SEO Social London, Link Reclamation
It has taken me a while to blog about this event, but I have got there in the end. On the 19th of April I was down in London at the SEO Social in London for a speaking event on Link Reclamation. A new set up I think, this was only the second event that they had, it was at Club Workspace on Londons Southbank.
There were 3 of us speaking, David Iwanow, Ross Tavendale and myself all on the topic of Link Building, giving some tips and ideas on how to do some Link Reclamation. What struck me about this event was it was only in front of around 20 to 30 people, we were given around 30 minutes to discuss our tips and advice. The audience were quite vocal in asking questions and it was followed up by a questions and answers session. A great set up, small audience and a handful of speakers I felt was a great way to do this type of event as it allowed the audience to interact which I feel is important.
Both David Iwanow and Ross Tavendale provided excellent value with their talks and I feel we all complimented each other very well. These guys have a wealth of experience. David was working with Blueglass at the time, I know he has since moved on, and Ross working with A Agency in London.
Special Mention to David Iwanow ( I still chuckle when I see this photo ) and no he wasn’t talking about my website ( being shit ) it was a generic view when looking at clients websites. For this reason, this is also the featured image on my post too as it was funny.
So, it was a great event and anyone with an opportunity to get along should go and try it out as I’m sure you will learn something from the speakers that appear.
Thanks to Myles McMorrow for inviting me down.
Anyway onto the event and some of the tips that were passed out there.
What is Link Reclamation?
This is a process that you should do at the start of any link building campaign. You should reclaim any previous links you may have had that have maybe disappeared because of site redevelopment or something else resulting in the link breaking. There are other technical issues that may result in links being lost, and then you have the odd person who mentions you and doesn’t link to you, either because they forgot or simply couldn’t find you to link to you.
It’s a simple process and one that many people ignore. Getting these quick, easy links can set you up going forward given that one of Googles main ranking signals is Link Building. There is no better place to start than Link Reclamation as you will find this a simple and easy process and it should make a fair bit of difference to your website.
Any SEO worth their salt will have all the basic tools in place to do competitor analysis, site auditing and most importantly link checking tools like Majestic SEO, Ahrefs or something else that helps you monitor your backlinks. So what you want to do is regularly monitor and watch your best backlinks and make sure they are passing value.
Internal Links
There is no better place to start your Link Reclamation process than your own website. Using a site auditing tool you can ensure that all links on your website are 100%, you can use SEMRush which is a fairly aggressive auditing tool, or something like Deepcrawl or Screaming Frog, any of these tools will do the job and allow you to identify any broken links that you have on your own website. Fixing broken links on your own website is easy, you simply go on and fix anything that needs fixed job done, so get this done as the first part of your process.
404’s
You may once have had a link on a website and due to some kind of development or update the page now shows a 404 error as a result of something changing, this is common and happens all the time. Simply reaching out to that particular website owner and asking for your link to be replaced is another way of getting some of your authority links back. Don’t be scared to ask. Reach out and make sure you get that link back as you may have good ranks or gain some decent traffic from some of these strong links that you have previously had, so do monitor this closely.
302 Pages
Also, pay attention to any 302 redirect pages in case your link is placed on one of those pages. The best practice is to ensure any pages that have your link on them are on a 301 redirect to pass any link equity that comes from your link on that page. A 302 redirect is advising Google that this is a temporary redirect and many people do this by mistake, so it is worth paying attention to any URLS that have this status code that contains your link as no juice will be passed with 302 status codes.
Brand Mentions
As part of any SEO campaign getting links is one of Googles main ranking signals and a quick and easy way to get started is doing some Link Reclamation, or broken link building. Now one of the first things you can do is look for Unlinked Brand mentions, there are tools out there such as Mention where you can monitor your brand mentions and in many cases, if someone is going to mention you or your brand they will most likely link to you too. You don’t have to use tools like Mention there are many other tools including Google Alerts that you can use to monitor any mentions of you or your brand.
You can also use a tool like Scrapebox where you can scrape the web for mentions and exclude your own website.
Site Canonicalisation
There are other quick fixes you can use to ensure your website benefits from the links you have coming to the website
- Ensure that you implement the www. resolve, many people don’t
- Ensure that your HTTPS implementation is done properly, don’t have pages available as HTTP:// and HTTPS://
Fixing your URL issues is important as you can lose link juice to the different variations of your website. Using site auditing tools or Google search console will enable you to see these problems and quickly resolve them as there is no point in having these basic problems with your website, it’s all these small factors that make a massive difference.
Reverse Image Search
You can use Googles reverse image search function to see if there are other people out there using your images, infographics or whatever on their website. It is common practice if someone does this to give you a link or credit for the image or infographic if they have taken it from your website. In a lot of cases, they will link to you if you ask, most people are not actively out there trying to rip off your content. This may happen in some cases but this then gives you another job to do.
Tools
There are many tools out there that can help you identify website issues and there was one I recently did a review on, Content King which you can use to identify these opportunities to help you ensure that you have all your technical SEO in place and Content King can help you audit your website and much more.
Additional Things To Watch For
In my opinion, there are a lot of shady people out there in the world of SEO. There are people who are unethical and try to be smart, just watch that you don’t exchange or get a link with someone who will in a few weeks time put a ” No Follow ” tag on your link or even have a ” No follow ” attribute on the page or post that your link is on. Everyone has different tactics when it comes to Link Building and some people will trick you into thinking they have provided you with a decent link, so just another thing to watch out for. That said though most people are genuine and fair, but you can never be too careful so just keep an eye out for anyone trying that.
If you have any questions feel free to get in contact with me.
I’m not so sure what @rtavs is doing, @davidiwanow and myself have that look on our face’s, but it was a good laugh other than when Ross started to dance, that’s when people started to leave.
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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