Netlinking : The complete guide in 2024

✍️ Last modified on April 10, 2023

Here is our special guide on netlinking. We advise you to read it carefully if your goal is to :

• understand how to tame netlinking ;
• create authority links to strengthen the referencing of your website ;
• position yourself in the first Google search results;

Get ready to drink and take notes dear Maker, because we are going to give you the most complete guide possible.

If you are a beginner, don’t worry! We’ll do what it takes to get you to understand(and apply) everything in one read!

What is netlinking?

Netlinking is a strategy in SEO that consists in building backlinks to your website in order to strengthen your ranking on search engines. In other words, it concerns everything called SEO Off Site.

To be clearer, it’s like a recommendation.

If you’re repeatedly recommended the Arcane series on Netflix, it’s likely that you’ll go watch it or at least check it out. Well, Google works the same way.

As you can imagine, some recommendations are more important and powerful than others. The site of the local butcher will not have the same strength as a government site for example.

Why are backlinks important for SEO?

With equal content, it is the backlinks that will make the difference in SEO. However, most novice SEOs are content to optimize the SEO On Site which is said to be “easier“.

Therefore, if you manage both On Site SEO and Off Site SEO, you will be ahead of your competitors. This is the way to move up in the search results in order to reach the 1st page of Google.

The more quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more stability you provide. It will be more difficult for your competitors to dislodge you from the first places. Moreover, depending on the theme you choose, you won’t necessarily need many.

For example, you will need very few backlinks to rank on a specific crypto play to earn game while you will need thousands to rank on the general theme of video games.

The consequences of Google Penguin on netlinking

Google Penguin is a filter put in place on April 24, 2012 by the famous Californian search engine.

To explain the context, it was enough at that time to spam links to his site to rank in the first results. There were even online tools to create thousands of links in a few clicks.

Therefore, Google has decided to fight against this practice by pushing the analysis of netlinking of each site. Thus, the criteria became stricter and sites disappeared from the search results overnight because they abused these practices.

It was a bit like “Black Tuesday” for SEO professionals.

This leads to several conclusions that you can already keep in mind:

• it is better to have a quality link than a quantity link;
• do not abuse the anchor of the links(we will come back to this later)
• it is better to have a link from a site on the same theme as yours

Officially, Google is against the optimization of netlinking by you. He prefers that your “popularity” happens naturally. Nowadays, it is more and more difficult to have links in a natural way.

So if you wait for everything to happen naturally, you risk ending up like Jean-Claude SEO:

Our advice is to optimize your SEO Off Site, but in a smart way without spamming.

Don’t worry about that because when you read on, you’ll :

• know how to distinguish good from bad backlinks;
• get our best strategies for getting links naturally;
• how to create links easily(and with 0€) ;

Let’s start right away with…

The 5 criteria to evaluate the interest of a link

You can analyze a link from different angles to evaluate its potential for your site. To make your job easier, we have decided to compile for you the 5 most interesting criteria to take into account in this evaluation.

1. The authority of the page and the site

Each site has an overall rating while each of its pages has its own rating.

Domain Authority (or DA) is the strength of a site. This is a score out of 100 that you can get via Moz. com or Ubbersuggest as well.

Be careful, this is an estimate, it is not the official score that Google gives to your site. Nevertheless, it allows you to know the overall reputation of a site.

Look at the gamesvideo.com rating for example:

Thus:

• A DA < 10 means that the site does not have a high authority, so it is easy to overtake it in the SEO;
• A DA between 10 and 20 indicates that the site has a minimal reputation and that the content is interesting. On the other hand, netlinking is still weak for this one;
• A DA between 20 and 40 explains that the site has a good reputation with good netlinking. It’s getting hard to get past him;
• Beyond 40, it will be difficult for a beginner to surpass this site because it is well established in terms of content and netlinking;

Therefore, Google sees a positive signal if a site with a better Domain Authority than you point a link to yours. This will strengthen your natural referencing.

Still, this link must be “in the right place“. Indeed, each page of a site has its own strength. It is therefore interesting to analyze the one where you can get your link.

For this, you can use the Majestic website. This tool is not free, but it allows you to get 2 very interesting data on each page:

• Trust Flow(or TF): this is a score out of 100 that evaluates the quality of a page or a website of your choice.
• Citation Flow(or CF): this is a score out of 100 that evaluates the quantity of links pointing to a site or a web page of your choice.

To take the example of jeuxvideo.com, the home page has a TF of 63 and a CF of 58:

On the other hand, its jeuxvideo.com/ps5.htm page has a TF of 43 and a CF of 49 :

➡️ This means that a link from the home page will have more power than from the PS5 page.

It is best to avoid having too great a gap between these two criteria. There is officially no number, but you can set a maximum gap of 10 between CF and TF.

➡️ Of course, having a link from a site with a better TF than yours will allow you to increase your own TF.

To further refine the power of the site, you can look at the number of Referring Domains(or RD). The more DRs a site has, the higher its reputation with Google. Provided of course that the links are of quality.

Use this data to refine your thinking after checking the DA, TF and CF. This will allow you to avoid coming across sites with thousands of spammy links that could damage the reputation of yours.

2. The theme of the site

It is necessary to have a thematic link to strengthen the natural referencing of your site. To find out, you can once again use the Majestic website.

This one allows you to know in detail the theme of all the sites on the web. Therefore, you can see at a glance if the spot you found is interesting or not.

To use our example of jeuxvideo.com:

We can see that his links come from sites talking almost exclusively about video games. This site is therefore very well themed.

Of course, you can go further.

If the site you found is general or in a related theme, you can use it. For example, there is no problem to have a link from a site about cars when you talk about high-tech for example.

But for that, you have to contextualize your link.

Thus, you will write a text using a semantic close to your site. In our example, you will talk about technical developments in the world of cars. Thus, Google will be able to understand the coherence of the link between the two sites.

Let’s take the example of an article from numerama magazine linking to an article from jeuxvideo.com :

At first glance, one might think that Numerama is an online magazine for everything related to pop culture. It’s not specifically video games.

This is confirmed by Majestic:

The page in question is themed “media”.

However, it is a good link. Why? Because the numbers are good. The site is known, the TF and CF are not bad, the site makes traffic, etc.

And the icing on the cake: the link is contextualized:

We’ll skip the details, but basically the article talks about a console and quotes the article made by jeuxvide.com about it.

It just feels natural!

3. The position of the link in the page and the traffic

Each link will have a different impact depending on its position on the page. Note that this will also affect the Citation Flow and Trust Flow scores given by Majestic.

For example, you can have a link in a thematic article of a site. Here, your site will only get one link. As the article of numerama in the end:

But you can also get a link in a footer or in a widget(the sidebars on the side of sites). And then you will get a link from ALL the pages of this site. And if he has a lot, you’ll get a lot too.

This will increase your Citation Flow so be careful not to create too big a difference with the Trust Flow. However, this only counts for one referring domain since all these links come from one site.

For example, the site jeuxvideo.com has a link to Webedia in the footer. And this one can be found on ALL the pages of the site:

Finally, traffic is also a criterion to consider. If the page is visited by many visitors, some of them may click on the link to your site. So it’s interesting on all points, be it SEO or marketing.

We can also tell you about the platform Nextlevel link created by Julien Jimenez, a SEO expert. According to him, it is necessary to have links from pages already referenced on Google.

There are other link selling platforms like SemJuice or GetFluence .

If they are referenced, there is a good chance that they will have visitors. And therefore Google likes them. CQFD

4. The link anchor

We can define the anchor of a link as the text containing the hyperlink allowing the user to reach another web content.

Before the Penguin update that started in 2012, SEOs optimized the anchor by putting their biggest keywords .

Like this:

To be more clear, if they had a site about deep fryers, they were going to use anchors like “best deep fryer“, “professional deep fryer“, “oil free deep fryer” to fully optimize their SEO.

Thus, Google understood that the site was about deep fryer and all its derivatives. And as a result, it ranked high in the search results.

As you have already understood, things have changed. Now you have to be VERY careful with the link anchor.

➡️ You can do whatever you want on your internal links, but not on external backlinks.

If you are a beginner, use 100% the URL of your site simply. For example, for us it is: https://lesmakers.co/

You can vary by indicating from time to time www.lesmakers.co or lesmakers.co. But stay on that to start.

When you start getting more and more links, you can start optimizing the anchor. From time to time, and only with very good quality links, you can indicate a contextualized keyword.

For example, for a site about deep fryers you can use “find our comparison of the best brands of deep fryers“. Here we have the main keyword that remains diluted among others that contextualize it.

This is what it could look like even if this example is not perfect:

You can use this kind of link anchor to optimize the SEO of your most important pages. That’s why we tell you to go sparingly.

In a few words:

• leave the generic URL for 97% of your pages;
• And optimize the anchor by theming it for the most profitable pages of your site;

With this, you will be almost sure not to receive a penalty from Google!

5. No follow or do follow link

The mention no follow indicates to the search engine that the link should not be taken into account contrary to the do follow.

You should know that each page has an SEO juice(or power if you prefer). And this juice will spread equally among all the links you will have on this page as long as they are not in no follow.

➡️ In other words, having links pointing to your site with the mention no follow is useless from an SEO point of view. This will not bring power to your site.

On the other hand, one should not throw so much in the past. If a site has thousands of visitors or more and offers you a no follow link on one of its most popular pages, it will be interesting.

➡️ Of course, it won’t impact your SEO, but it will get you hundreds of visitors.

Not bad, right?

If you are interested, you can use a very simple application to distinguish between links. This one is called NoFollow and you can install it for free on Chrome.

It will circle in red dotted line all the links in no follow. So, at a glance, you can tell if the link is transmitting SEO juice or not.

Take for example this link I took from an article in the local newspaper:

They take advantage of their article on the staking of cryptos to propose an affiliate link to Invictus Capital. This one is in no follow as you can see. Red is the perfect color to spot it easily.

Let’s move on to all our tips for getting your backlinks the natural way dear Maker.

Linkbaiting : 5 techniques to get backlinks naturally

As we told you in the preamble to this guide, it is increasingly difficult to get links naturally. However, there are still some fairly effective techniques for getting them.

The only flaw is that you can’t choose whether or not the link is right for you. Some sites do not meet all the criteria to be considered as good spots, but it does not matter. A link is a link, especially when it is obtained in a natural way.

1. The infographics

In marketing, an infographic is a visual representation of a more or less complex subject. The goal is to get visually all the information you need to know to understand it.

Here is for example the superb infographic from vino-lovers.com, a great site to learn how to taste good wine:

This kind of infographic is very popular. In fact, they are often used on social networks like Pinterest or Instagram for example.

Don’t forget to put the link of your site on it, because some people don’t hesitate to steal them and share them as if they were the authors… Those crooks.

Some publishers will be able to link to it in return. This will naturally improve your referencing.

2. The “Top” articles

Internet users love the TOPs. And on all subjects moreover. You must know the Topito website which is based on this concept. Basically, members can create their own TOP and other members vote on whether they liked it or not.

You can have fun doing an article like this in your theme.

For example, if you’re doing a site on cryptos, you could do an article on :

• The 50 Benefits of Cryptocurrency for the Economy;
• The TOP 9 best ways to protect your cryptos;
• Bobby’s 50 arguments for why cryptos are a ponzi scheme;

This kind of article will appeal to your audience, and you have a certain probability of getting links to it. Plus, it’s pretty easy to write, especially in terms of structure!

3. The “reference” articles

The other way to get backlinks naturally is to offer articles like “Complete Guide” or “Ultimate Guide“(kind of like the one we’re offering you today 😉 ).

ATTENTION: you have to be sure to do a complete article on the subject. If you say you’re offering a comprehensive guide and it’s very small or doesn’t go into detail, it won’t work.

Here’s an example on the profitable subject of gender relations:

The advantage of this kind of article is that it will rank on several keywords in addition to having a chance to get links naturally. It also brings a lot of value to your readers, which reinforces your authority and your relationship of trust with them.

If you then offer a service or product for sale, you’ll have a better chance of converting that reader into a customer.

This is a really good strategy in every way!

4. Organize a carnival of items

This strategy has been used a lot in the 2010s, notably by Olivier Rolland. The idea is to propose to several site editors to write an article on a question and that each one answers it.

In the end, the organizer sends a link to each participating publisher while the participants send a link to the organizer. This is a good way to get several links in a natural way.

If you’re making a site about bitcoin, you could make a carnival of articles about “what would you say to someone who has never bought bitcoin to convince them to take action?”

However, this technique requires you to contact each site editor yourself. It is therefore not 100% passive like the others.

5. Create the buzz

Any marketer will spit on you(yes, definitely) if you ask them how to create a buzz. This is impossible because it often happens unexpectedly. We can’t control this aspect.

On the other hand, you can use ingredients found in some buzz to try to achieve this. Very often, you have to play with your reader’s emotions. And it’s all going to depend on your ethics at that level.

Let’s take the example of Le Gorafi: it is a parody of Le Figaro(admit it, you didn’t understand the verlan). All the titles of their articles are invitations to share so big.

And they naturally get links in return. Some journalists had even relayed the information without checking the content of the articles at the time(great journalism!).

We can also mention Mediamass which provides false information on the private life of stars. In the end, when you read the “about” section you learn that their approach is to denounce this kind of practice.

Finally, you can move towards less ethical behavior. For example, make the most misogynistic article possible by sharing it on feminist Facebook groups.

You are likely to get articles that will slaughter you(but possibly with a link to your article, which is what you are looking for). But again, it all depends on your ethics. We don’t recommend it because it is difficult to anticipate the consequences of a REAL bad buzz.

Ninja linking: the strategy to get free links

The ninja linking consists in looking for spots where you can position a link to your site. This allows you to strengthen your natural referencing for free.

But be careful, this must be done in a fine way because you will very often do it in secret on sites belonging to other webmasters.

Find out now….

The 3 best spots to ninja linking

1. The forums

Forums are very interesting spots because you can put your link in different places depending on the CMS.

Thus, you can put a backlink :

• in the signature,
• the content of the message itself
• or in your profile.

Look for example at this discussion on btcforum:

The first message contains a link and the reply also has a link in the signature.

Note that some forums will put links in posts as no follow, but as do follow in the signature for example. You have to analyze everything before you do anything.

For this, I refer you to the part concerning the criteria to analyze a link.

Try to be discreet when you do this though, because the modos are watching to avoid polluting their forums too much with this kind of practice.

2. The webprofiles

Webprofiles are sites where there is a member area that you can use to put your external link.

Here is for example a webprofile using the anchor “personal page” to put your link:

As you can see, it is very often a spot where you can only put your link. Often you can’t contextualize this one with a text around it.

But it’s always good for your SEO, especially if it’s well themed.

3. Spamco

Spamco is a site where you can put your link in a comment without registering first. We often use comments on blogs, guest books, etc.

You have to be careful though because this was used a lot before Google Penguin. The online tools spammed all the existing blogs with all kinds of links.

How to find ninja linking spots?

Audit your competitors

The first thing to do is toaudit your competitors’ sites. To do this, it’s very simple: you just have to indicate the URL of your competitors in an online tool like Majestic which allows you to list all the sites linking to them.

You will be able to list all the spots you can use for your site. This gives you a good base to start with.

Therefore, always keep a file where you note all the sites that deal with the same subject as you. This will allow you to get free spots. In addition, you will be able to know if they will be easy or not to exceed in the number of referring areas.

Let’s take the example of the site ma-friteuse-sans-huile.fr :

Via Majestic, you get 23 backlinks in 1 click. You just have to check their quality to see if you can take them or not.

Use Google search

The second thing to do is to use basic Google searches. For example, to find a forum you will type “your keyword + forum” or “related keyword + forum”.

You will have all the forums referenced in the same domain as you. So potentially interesting spots.

You can also type “keyword + guest post” to see if blogs in the same theme as you accept guest posts. This makes free and good quality content for him, and a backlink in return for you.

You can also search “blog + keyword” to find blogs in the same theme. Just to see if you can put your link in an article comment for example.

In short, you have to surf the Internet to find them yourself. Make a file where you list all the spots, even the ones that are not interesting for you at the moment. Maybe in a next niche or project it will help you 😉

Use the footprints

We arrive at a more complex technique to implement when we start. It is important to know that each site or type of site leaves “ traces “that we call footprint. So you can find in a Google search all the sites using the same footprint

Let’s take an example: very often, sites with a forum have a URL like this “urldusite.fr/forum”. You can use the footprint: “site:.en/forum AND intext:keyword” in Google to find them all.

To translate this request: you ask the search engine for all the sites that have a URL in “.fr/forum” and that have the keyword in question in their content.

You can then make the same request by replacing the “.fr” with “.com” to find other forums with this extension.

When you look for spots to spamco, you realize that most sites using wordpress still have the same layout to encourage readers to comment on the articles.

You can use this footprint: intext: “Add a comment” AND “Keyword”

In other words, you ask Google to search for you all the sites that have “add a comment” in their text with the mention of your keyword somewhere on the page.

And so on.

So when you find a spot, try to see if it has footprint to find other spots. It’s a kind of backlink fishing.

You can find a lot of footprints on the Internet. The best thing to do is to find your own footprints so that you can have spots that are a little more hidden than the ones we just gave you.

The case of directories

Some site editors have started to create specialized or non-specialized directories to list all the sites with backlinks to them. Some are free while others are paid.

It can be tempting to go to this kind of spot to get links easily.

We don’t necessarily recommend it. There is generally no content on these sites, and especially they make thousands of backlinks to other sites. The contribution to your SEO is not necessarily interesting.

Netlinking: 4 techniques to go faster

Now that you understand how netlinking works and how to tame it, we will be able to give you some tips to get listed faster than others.

1. Buy an expired domain name

Instead of creating a site on a new domain name, you can use an expired domain name. This is simply a domain name (NDD) that has been used before.

When you buy an expired one, you will get all its features. It is therefore necessary to analyze it beforehand in order to determine if it is interesting for you or not. And you can do it! You just have to take the part “the 5 criteria to evaluate the interest of a link” and apply it.

You will be able to launch a site with already referenced domains, domain authority, trust flow and citation flow. In short, a certain power.

In addition, it will allow you to index your content faster since Google already trusts your domain name.

To find this kind of expired domain, you can use sites like kifdom(an auction platform) or domexpire(a crawler that searches for NDDs for free).

2. Buy backlinks

Aware of the value of their sites and their power, some SEOs offer backlinks for sale. You can find them on platforms like Nextlevel or Accesslink but also by contacting them directly.

It is a good way to save time while getting a spot that has not been exploited by your competitors for example. This will make you stand out and get results faster.

👉 See our comparison of the best netlinking platforms

3. Exchange backlinks

You can buy, but also exchange backlinks with site editors. You just have to avoid that each of the links refer to the same pages for more security.

And optimize the Netlinking, it should even manipulate the random surfer. The principle is to manipulate the external and internal links to constantly bring the Google bots to your page.

Here is the ideal scheme:

Again, you just need to apply the criteria we gave you to know whether or not the exchange is interesting for you or not.

4. Chasing broken links

Most site editors link to other sites to cite their sources or simply to comply with the SEO On Site criteria. But sometimes the site receiving the link disappears. This is not a good signal for Google.

Thus, you can install the application Check My Links application to spot this and contact the site editor directly with a warning. You can offer him to put your page instead.

This way, you will have done the work for him, maximizing the chances of having your link in place of the broken link. This is a good technique especially if the site in question is very popular.

Set up your netlinking campaign

Very often, beginner site editors will take the time to do the On Site SEO well and then neglect the Off Site part. This is due to either laziness or lack of motivation in the face of their poor results.

The SEO is a long-term business, and it is necessary to work in an organized and rigorous way to obtain the desired results.

Therefore, we advise you to set up a kind of routine or calendar of netlinking.

At the launch of your site, you will simply organize a campaign to respect. For example:

• 1st week : 4 links in ninja linking
• 2nd week: 2 ninja links and 2 guest articles
• 3rd week: 4 links in ninja linking
• 4th week: organization of a carnival of articles
• Etc.

You can make this program last as long as you don’t have as many referring domains as your competitors.

Avoid doing too much at once. It has to look natural to Google. So don’t make 15 links one day, then nothing for 2 months.

That’s why the idea of a calendar is good. This prevents you from making mistakes while optimizing your time.

To motivate you even more, you can sell links from your own site. This one will be referenced, it will have visitors and a good popularity in the eyes of Google. This will ensure you a certain profitability in the long term!

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There you go, you now know all the basics of netlinking and off-site SEO. What to strengthen the natural referencing of its website. It’s time for you to take action!

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