White hat link building is a reputable and legitimate way to boost your organization’s online presence.
In this guide, we will delve into everything you will need to know about white hat link building, from what it is and how it works, to how it differs from black and grey hat link building methods.
We will also share insights into when and why you might want to pay for link building services, and what distinguishes paid links from paid link building campaigns.
Let’s take a look.
What is White Hat Link Building?
White hat link building is an approach to creating backlinks that use above-board methods that are in keeping with all of the Google guidelines.
While white hat link building may be a slower route to creating backlinks than other versions, following this approach will generally ensure that your brand can avoid getting slapped with Google penalties for suspicious or spammy links.
White hat link building provides safer, more reliable backlinks that can positively position your brand for long-term success and growth.
Precisely defining what white hat link building consists of can be tricky, as there is not one explicit set of rules that clearly defines this method.
Instead, white hat link building strategies aim to fall squarely within the Google guidelines by crafting “helpful, reliable, people-first content” that can naturally attract readers and viewers online.
In other words, white hat link building has brands focusing on creating genuine high-quality content, rather than on the quantity of backlinks they can gain as a result.
Benefits of White Hat Link Building
White hat link building provides a safe, secure way to simultaneously boost the quality of your web content and avoid Google penalties.
The main benefits of white hat link building are:
- Boost Organic Traffic: Organic traffic provides the most valuable visitors to your site. When visitors are already seeking out products or services similar to what you are offering, then they are primed and ready to become loyal customers.
- Amplify Your Reputation: High authority backlinks prove that your site is a trustworthy source of information and user experiences. Boosting your reputation helps to boost your position in the search rankings, and generates more organic site traffic and natural link placements.
- Generate Leads and Conversions: When site visitors already trust that your site is providing high-quality, high-authority content they will be more likely to pay attention to the goods and services you have on offer.
- Improve Online Ratings: High-quality content that provides true value for visitors will not only satisfy the Google SEO guidelines, it will also help boost your brand’s online DA and DR ratings.
- Rise in the Search Results: The power of white hat link building is that it creates natural connections, providing a smooth connection between visitors and your brand. But to make those strong connections that can lead to conversions and profits, you need to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Examples of White Hat Link Building
It can at times be a bit hazy to make certain you are complying with Google’s guidelines. Since the Google guidelines are not cut-and-dry rules but more like overarching suggestions, it can be difficult to avoid accidentally straying into forbidden territory when it comes to link building.
Here are three specific examples of white hat link building. (We will go more in-depth on white hat link-building strategies later in this article.):
1. Organic Discovery
You have posted some high-quality content online. The owner of a website stumbles upon your digital content. They like it and organically decide to include links to your content on their page, or within their content.
2. Digital Outreach Campaign
You send out outreach emails promoting your digital content. A website owner reads this email, discovers that your digital content is relevant and of interest to their audience, and decides to link back to your content.
3. Guest Post Outreach
You reach out to a website owner, suggesting ideas for specific guest post articles that would be relevant to their audience. The website owner likes your article pitch and commits to publishing your guest post content.
4. Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a proactive SEO strategy where website owners identify broken links on other websites and offer to replace them with relevant, working links to their own content.
White Hat vs Black Hat Link Building
Just as white hat link building is a particular SEO strategy for achieving a backlink portfolio, so too are grey hats and black hats.
While white hat link building involves adhering to the Google SEO best practices guidelines, grey hat and black hat approaches to link building are usually more concerned with quantity over quality.
This can involve manipulations, financial transactions, and other suspicious techniques for acquiring backlinks.
The Difference Between White, Black, and Grey Hat Link Building
White Hat Link Building
- Relies on organic traffic growth, high-quality content, and linking to high authority relevant content.
- White hat link building works by organically boosting the reputation and rankings of a website through high-quality content and relevant links.
- White hat link building closely complies with Google search engine optimization standards and recommendations.
- White hat link building can be a slow, laborious process that involves actual experts taking time to create authentic, well-researched, well-written content.
- White hat content should be attractive, engaging, informative, and offer new perspectives. This focus on quality boosts the overall quality of the entire digital content landscape, so Google looks favorably upon these methods while ranking a site.
Black Hat Link Building
- Black hat link building, focuses on quantity over quality, which is no longer a valid tactic in SEO.
- Black hat link building involves using methods to boost site traffic without consideration of the value that linked content will provide to site visitors.
- Black hat link building does not comply with Google TOS and policies, and if detected can lead to penalties.
- Black hat link building is a faster process of gaining traffic or rankings that quickly fade away, or even drag a website to a worse state than it initially was in.
- Black hat link building uses whatever means available to amplify the number of links leading to a site, which ultimately waters down the quality of content across the entire internet, and leads to a proliferation of spammy, low-quality content.
Grey hat link building falls somewhere in between. While this strategy may not adhere as closely to the Google SEO guidelines, it will still provide more quality content than black hat link building schemes.
Grey Hat Link Building Techniques and Strategies
As we’ve mentioned above, grey hat link building falls somewhere in the middle of the link building spectrum.
Grey hat link building techniques are not necessarily focused exclusively on racking up the links regardless of quality, they can incorporate some methods that may be deemed a bit too suspect for white hat link building.
For example, offering to write a guest post for a site is a strong white hat link building outreach strategy. But if you offer to write a guest post and they agree to publish your guest article only if you pay a fee, then it changes the context of the link placement.
According to Google SEO guidelines, paying for any link placement means it is not an organic, natural link. Instead, it becomes promotional.
And while the true intent of even a white hat link building campaign can ultimately be to promote your brand, you certainly don’t want your links to appear that way.
So navigating the hazy territory of grey hat link building can be tricky, and always comes with more of a risk than white hat link building.
Black Hat Link Building Techniques and Strategies
A black hat link building approach relies on techniques that are directly against Google SEO guidelines. Black hat link building can create spammy, low-quality content.
Some of the black hat techniques that are used include:
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
A private blog network is a group of websites that were created with the explicit purpose of providing links to another main website to boost that site’s SEO rankings.
So while the “feeder” site does not provide any quality content or real value to the internet community at large, it can still help its target site rise in the rankings.
Link Farms
Enterprising black hat link builders will sometimes buy an expired domain that has already earned high DA and DR rankings.
The website owner will then use this site as a link farm, selling link placements to whoever is willing to pay to add one more link to their backlink portfolio, regardless of the quality of the content.
Automated Comments
Automatically generating comments that include links to your site can be effective in the short term, but Google search engine analytics is quickly learning to recognize this type of manipulation.
There are even softwares that can scrape massive lists of websites from web and post custom comments in bulk on them including backlinks and text.
Hidden Text Or Hidden Links
Using tiny-sized fonts or white colors on a white background to disguise links on a page is an instant red flag for Google search engine rankings.
Keyword Stuffing
This refers to a technique in which a website editor will fill the content page with a list or group of keywords, or repeat the same keyphrase an unnecessary amount of times to try to grab the attention of the search engines.
There is a infamous case where BMW used the keyword stuffing black hat technique back in 2006. As a result all BMW company pages were deleted from Google as a manual penalty for some period of time.
This demonstrates that even large multinational companies aren’t resistant to Google’s penalties.
Automated Content
Websites that use machine learning tools, such as ChatGPT, to automatically generate content for the sole purpose of placing links inside it may wind up with content that doesn’t actually make any sense to the reader but still includes an active link.
Since Google looks for high-quality, reputable, and trustworthy content, this approach can actually damage your brand’s search engine rankings.
Recent example of a detected AI content fiasco was when Sports Illustrated got accused of posting AI generated articles. Although they deny content was written by AI, content in question has been taken down.
Broad Outreach Campaigns
Some guest posting campaigns can use mass email outreach strategies to create guest posts en masse, with anchor text links that are stuffed thick with keywords.
Google warns against this type of broad, watered-down outreach campaign, advising brands to instead focus on particular sites to build genuine content, relationships, and link placements.
Black hat link building techniques can cause lasting damage to your brand. If Google discerns any of the techniques listed above, your brand’s reputation will be tarnished and your site may be blacklisted and removed from the search engine results pages.
The main point: black hat link building tactics come with a huge risk for the long-term success of your brand’s digital presence.
White Hat Link Building Methods
White hat link building methods require more patience, insight, and an expert’s in-depth understanding to really do it right. With this approach, the focus is always on crafting high-quality content that offers value to readers.
White hat link building establishes your brand’s reputation, so you will want to create content that is original, insightful, and engaging. You can also refresh previously existing content to ensure that your site continues to be relevant and up to date.
Researching the appropriate keywords that will drive organic traffic for your site is essential, and understanding how to connect with the right target audience is also key. White hat link building methods are secure, eliminating the risk factors of grey and black hat link building.
Ultimately this approach will be more cost-effective as well, enhancing your sales funnel while reducing the cost of low-value purchased links.
Let’s dive into some specific white hat link building techniques.
1. Writing Guest Posts
This is one of the most popular white hat link building techniques. To write high-quality guest posts for other sites, you will first need to research sites that will provide relevant content that is in some way connected to the products, services, or ideas behind your brand.
Then you will reach out to that website with an offer to write a guest post article for their page. If they like your ideas and approve your guest posting pitch, then you craft an original, high-quality article for their blog that will include a naturally placed, carefully phrased link to your website.
Your link should be relevant and authentic, and provide real value for readers of your content.
Benefits of Guest Posting for White Hat SEO
- By creating guest posts on relevant websites, you are drawing in potential customers and clients who already have an interest in the relevant subject area.
- Linking within content on a high authority website reflects well on your own level of authority.
- Since you are crafting the content for the guest post site, you have control over which page on your site you will link to, so you can drive traffic straight to the most significant pages of your site.
- If the guest post you write for the website does well on its own merits and rises in the Google search rankings, then that will reflect onto your site, driving organic traffic and boosting your rankings.
- Guest posting can help your brand reach new audiences within a relevant field. You can even include links to different distinct pages on your website within one article.
2. HARO
HARO stands for “Help a Reporter Out”. This white hat link building technique is an email newsletter through which writers can answer requests for assistance posted by journalists.
If you browse the email newsletter and find journalists’ requests that align with your area of expertise, then you can respond with the helpful information in question.
HARO is a great quid pro quo situation: you provide a missing source for the journalists, and they, in turn, include your link in their article once they publish it.
Highly reputable sites (including Forbes and Business Insider, among others) use HARO to complete their articles, which provides a unique opportunity to access top-tier sites in a respectable way.
Benefits of HARO for White Hat SEO
- By creating guest posts on relevant websites, you are drawing in potential customers and clients who already have an interest in the relevant subject area.
- Linking within content on a high authority website reflects well on your own level of authority.
- Since you are crafting the content for the guest post site, you have control over which page on your site you will link to, so you can drive traffic straight to the most significant pages of your site.
- If the guest post you write for the website does well on its own merits and rises in the Google search rankings, then that will reflect onto your site, driving organic traffic and boosting your rankings.
- Guest posting can help your brand reach new audiences within a relevant field. You can even include links to different distinct pages on your website within one article.
3. Digital PR Link Building
Digital PR link building is an effective and efficient way to place links on high authority digital media outlets.
When you create an original, notable piece of content with timely relevance, you can reach out to journalists who may be interested in running your story, or some version of it, in their online publication.
Digital PR link building is a smart strategy for placing links in highly reputable digital publications, and it can scale up quickly and exponentially.
For example, Blue Tree crafted a bespoke outreach campaign strategy for Waveapps, a revolutionary accounting software company that streamlines finance management for businesses.
Blue Tree researched the ideal target audience and most relevant sites to help boost Waveapps in the rankings, then created high-quality original content that was picked up by highly reputable digital publications, including Vimeo (DR96), Namecheap (DR92), learn.g2 (DR90), and powr.io (DR89).
Blue Tree used its well-established network of connections from across the digital media landscape to entice these publications to include their Waveapps story, thus helping Waveapps to stand out from the competition and rise in the rankings.
Benefits of Digital PR Link Building for White Hat SEO
- Once you successfully reach out to one journalist who publishes your story, it can generate its own natural link building.
- If it does well, other reputable websites will take notice of its success and create their own version of the story tailored to their readers.
- The essential- and challenging- part of digital PR link building is to craft an original and highly linkable article in the first place, one that can easily be reshaped to suit many different audiences and reader bases.
- Establishing relationships based on trust can take a long time. If you are interested in placing links within the top tier media outlets online, you may be interested in hiring SEO experts to enact digital PR outreach campaigns on your behalf.
4. Linkable Asset Campaigns
One clever technique for boosting white hat link placements is to create and promote linkable assets that can easily be shared and linked across a wide variety of relevant, high-quality sites.
If you can create a truly useful, original resource, then other sites will be all too pleased to include links to this resource within their content.
This strategy does have a drawback, however. Since so many brands now conduct this type of outreach, website owners have become overwhelmed with frequent requests to include linkable assets on their sites.
These requests can clog inboxes and become an annoying nuisance that website owners often quickly learn to ignore.
This means that to achieve success in this method of white hat link building, you will have to create a truly stellar asset that website owners will be reluctant to ignore.
You will also need to conduct dedicated outreach that balances the line between persistent and obnoxious.
Benefits of Linkable Assets for White Hat SEO
- Some types of linkable assets that can provide real value to website owners include original research studies that writers can cite as a source of information inside their own articles, or superior quality explainer content that outshines other similar pages.
- You can also create open access digital tools and software that provide a useful free service for readers. To create a truly valuable linkable asset, take time to do some research. You should develop an in-depth understanding of the type of content that is displayed on your competitors’ most highly linked pages.
- Then you can take this as inspiration to create similar content, but higher quality. When you create a truly valuable linkable asset, site editors will continue to link to your asset as a qualified resource, even long after you have stopped conducting outreach campaigns.
What is a High-Quality Backlink?
As you enact your white hat link building strategies, you will want to focus on landing high-quality link placements. So you should understand what a high-quality backlink actually is.
A high-quality backlink is a link that comes from a highly trusted website. This website will have a high domain authority and domain ranking, high search engine results page rankings, and a reputation for trustworthiness and authority.
Drawing on the power of the high authority site where the link is placed, high-quality backlinks can help increase your site’s authority, boost your place in the search engine rankings pages, and expand your site’s reach to new audiences.
High authority backlinks can help drive organic traffic to your site’s most valuable pages, and lead to more conversions and sales.
While the website they are placed on does a lot to determine the quality of your backlinks, the links themselves should also exhibit certain characteristics. Links should never come across as overtly promotional or spammy.
Instead, the link text should appear as a natural fit within the content and should link to a page that is relevant to the article in which it is placed.
The keywords in the link text should provide strong support for both the article and your brand’s site.
Should You Pay For Links?
So should you pay for links to help promote your brand, expand your reach, and drive traffic to your site? The answer is not so simple.
1. Direct Paid Links
Paying for links directly will land you in the black or grey hat link building territory, which presents a risk for your site.
If Google discovers that you are placing promotional or spammy links, your site may be blacklisted and your reputation as a source of authority will be seriously diminished.
Paid links on link farms or private blog networks will increase the quantity of backlinks to your site, but will not boost the quality or drive organic traffic your way.
So paying directly for this type of spammy link will end up being a sunk cost that may actually do lasting damage to your online reputation.
2. Paying For Link Building Services
On the other hand, if you pay a company to assist you in your digital link building campaigns, that is another story entirely.
Employing a company of digital PR and SEO experts to help land you high-quality links can be a smart strategy for amplifying your brand’s online presence.
You can benefit from a network of contacts that has been built up for years, and a team of experts who are highly qualified to land you the best links possible to achieve your specific goals.
Best of all, hiring a digital consultancy company that can help you build your link portfolio is above board, so you are not running the risk of being blacklisted by Google or similar search engines.
What is a White Hat Link Building Service?
A white hat link building service provides support, expertise, and professional resources that can amplify your brand’s online presence and help you land high-impact, high-authority backlinks on top-tier websites.
White hat link building service providers can conduct digital PR campaigns that draw upon their extensive network of contacts to land links for you on sites that will actually be relevant to your brand’s content.
The SEO experts at a white hat link building service company can find online locations where interested readers will be happy to discover your site, and where your products, services, and content will provide value for new audiences.
Google recommends that you spread the word about your website.
The Google SEO guidelines suggest that you are “active in communities where you can tell like-minded people about your services and products that you mention on your site.”
Hiring a white hat link building service provider to assist you means that you will have a team of expert writers, researchers, and digital PR insiders who can organically spread the word about your valuable products, services, and content.
They will use above-board white hat techniques to provide legitimate and valuable results that will directly move your site toward your intended goals.
Take a Look at Our White Hat Link Building Case Study
We have helped Dooly increase their traffic with high quality link building tactics that continue to provide value for a long period of time.
Their organic traffic rose by 300% in the first 12 months. Dooly also got more than 50 keywords in the 1st position, and increased their conversion rates as a result of white label backlinks.
Final Thoughts
Generating a high quantity of links is easy and fast if you are willing to buy those links directly, but landing truly high-quality links that will lend your website authority and improve your site’s reputation will take a more careful approach.
Using white hat link building techniques like HARO, guest posting, creating linkable assets, and digital PR will help you expand your brand’s reach and achieve your aims.
Whether your goals are to attain higher conversion rates, amplified search engine ranking results, a boost in organic traffic to your site, an improved online reputation, or higher DA and DR rankings, white hat link building methods are the safest way to ensure truly high-quality link placements.
If you want to consolidate your resources and amplify your impact, you may want to consider hiring a white hat link building service provider like Blue Tree.
With Blue Tree’s team of dedicated researchers, content creators, and digital SEO experts, you will have a leg up on the competition.
Contact Blue Tree, and we can help you advance and expand with truly high-quality backlinks and high-impact outreach campaigns.
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