If you’re trying to get your website to rank higher on Google, link insertion should be part of your overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) approach. Link insertion backlinks, often referred to as niche edits, help to build the overall authority of your site in the eyes of Google and can help to direct traffic from other sources to your pages. What separates this link-building tactic from a traditional guest post is that instead of writing new content, you insert a link to relevant content you’ve already created on your website. The concept is relatively simple; you ask someone that has a great piece of existing content if they would consider adding a link to your site because it is helpful and useful for their readers.
But, actually going about getting quality backlinks using link insertion isn’t quite as straightforward as just asking people for a favor. To run an effective link-building campaign and ultimately drive traffic to your site through these efforts, you need a site with some existing authority. Otherwise, you will find that other website owners will be hesitant to put in the work to give you a free link insertion. Think of it as having street cred in your space – the less known you are, the harder it is to get people to acknowledge you.
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What Are the Benefits of Link Insertion?
Link insertions are a valuable link-building strategy and this strategy provides more benefits than just SEO link juice to your page or site. There are additional ancillary benefits that link insertions provide that should be considered. We’ll go over these now, so buckle up.
Link Insertion and SEO
Link insertion backlinks can work wonders when done right, and part of getting these links done correctly is that they are inserted onto a topically relevant website, and are not “forced”. There are various tools out there that you can use to monitor how well your pages and website rank overall in relation to other relevant sites.
Two such SEO monitoring tools are Ahrefs and SEMrush. These tools look at numerous variables to give you an idea of your overall ranking, with one metric being Domain Rating or Domain Authority (depending on the specific software you use) to quantify your overall authority compared to others. If your rating is consistently going up over time as you employ different SEO tactics (of which link building is one piece of the puzzle), you are on the right track and making headway with your content.
The main concept of the SEO strategy behind backlinks through insertion is that they pass on a certain amount of SEO juice or street cred to the site they are pointing to. The more sites (referring domains) that backlink to your page or site over time (it isn’t an overnight phenomenon – don’t think you’ll make it to the top of Google with just a few link insertions), the more likely Google will view your site as trustworthy and credible, bumping up your domain rating and ultimately getting you to rank higher.
Other Benefits
With link insertion backlinks being an SEO strategy that’s designed to boost your page and site’s authority on Google, you should be getting organic traffic, assuming the page and overall website is designed for search ranking as well. In other words, link insertions aren’t a magical SEO panacea to bring traffic, although they can have a snowball effect in which the higher you climb in search rankings, the more organic traffic and the easier link building becomes.
If you’re doing your job by building your link profile properly, you can expect that links that are pointing to your content (on other relevant sites) will drive some direct traffic to those pages or even your website overall. How much traffic depends on how reputable and high-ranking the website or page is where the link lives. Don’t forget, outbound link considerations are crucial when other site owners are placing links on their pages as well. In a sense, these sites are taking a risk with outbound links, and to mitigate risk, your site has to have good quality, trustworthy content to incentivize them.
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Different Types of Link Insertion Backlinks
There are a few different categories for this SEO backlink type: Article, List, Roundup, and Resource List link insertion.
Article Insertion
With an Article link insertion backlink, you are approaching someone about an already written article that they have created. For this type, you should try and identify content gaps in the existing article and find existing content on your site that naturally fills in the content gap.
For example, you’re a small website owner who wrote a beginner guide to website building, but you want to increase the overall SEO and traffic to your site, which may even increase direct traffic. You analyze a few relevant websites in the same space that get more traffic and are top-ranking pages on Google. After evaluating one article specifically, you identify that the author wrote about website builders but failed to mention one helpful builder tool that you did.
The author also mentioned ways that users can analyze website building performance and mentioned a couple of helpful analytics tools but didn’t include a different helpful analytics platform you like. You’ve now identified that there are at least two spots in the post to reach out to the site owner or webmaster to ask if they’ll do a link insertion on their post that links to relevant content on your page.
List or Round-Up Link Insertions
Lists and Roundups are essentially what the names suggest, articles that list sites, products, tools, companies, services, etc. Finding these kinds of opportunities isn’t any different than finding targets to approach with your Article insertions. But instead of finding spots in an existing article where your link fits well, you just recommend your page or website be added as an additional item on their list, and because you found this opportunity – that likely means that your competition was added but you were left out – you know, because you found this list opportunity.
You or the agency you may hire to do link-building should keep tabs on how those lists evolve over time. As those lists grow with new sites or companies being added, and if you aren’t included as your competition is, then your link building approach or overall site’s authority (as seen by Google or measured via Domain Rating) may need tweaking or revamping. A well-placed list insertion can work wonders in these instances because often a link in these posts point directly to a site’s home page. It’s also critically important that you keep your content consistent to keep it indexed and ranked.
Resource List Link Insertions
The difference between List or Round-Up posts and Resource List insertions are subtle, and truthfully there’s likely a decent amount of overlap depending on the content of the post and its goal. For example, a roundup post of different marketing resources can also be viewed as a list that would appeal to someone searching for general information about marketing. But, in many instances, roundup or list posts tend to be “how-to” guides on achieving something using existing online tools.
Resource List link insertions are less “how-to” and instead lean more towards just offering users resources or references about a given topic or subject, although high-quality resource pages are generally a valuable part of any content strategy. This content often leans into information such as “facts about” or general information. To go back to our website building example, this may be something along the lines of an article titled, Essential Resources for First-Time Website Builders.
To use link insertions for these opportunities, it is simply approaching the webmaster and providing an additional relevant link they missed.
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How Does Link Insertion Impact My SEO?
Any time a user links out to an external site or piece of content, they are endorsing its value, as long as it’s in an appropriate context. Links pointing back to you show Google that your site is providing high-quality information that’s seen as helpful, credible, and accurate. With link insertions, because you’re working with established content, you’re using an alternative tactic compared to traditional guest blogging which means your competition may not have tried the specific sites on your target list, giving you a leg up.
These websites also have their own backlink profile and reputation and if they are willing to point a link back to your site or page (especially if they use a dofollow anchor tag for the link, which means Google considers this a vote of confidence from your link insertion target), you get that same SEO value added to your page.
Finding Quality Link Insertion Targets
The goal is to always aim for sites or pages that have higher domain or page authority, lots of traffic, and ideally use dofollow link tags when pointing to your pages or site. Easier said than done right? You need more than a basic understanding of what the practice of link insertion entails to actually go out and find good-quality links. Let’s jump into several crucial steps you should always follow.
Authority Site Targets
There’s some subjectivity involved in figuring out how “authoritative” (without quotes) or popular a site is based purely on browsing their content and traffic stats, especially as an up-and-coming entrepreneur trying to climb the search ranks and improve their overall visibility with limited marketing dollars to spend on paid traffic. One thing I have noticed over the past few years is how vital this metric has become for overall ranking – we’re seeing lower-quality sites fade, and businesses putting more emphasis on this important part of link-building – it’s becoming quite popular now that people realize just how crucial authority is.
While “street cred” can give you a basic idea of what’s hot and what’s not, luckily there are more effective tools you can leverage beyond pure conjecture to identify higher-authority domains in your space and ultimately work out how authoritative (again, sans quotes) or strong each page on those sites are. We’ll walk you through a couple of our favorites.
Measuring Domain Authority
Domain Rating (or Domain Authority as used by SEO Software tool Moz) is one way of getting an objective idea of how relevant or reputable Google sees your page in relation to competitors. These tools don’t explicitly measure or reveal all the metrics used to determine this number but give you an easy point of reference as you’re growing your online presence.
You or a backlink agency that you may hire can quickly evaluate target site’s domain rating with tools like Ahrefs and Moz. These tools not only give you your Domain Rating, they also reveal how much traffic the sites get on average each month, give a complete backlink breakdown of every site pointing back to it, show competitors, keywords it ranks for (that’s just to name a few key elements.). The key with this tool is that you look at how sites you view as authority sites measure up in your niche. As you evaluate these top-ranking sites, you can then try and find pages or specific blog posts where link insertion is a viable option.
This helps in a couple ways. Firstly, by using this tool you can see if their authority (the one’s you consider popular and top-ranking sites) matches the actual metrics from the software.
Secondly, this also reveals valuable pages on their sites (assuming they aren’t competition and use dofollow link tags) which you may never have thought of or would even know about. Keep in mind though, that although a link insertion might seem a valuable part of building links to improve your search ranking – any links on those target pages have to pass “quality” (no quotes) standards too – essentially we don’t want to get traffic sent our way from a place no one visits.
Measuring Page Authority
You don’t only need to assess the Domain authority or Rating, it’s vital to check out individual pages on the websites you’re considering reaching out to as well to get the whole picture. After all, you may have a site with extremely high Domain Rating – a value of 95 for example (which puts them firmly at the top, as Domain rating has a top rating of 100) – but what about a specific post you’ve identified for a backlink opportunity, and is this a smart investment if we were to use an agency? Will it pass the quality check to give a proper idea of our potential traffic numbers from these insertions?
That’s why I like to assess individual page strength in relation to all the others to find those ones that not only make sense for my overall content marketing strategy (remember, a link insertion needs to have topically relevant backlinks or else the value drops significantly.), but to ensure that these individual page’s metrics measure up.
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Leverage Competitors
Many niche edits and link-building services like to start with an in-depth analysis of the pages they know they will be going head to head with on Google’s Search engine to see if any clues can be gleaned from competitors who are already highly rated and driving lots of direct traffic to their websites.
There’s some nuance to this approach. If you are just getting started trying to build your content and trying to improve your overall visibility (without spending thousands on marketing efforts each month) then it’s highly likely that many pages ranking well and attracting high organic search volumes will be outside of reach for now. So in the beginning it’s best to not sweat this detail, although this doesn’t mean you can just ask anyone for a link insertion to give your pages more juice.
Focus instead on creating quality content that is highly ranked with a respectable amount of traffic to improve your SEO domain rating. You may even see organic direct traffic come your way and more dofollow link opportunities (remember, we want those dofollow anchor tags – you may get organic search engine traffic or direct traffic if using no-follow, but these offer much less authority value.). Then go out and check to see where they (competitors you’re starting to compete with in rankings, not those way up high with their million dollar a year SEO strategy budgets.) are gaining link insertions to give an idea of who’s linking out to them but you haven’t even considered.
An instance would be, as an eCommerce representative that has their business steadily climbing in rankings for highly valuable keywords you’ve been targeting – you may see your overall ranking is around a 40 and organic monthly traffic numbers sit comfortably at 5000 page visits for a particular valuable keyword that you offer. You’ve done the research and used a competitor analysis tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool (these are excellent because they not only let you evaluate your own site’s data – it helps inform your overall content creation strategy.), and identify two separate sites with ranking values around a 45. You dive deeper to see who they are getting linked back to by using their Referring Domains function (often hundreds – good news because this tells us these two are solid choices and could drive some traffic) but you are not.
This gives a blueprint for places you never even knew existed. Keep an eye on how your direct traffic numbers from these backlinks fluctuate and update the target page content on those links you own.
Evaluating External Links
Just as measuring authority with metrics can be slightly misleading or only part of the process (we always make sure to assess the whole picture.) – how external backlinks are handled also varies from place to place.
Beyond authority and relevance (still vitally important considerations) we like to look closely at each backlink prospect and evaluate how, and to whom they choose to provide these free backlinks.
Competition?
Any SEO manager running an authority site knows they will have their share of businesses that want backlinks to help boost their own visibility and drive more users to their pages and we also know these site owners like to make requests even if they themselves don’t make great quality content. These opportunities make perfect sense, assuming it’s an ideal fit and we feel good about their trustworthiness. However, there are some clear scenarios when even if a site ranks well for certain keywords (such as resource list link insertions) they may be viewed as a competitor or aren’t relevant enough to actually link back to with do-follow anchor tags.
The concept of competing isn’t black or white in this situation – after all we don’t know the search terms that Google used to match a user to that page or what the true goal of their search was. Luckily there are some rough guidelines that can help navigate this more complex situation as an agency or content manager.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow
Now here’s where we see that authority and the proper approach really begin to converge. Not all links provide equal SEO value to those pages being linked to (remember, you’re essentially saying that “this site is awesome.” sans quotes of course – always gotta make things sound human, right?) but you don’t necessarily see a benefit from these backlinks. There are those that think it’s all smoke and mirrors that these anchor tag designations somehow impact your domain rating or are just more rules we all need to follow but this is incorrect. Not all links are equal.
The “street cred” behind backlink strategy essentially rests with those two magic anchor tags – “dofollow” and “nofollow”, without quotes. When Google’s crawling robot, named “Googlebot”, gets to the target page and spots your page URL with the magical dofollow link designation – you gain value that helps propel your site up higher, because another authoritative and reputable (or so Google thinks and we do as well because we did our proper due diligence.) has said – “Yeah, check this site out.” We are essentially linking arm in arm with someone well known.
With a nofollow designation Google essentially shrugs it’s metaphorical shoulders and moves along – as a nofollow link offers far less ranking benefits to you and is ignored. These can, however, help bring in some organic traffic if the link insertion you got placed is on a page with lots of traffic. These visitors might check your content out, browse around a bit (that’s direct traffic or “Referral” traffic as designated by analytics programs like Google Analytics) – they may even find some other information helpful, but Google won’t necessarily factor that into how it rates your page overall.
If I’m reviewing a list of backlink opportunities, or even doing an analysis of competition’s strategy – I make sure I see some good do follow links because Google does and that’s ultimately who I am targeting (remember, authority builds from different avenues.).
| Backlink type | How Google Sees it | Our Take |
|---|---|---|
| Dofollow links | Excellent sign of quality from a page owner. They are vouching for the trustworthiness of your content and link. These pass SEO value from the website back to your website. The anchor text for do follow links are a vote for the content the link points to. They are great, valuable backlinks that we try to maximize and are the ideal outcome of our link insertions strategy. These can send organic traffic your way. | Must have for link insertions. A high ratio of do follow link tags with great anchor text tells us this target website knows how to properly vet outbound links and isn’t handing out SEO juice for free. This metric isn’t make or break because there are good instances to use no follow tags (if someone shares content from our site on social for example.), and this site owner clearly isn’t worried about what Google thinks. |
| Nofollow Links | Nothing of value passed along. They could use them in situations when it would not be appropriate or fair to include a link to a third party because the site owner wouldn’t be comfortable or feel right vouching for the third party link insertion or may be compensated. | In some situations, no follow links are expected, because passing along value doesn’t make sense in every situation. In other instances, it may tell us that they’ve had issues or gotten penalized for poor SEO practice so are more risk adverse. Still though we like to make sure we see do follow link tags if we are putting effort in. |
The Whole Picture
Remember how in Measuring Domain Rating, we talked about using that data from our “competition” as a jumping-off point to get a wider view of where they get their links and we do not, essentially using a top competitor’s backlinks as a list for opportunity. We do the same in these instances by reviewing those pages of “authority websites” sans quotes (we really try to make our tone less robotic) to figure out their overall link approach beyond the standard metrics of domain and page authority as these only give part of the picture – a picture frame, no portrait.
For example, you could be looking over one site owner or competitor that you respect with solid ranking values – they even use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (because they are professionals that understand how SEO is crucial – a nice detail that adds to trustworthiness.) to find and manage valuable keywords. In addition to using SEO software, you’ve run them through your manual site review to make sure the website owner isn’t stuffing the page with black hat backlinks to other paid resource lists they own to sell to unsuspecting customers, a trick that works well for the short term (especially if done correctly, as Google doesn’t notice.) – but that will see Google come down on those page owners and potentially yours if you’re caught buying shady links.
Once those basics checks are covered and this webmaster passes the sniff test we now jump into the nitty-gritty of external backlinks on each of those competitor’s pages by actually going and manually clicking on those links to other sites they point back to.
In our own analysis for this website, you’ve gone and opened up dozens of outbound links to those websites (as Google’s trusty robotic “Googlebot” sans quotes of course does. No point in cheating because it’s extremely smart.) to get the same viewpoint. What you see is that every single link uses dofollow link anchor tags which tell us a great deal about the way in which these site owners go about this important part of their site strategy and how their competitors got included, a nice bit of expertise Google picks up on and you now see as well.
These link insertions tell us this is someone who is selective and likely only wants higher-quality websites (which gives a great idea about why it works – they did their due diligence.), making their endorsement all the more valuable. It’s all too common that link insertion on lower-quality websites becomes a free for all. Links get put up with anchor text using “exact match” (which can actually hurt your overall site strategy over time and should be balanced out.), with hundreds on each post (imagine trying to link arms with 500 strangers at once and no one knowing who’s really who.). All these links use do follow anchor tags because the site owners don’t necessarily care if Google finds this fishy (in these cases – they are likely trying to scam others who are buying the backlinks they are hosting) – in some cases it can work because Google is not foolproof and needs help.
Keep in mind that authority and content relevancy should not be pushed aside. After all, the links they placed are valuable to Google, not only because they are dofollow – but because their SEO game plan is designed to not trigger warning bells.
Conclusion
With so much of online marketing evolving into complicated paid traffic and automated bot networks, link insertions, when done with the right approach can help a growing online brand expand. If you want a backlink strategy that not only provides juice and good anchor text to improve your website’s domain authority, but a strategy that will ultimately drive more traffic – link insertion can work well.
