From time to time Ahrefs has linked to SEO Theory through its marketing feeds aggregator. I have always considered these to be high-value links because they drive traffic from a Website that a lot of people trust. I have never looked at the source code to see if the links were passing PageRank and Anchor Text. In my experience a lot of Web marketers place relatively no positive value in feed aggregation; they may even flag these perfectly legitimate Websites as “spam” in their link audits. I imagine a lot of perfectly good aggregator sites have been disavowed in cleanup campaigns as well.

I single out Ahrefs’ aggregator for two reasons. First, it’s a great example of exactly the kind of earned links I enjoy receiving for my sites. Second, it illustrates one of the problems with value-based link acquisition. How do you assess the risk associated with a scalable link building technique? I have been building links since 1996. I never stopped building links, although some people in the SEO world have painted me as against linking (I was only ever against inefficient uses of time and resources). I have found a lot of reasons NOT to build certain kinds of links again, far too many to mention here, but Ahrefs’ has given me the perfect excuse to write a case study on risks associated with link building strategies.

Of course, I am referring to their 90-expert white hat link building roundup article published here.

What Is Risk? How Should It Be Measured?

This is an important question in the theory of link management, for nothing on the Web comes labeled with a warning. Most marketers tend to speak of “risk” in terms of what a search engine might do about a given link. But there are other risks associated with link building, some far worse than anything you will see coming from a search engine.

At the end of the day, if Google stops sending you traffic you still have other options for getting traffic. You may not feel confident in those options but they exist, and the past 2-3 years have seen many companies share anecdotes about how they have built up non-Google traffic through social media, links, alternative search engines, online advertising, and even offline advertising. In the sink or swim world of Website marketing I never advise a client to wait for Google to run another update.

Hence, search engine algorithmic risk is not the incredible monster that fear and rumor have made it out to be. But we’ll come back to that. For the purpose of this case study let us speak of four types of risk associated with links:

Negative valuation Inappropriate referral Value dilution Search penalties and downgrades

Negative valuation is the worst of these risks. The Streisand Effect is a good example of negative valuation. You may want to change what people see in the search results about you and so you engage in positive reputation management: you build links to all the “good” stuff that has been published about you. But then someone sees what you are doing and they start linking to all the bad stuff. You can’t have it taken down and you can’t outlink it. Negative valuation decays your ability to manage search results and it can be devastating when it goes viral.

Inappropriate referral is the next worst-case scenario. You’ll often run into this when you buy an expired domain. Now, a lot of Web marketers buy expired domains and turn them into zombie link slaves, but every now and then an entrepreneur resurrects an old domain name that was used for an entirely different business. You have to live with the legacy of those old links, many of which can still send a lot of traffic. Worse, they may continue to pass good, strong anchor text that causes your site to rank well for queries you have no interest in.

If you only receive a little bit of inappropriate referral traffic it’s not really a problem, but once in a while someone receives a LOT of inappropriate referral traffic. These visitors tie up your Web hosting resources, your TCP connections and SQL database connections and bandwidth. The visitors you want may have to stand in line to wait for access to your content, and many of them will simply go elsewhere.

Inappropriate referral is a convenient tool for hostile (negative) SEO campaigns. If your Website suddenly has thousands of pornography links pointing to it from random domains, the chances are pretty good people will come searching for some of that stuff. They are not finding what they want and your analytics are screwed up. But your analytics are screwed up by zombie referral traffic, too.

Another form of inappropriate referral is an inherited penalty when you resurrect a burned domain.

Value dilution is the self-inflicted gunshot wound of SEO bloggery. You come up with a great idea for acquiring links and you decide you just have to share it on your blog (or maybe someone else’s blog). You do this because you are a marketer trying to make a name for yourself or hoping to generate leads, or whatever. It works. It usually works too well. Eventually more people start doing what you are doing (because you keep telling them to do it) and the return on investment from this technique begins to decline.

One way that ROI drops on a link building technique is that whereas you were able to get lots of links by hand last year, this year someone has automated the process and now you feel you have to subscribe to some tool (or create your own). Your great technique now costs you more time and money and other people will be snatching links out from under you because you cannot stay at it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.

Value dilution also kicks in when the technique scales so widely through overuse that the search engines declare it to be spam. And that leads us to the little sister of link risk:

Search engine penalties and downgrades. These are not so bad because you CAN recover from them, or ignore them. If you invest in the shadow domain/cloaking strategies of high-end spammers penalties become meaningless to you. You just practice churn-and-burn SEO. You don’t even have to cloak with churn-and-burn; you can just build Website after Website, milk each one for all it’s worth, and then move on.

Many of you (or some of your clients) are frustrated with the Google Penguin and Panda algorithms. You are waiting for updates to come in and tell you if you have fixed the problems. Of course, there are ways to get around both algorithms. When I explain these methods to business owners they usually say, “But I don’t want to do that. I just want Google to fix my rankings.” And some people still want to compensate for their downgrades or penalties with more links (especially now that we know Google will rebalance the link equation if you earn enough good links).

Nonetheless, your frustrations are misplaced. You can do far more about a link-based penalty (manual action) or (Penguin) downgrade than you can do about any of the above three scenarios. Consider yourself fortunate if a penalty or downgrade is the only link-based problem your site has to overcome.

Cost in Time and Resources might be a fair fifth “risk” category, but I’m not sure everyone would agree this is a risk. So I will agree that it’s closely related to risk but something different. Still, you should assess the time-and-cost versus expected return on investment.

Content Quality is another risk-like factor that most people don’t agree on how to assess. Everyone talks about “great content” but what does that mean? The official, formal SEO Theory definition of “great content” is that great content requires absolutely no outreach to earn links, and it constitutes 10% or less of all Web content. If you are really producing “great content”, you should not be sending outreach emails or social media pokes to anyone. There is no need for that with “great content”.

Let’s sum all this up by naming it the Risk+Cost Ratio. The higher the Risk+Cost to links earned ratio, the less valuable those links will be in the long run.

You don’t have to agree with me on how I define or value these risks and related factors, but these are what I am applying to some of the link building ideas in the Ahrefs article. The above list is the ruler by which I measure the link building techniques below. Common sense will tell you to use all of these ideas sparingly.

Link Building Technique Source My Opinion on the Risks Skyscraper technique Brian Dean This is a variation on content curation and I have been doing stuff like this since the 1990s but it is time-and-resource intensive . There is a risk of value dilution because this technique is so popular. And if you follow Brian’s formula to the letter there may be a future risk of search penalties and downgrades . Remember Eric Enge’s Law: Differentiate or Die. Broken link building ? I know I did broken link building back in the 1990s. A lot of people were doing it then. This may be one of the oldest non-spammy link building techniques. But it can definitely lead to value dilution and search engine penalties and downgrades . Remember, just because a lot of people believe a link building technique is “white hat” does not mean it is always that simple. If you buy old domains to redirect their links then you also risk creating inappropriate referral traffic . Outdated link replacement Nimrod Flores He is probably not the first person to think of this. In fact, I remember a lot of Wikipedia link wars where marketers kept changing outdated links. I have never heard of a spam downgrade or penalty for this, but it can lead to value dilution and inappropriate referral traffic . Image link building ? I started doing this when I became frustrated with hotlinkers in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Boy, was that a mistake. It sucks up bandwidth and Google changed the way it handles links associated with images. Gareth James’ method looks more productive simply because of the follow up outreach, but it could become the next form of widget spam (thus risking search penalties and downgrades ) and it costs time and resources . I can see a risk of value dilution as well but once people see how much work is involved in this, they may be less likely to jump on this bandwagon. Killer content ? If you do it right, they WILL come without your doing anything and they WILL link. It’s just really hard to create killer content. It’s not killer if you have to shore it up with social media and email outreach. Also, if you seriously have to invest 40 man-hours in killer content, it’s probably not going to be that. You’re way overthinking it. Killer content almost leaps off the keyboard when you create it. You usually don’t even realize it is that good until the comments, shares, and links bury you in an avalanche of attention. Killer Websites take a long, long time to create but these are easier to achieve than simple “killer content” (whatever that is supposed to be). The Tortoise Me I have been telling people to just consistently create good content on their sites since I was a moderator in the Search Engine Forums in 1999. In recent years the Tortoise “good content” strategy has won many supporters, including Neil Patel and Brian Harnish. It’s easier to create “good” content than it is to create “great/killer” content. There is, of course, a time-and-effort cost associated with the Tortoise technique. Attractive Resources ? There are several variations on this method in the Ahrefs article, including surveys (John Rampton), in-depth white papers (Murray Newlands), and statistics-rich data (Michael Arce). This technique is time-and-resource intensive . If too many people publish the same or similar data/presentations there would be at least a low risk of search engine penalties and downgrades . But the almost infinite potential for variation leads me to suggest there may be little or no value dilution risk. Ego Articles ? Those awful Expert Roundup Articles (ERAs) so many of you love to produce these days top the list. I expect them to eventually lead to spam penalties or Panda-like downgrades . The Ahrefs’ article is exceptional. The risks associated with this strategy include value dilution and search engine penalties and downgrades . You cannot manufacture that much content using the same pool of “experts” AND maintain distinctiveness. Another example of ego articles is Top Lists Spam. Too many people are doing this. Same risks as for ERAs. Floyd Buenavente’s Followup Interview technique is an interesting variation but it could also fall prey to value dilution . Local citations ? I’m not sure who first propagated this idea. Adam Steele mentioned it in the Ahrefs article. Search engines don’t actually use citations like links. Everyone should know that by now. They are very restrictive about which citation sources influence the local ranking algorithms, too. There is a time-and-cost factor to consider with this technique. I would say there is some minor chance of earning search penalties and downgrades too, but that risk probably correlates highly with value dilution . It will depend on how many people do it. And not every Website can benefit from local search. Bottom line: learn which citation sources really matter. Resource Page Links ? This is almost certainly THE oldest link building technique. Back when we first started building the Web everyone had resource pages. There is a risk of earning search engine penalties and downgrades but my partner Randy Ray and I still ask for links from resource pages. There is also a low risk of inappropriate referral , depending on how you select your resource pages. Original Research Andy Crestodina This is technically a sub-category of Killer Content but it’s a good angle to explore. Find a widely used but poorly supported maxim and publish adequate research to show why it is true. There is a time-and-resource cost associated with this technique. You also have to expect value dilution if a lot of people try this. If a lot of people choose the same topics there might be a low search penalty and downgrade risk as well. Stealing Competitor Backlinks ? Bishal Biswas mentioned this technique. I vaguely recall someone discussing it on a mailing list over a decade ago so this technique has been around for a long time. There is a moderate risk of earning search penalties and downgrades with this technique because, as with copying competitor backlinks, you have no way of knowing if those links help or hurt the competitor sites. It is also time-and-resource intensive . Private Blog Networks ? PBNs are favored by many spammers these days but many large corporations publish private networks of Websites (not always blogs). Heck, I have a private blog network (Xenite.Org, SEO Theory, SF-Fandom, etc.). It’s not evil, immoral, or a violation of search engine guidelines to publish multiple Websites. But there is a moderate-to-high risk of search engine penalties and downgrades when you use PBNs for link building. There may be a low risk of inappropriate referrals as well. Web 2.0 Splogs ? Moderate-to-high risk of search engine penalties and downgrades when you use these for link building. Web 2.0 splogs (built on free-hosting services like WordPress.com, Blogspot, Tumblr, Weebly, et. al.) are really a sub-category of PBNs. Guest Posting ? I still write occasional guest posts. But there is a moderate risk of search engine penalties and downgrades . And value dilution set in long ago. It is also time-and-resource intensive . Scholarship Link Building ? There is a moderate-to-high risk of search engine penalties and downgrades associated with this link building technique. My partner Randy Ray and I advise our clients to make the scholarships meaningful and useful. There is also a moderate-to-high risk of value dilution because we have a limited pool of schools that accept marketing-driven scholarships. This is also a time-and-resource intensive technique. And you may get inappropriate referrals . Infographics ? High risk of search engine penalties and downgrades . Infographics are a form of widget spam and value dilution set in years ago. It is still possible to produce good infographics but they are a time-and-resource intensive technique. Product Leveraging ? This is a sub-category of Ego Articles but Jeremy Rivera describes the technique very well. There is a low risk of value dilution but it is a time-and-resource intensive process. Content quality may be uneven depending on the industry or niche. Enge’s Law also applies here: differentiate or die. Solicit Content Jon Dykstra I’m not sure he should really get full credit for this idea but his explanation strikes me as being relatively unique. It’s time-and-resource intensive . Industry Association Memberships ? An older technique that still works, it is not (in my opinion) very scalable. Time-and-resource intensive . Influencer Outreach ? A lot of people integrate this into other techniques but Marko Saric explained how acting just like a PR agency can make this an effective technique. I occasionally create content on my private Websites for a few PR firms that work with the entertainment industry. This is a time-and-resource intensive technique that carries a risk of value dilution . Providing a small, select group of bloggers with exclusive content is better than making it available to everyone. See Matthew Capala’s contribution for an example. Buzz Chasing ? This was actually very popular for content creation a few years ago, and probably still is. Melanie Nathan explains how she might chase a breaking story with some media outreach for specially created timely content. This is time-and-resource intensive and there is a risk of value dilution . Paired Post ? Paul Shapiro described this technique but I know it has been done by many people. This is a time-and-resource intensive technique and there is a risk of value dilution . There may also be a low-to-moderate risk of search engine penalties and downgrades . Lifestyle Content John Deere Okay, John Deere invented “Content Marketing” but Reggie Paquette’s explanation of how his team develops “Lifestyle Content” for ecommerce Websites is a natural example of true content marketing. Many affiliate marketers use this technique, too. It’s a time-and-resource intensive process . Enge’s Law probably applies, although I’m not sure there is much risk of value dilution among ecommerce sites; there is a greater risk of value dilution among affiliates. Copy Competitor Links ? This is a high-risk technique simply because you do not know which links pass value and which links hurt. A lot of Web marketers have been doing this for years. I only go after the barest, minimalist, absolutely necessary links from the most dominant Websites in a niche because everyone who is anyone in the niche has to have them. Gold Mining Kevin Indig This is a sub-category of Influencer Outreach. It is a time-and-resource intensive process. There is a low-to-moderate risk of value dilution simply because there are so few high-value influencers. Social Sharing ? This is more controversial than risky, given how many social media services now automatically add “rel=’nofollow'” link attributes to the links you publish. The secondary links you earn from social media shares can be quite valuable. This is a time-and-resource intensive technique. Advertising ? Servando Silva is notable for discussing it in the Ahrefs article. This is a time-and-resource intensive technique and the return on investment may not be easy to measure (unless you do this exclusively). Forum Marketing ? This is another very old technique. There is a risk of earning search engine penalties and downgrades but many forums now offer special marketing sections where the crawlers are blocked. Some forums may welcome announcements from marketers (like press releases). Your best bet is to work with forums that cater to specific interest niches. Blog Commenting ? There is a high risk of earning search engine penalties and downgrades but you can still do this effectively assuming you don’t annoy everyone. Value dilution set in years ago. There is also a risk of negative valuation and a low risk of inappropriate referrals (high risk if blast spammy blog comments). The key to success is to contribute real value to the discussion. Enge’s Law also definitely applies here. Leverage Vendor Relations ? Tyson Downs explains how he does this in the Ahrefs article. There is a low-to-moderate risk of Negative Valuation and a low risk of earning search engine penalties and downgrades . There may also be a low risk of inappropriate referrals . Rewarding Favorable Content ? Although similar to incentivized blogging, the rewards are offered after the content has been created without any prior knowledge of a possible reward. Still, sending gifts to bloggers and asking for links incurs a moderate-to-high risk of search engine penalties and downgrades . Michael Salvo explains how he does it in the article. Using the gifts to establish relationships whereby you can ask for links later on may be less risky. There is also a risk of Negative Valuation , as anyone who has been “outed” by a blogger can attest. Passive Link Requests ? This is another old technique. You ask your visitors to link to your site, usually by including a “how to link to us/this article” box somewhere on each page. There is a high risk for inappropriate referrals . A high-traffic Website may not be hurt by that. Contests ? Technically, contests are NOT forbidden by search engine guidelines. You can run contests all day long. You just cannot require contestants to link to your site. It’s advisable to not even ask for links in conjunction with a contest. When done right your only risks should be inappropriate referrals and time-and-resource intensive . A business with a bad reputation for poor products, poor customer service, or aggressive billing practices incurs a risk of negative valuation .

There are other ways to build links. And some of the responses in the Ahrefs article were really just techniques that are mentioned above but given with different names. It is impossible to concisely classify everything.

Many link builders now make extensive use of rogue crawlers and botnets. Some of you may know this already, but most of you appear to unleash these heinous tools on unsuspecting Websites without any consideration for the harm you do to them. It doesn’t take much effort to use up all the available TCP connections or bandwidth for many personal blogs. Web marketers just trample the Web like barbarians crushing fine works of art in their zeal to get to the gold in the temples.

If/when the Web converts over to the HTTP/2 protocol set those precious TCP connections won’t be devoured so greedily by crawl spam, but there are other ways that your random trawling for link resources hurts unsuspecting Websites. Maybe just seeing a sampling of the many different ways people can build links will help marketers behave more responsibly.

But the greatest danger to effective link building remains your willingness to share your ideas. The more you share, the less effective these techniques will become. You may think that all these “X link building experts share tips” articles are a great idea, but you are a crowd of Once-lers cutting down Truffula Trees so that you can make an endless supply of Thneeds.

Trust me: once you burn all the great link building techniques you will go back to writing an endless stream of “SEO is dead”, “link building is dead”, and “Google hates me” articles. Sharing is not caring in Web marketing. If you want to reduce the risks associated with your link building, stop participating in all the Expert Roundup Articles. Stop writing ERAs about link building. What is coming down the road is easily preventable, but the Web marketing community acts like it doesn’t care at all about the consequences of all these “great articles”.

In the end the very companies that pay us to help them improve their search referral traffic will trust us even less than they do today, and in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people who don’t think much of the SEO industry. Calling yourselves “Content Marketers” or “Outreach Specialists” or BazizzWhamagadgets will not fool the public.

When it comes to assessing risks associated with link building, the issue is not all about search penalties. It never was.