forget where we’ve built links to.
So today I am going to give you a little worksheet I created at the end of this blog post that will greatly help you out.
But, first let’s cover how to increase your link diversity for a few moments.
#1. Spread As You Go
An easy way to make sure you’re building backlinks diversely is to start doing it from the beginning. Set up daily tasks to help you complete this. Schedule something like this…
Day 1: Articles
Day 2: Blog Commenting
Day 3: Social Bookmarking
Day 4: Squidoo Lens
Day 5: Different Article To Different Directory
Day 6: Press Release
Day 7: Forum Post
The above is just an example. However, you see where I am going with this. You can do this for every page/post on your site as well including the home page. You can also use any link source you want and as many link sources you want. Remember the more the better as it’ll make your link profile more diverse.
If you have a new site start diversely doing this now, do not wait.
If you have an older site you’ll want to start doing this now as well.
Optionally, you can set this all up inside Google Calendar to set reminders for yourself and make it easier.
#2. Vary Your Anchor Text
On another note and this goes hand-in-hand with link diversity make sure your anchor text isn’t always the same. One thing I see a lot is someone only selecting 1 or 2 versions of the anchor text. You should make this a varied as possible.
There is nothing wrong with having 20 different anchor variations. You should also consider just linking back to your pages/posts with just the URL too. Sure it won’t contain anchor text but it’s still a backlink.
#3. Don’t Worry About No-Follow and Do-Follow All The Time
Natural link diversity will have no-follow and do-follow links. Often people worry too much about posting on sites that only allow do-follow. The problem is you always have only do-follow links on your site and never any no-follow links that’d look odd to Google don’t you think? Quit worrying so much about this and just get links wherever you can (ethically of course).
#4. Internal Linking
Link various page/posts on your site together. A good start is having a site map on your home page that contains a link to every one of your additional pages/posts.
However, you shouldn’t stop there. If you write a post anytime you can reference another one of your posts within that pot and link back to it, that’s good! Not only is this good for your site, but it’s also good for your readers.
Imagine reading an article about preventing heart disease and the author put in an additional link referencing a post they wrote on 10 foods that help prevent heart disease. How likely would you be to read that if you were already interested in the subject? It’s often easy to forget that in all of the stuff we do online that we are still building our websites for people not robots, search engines or computers.
Make sure you vary your internal anchor text as well. Don’t be afraid to just use the anchor text “CLICK HERE” from time to time as well as it’s just a naturally looking backlink.