Effective SEO backlinking strategy that reduces bounce rates too

[Julia Andersson]

I'm sure many warriors already use this technique but I thought I would post it here for the benefit of our less experienced warriors

If you happen to have a blog and have a series of articles under a specific category, create backlinks to your category with the category keyword as the anchor text as well as creating backlinks to individual posts with long tail keywords.

Say for example you have an SEO blog and one of your categories is 'backlinking techniques' and you have 10 posts under that category. When targeting the keyword 'backlinking techniques' link to the category rather than individual posts. This allows you to concentrate all your backlinking to one url rather than having a smaller number of links to multiple posts (i.e. better 500 back links to the category than 50 each to 10 posts).

In order to diversify your backlinking si it looks more natural to search engines, you could also use 'backlinking strategies' as alternate anchor text... and I'm sure you can think of other examples.

I've been using this technique very successfully for one of my categories to rank on page 1 of google results for higher competition keywords. That category even has google pagerank as a result (not that PR is a big deal... it's more of a vanity thing LOL)... I'm now beginning to use this strategy for other categories.

There are a couple of other good things with this strategy also.

1. When people land on the category page they see several related posts rather than just one which reduces bounce rate by making them curious. They'll click through to one post then go back and click through to another. Sometimes my stats show the one IP address clicking through to four or five posts in the category.
2. When you create new posts in that category, a large portion of your backlinking is already done, you need only create backlinks to the post itself using specific long tails.

All feedback most welcome

Julia

[prcys]

As per me blogs, articles and videos are the best methods to get more backlinks and with that visitor engagement also as in reading content. And through these methods one can promote content which they have and by making use of social media, he/she can get more people for their content and this way can get better results for their site with the help of content.

[TheGrooby]

Is the category page simply links to posts, or is there some other content on the page?

[Julia Andersson]

Originally Posted by TheGrooby

Is the category page simply links to posts, or is there some other content on the page?

The category page on all my blogs displays a list of related posts by title and part of the first paragraph so it's important to get to the point quickly in your content as there are only 3 or 4 lines of text below the title. So what a visitor sees in that excerpt will need to capture their attention!

Of course, your sidebars are present also.

That said, some blog themes have different settings so you would need to check a category page on your own site... in general the link style would be mysite.com/category/mycategory

[Buyseech]

The problem which I see with categories and tags pages being indexed is that (as logic dictates) these are pages with duplicate content. They contain snippets of your actual posts and will be much harder to rank than the posts themselves.

I see the "trick" with lowering bounce rate etc., but it either denominates the posts with pointing everything to categories, or vice versa. Many of the plugins I have used in the past have had a tick box, with which you prevented the tags/categories/privacy policy etc from being indexed. I believe they are not there in vain.

Just my thoughts...

Sincerely, Buyseech

[simontts]

I think this thread is excellent advice for backlink building.

There is no conflict in my mind with regards to duplicate content because the category page and all the posts in that category are passing link juice both ways. If a link comes into a post, it passes link juice through to the category page and vice versa.

This is cool approach to backlinking and one of the main benefits is that when you add a new post to that category, a lot of the link building is already done and it will start ranking pretty quickly.

Thanks for sharing it Julia.

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by Buyseech

The problem which I see with categories and tags pages being indexed is that (as logic dictates) these are pages with duplicate content. They contain snippets of your actual posts and will be much harder to rank than the posts themselves.

I see the "trick" with lowering bounce rate etc., but it either denominates the posts with pointing everything to categories, or vice versa. Many of the plugins I have used in the past have had a tick box, with which you prevented the tags/categories/privacy policy etc from being indexed. I believe they are not there in vain.

Just my thoughts...

Sincerely, Buyseech

Google only takes exception with significant amounts of duplicate content. Using the method described by the OP will not hurt your SEO efforts.

It actually makes the individual posts easier to rank, not harder. It is giving more authority to an internal page and internal link that is pointing to your post.

If you are that paranoid about it though, you could list nothing but the titles on the category page.

[littledan]

Reallly good advice. Not sure if we do this or not on our blog, I have emailed my VA to see. It doesn't look too complicated and the potential rewards quite high, thats the way I like it.

[Julia Andersson]

Originally Posted by Buyseech

The problem which I see with categories and tags pages being indexed is that (as logic dictates) these are pages with duplicate content. They contain snippets of your actual posts and will be much harder to rank than the posts themselves.

Interesting point you bring up here Buyseech.. thank you.

According to Google, "Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar."

In that case, a category page would not be classed as duplicate content since snippets from multiple posts could not be classed as substantive blocks of content. Duplicate content occurs when a page contains essentially identical content to ANOTHER page. Categories are not pages, they are simply internal blog indexing and google recognizes this. If there really were duplicate content issues with tags and categories, don't you think blog software developers like wordpress would simply remove them?

Not only that but there is no reason for google to make a category page harder to rank for since there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty according to Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty"

So you can rest easy on this issue As I said, this has actually been from experience... I originally decided to try it as an experiment and discovered it works well so I am now expanding the technique to other categories.

Oh, and I am NOT saying not to link to posts... I like to backlink to posts using long tails that are very specific to the post. In the SEO example I used of backlinking techniques/strategies, if I had a post about creating backlinks on forums I would backlink for 'forum backlinking techniques' (assuming that had a reasonable number of searches).

[Julia Andersson]

One thing I forgot to mention in this post is that internal linking counts.

If you have posts that mention keywords that are also categories within your blog, or that you are targeting in other posts, then turn that keyword into anchor text for a link to your category or post.

This is a great way to give focus to specific keywords within a blog.

There are plugins that will do this automatically, like 'SEO auto linker'. But these will sometimes break existing html. For example, if the keyword was already part of a link and the plugin put a link within a link then it wouldn't work.

For this reason I usually do it manually. If you have a blog with hundreds of posts this would be tedious but you could do it on 20 existing posts and then just do it as you add new posts.

[CharlesFords]

Originally Posted by littledan

Reallly good advice. Not sure if we do this or not on our blog, I have emailed my VA to see. It doesn't look too complicated and the potential rewards quite high, thats the way I like it.

Yes, the tips/advices are very much great! And also the feedbacks from our experts are very helpful too.

[majidpucit123]

Julia,

Thanks for your nice tips. I'd apply this back linking technique to category level of my wp blog.

Buyseech has also raised an interesting point that It can cause duplication of content. But, your argue that WP developers should remove them if it is the case. I agree that It will pass link juice to the posts under category in back linking.

Best
Majid