I participated on a panel at PubCon New Orleans earlier this week entitled “Low Risk Link Portfolio Expansion Strategies.”
In short, the idea of the panel was to explore various ways to build links to your website while minimizing risk of being penalized by Google.
At its heart it’s impossible to call any form of link building “low risk” since Google is always changing its algorithm to flag links that aren’t natural and because inherent in “link building” is the intention to build links for the purpose of convincing Google that your website is more authoritative than it would naturally be without link building.
I’ve been a link builder or have had a team of link builders working on my websites for over a decade. I know the easy but risky world of “buying links” and I also know the sometimes painful process of building great content and generating links to that content, both naturally (hard) or through manual link building efforts (not easy).
At the same time, over the years I’ve become more sophisticated in terms of link building and tend to prefer more advanced (albeit “white hat / low risk”) strategies such as advertising widgets and asking for links from people I already provide something of value (i.e. sponsorships, donations, guest blogging, etc.).
Here’s the slide show of my presentation that I gave at PubCon: