Stealth Link Building – Part 1

When working with a website quite frankly nothing works better & is more stable than some good old fashioned link building with that personal touch. But now that Search Engines are becoming smarter at “discounting obvious links” we need to make sure that are links are getting the most value whilst still being undetectable.

Why is Stealth Link Building good?

1. Well firstly you can choose which pages your link will appear on
2. You can choose the anchor text
3. You can make an informed decision about how much link weight or authority the site will pass
4. The links are less noticable & less likely to be discounted

The days of getting links on “link pages” are falling behind us, appearing natural in the eyes of the search engines is the way forward. Besides, why would you want a link on a “link page” that has no incoming authority or backlinks when you could find the page within a website with the highest authority or most relevance to your website & drop the webmaster an email?

How can I practice Stealth Link Building?

The process of obtaining solid links that will really count for something isn’t something that will happen overnight. It will take time, effort & dedication. But, with most things you’ll get better & better at it as time goes on.

First of all you need to create a shortlist of websites within your niche that you’d like a link from. I personally don’t go after the sites that are too SEO’d, but rather aim for a website that has a more natural feel to it (from an SEO standpoint). Check to see which sites already rank well for the terms you want to target & add them to the shortlist.

Once you’ve got a list of about 50 websites, you’ve now got to see which pages on the site are most relevant to your website or the anchor text you want to use. You can check this out using a simple Google query:

site:thewebsite.com “anchor text”

This will bring up any pages within the website that contain your anchor text.

Secondly you want to see which pages within the site are regarded as “authority pages.” You can check this in 3 different ways:

Using the SEO for Firefox tool to check how many page links, .edu links & .gov links a page has.

Use the Webuildpages Strongest Subpage Tool to find authority pages on a website. This can sometimes be innaccurate though for example if you query squidoo.com you’ll notice a lot of spam backlinks which have been banned in Google but still appear in Yahoo.

The final way is by using a tool by Fromshawn, it’s an Authority Site Finder Tool. Best of all it’s free.

Stay tuned for more on Stealth Link Building