Recently we had a prospect who wanted us to help them start a link building campaign for their website. This was a moderately competitive industry but considering the facts that they had their main keywords in their domain (a huge advantage over competitors), the age of their domains and the amount of links they already had, it was surprising that they didn’t get more organic traffic but rather had to rely on Google Adwords to drive most of their traffic to their site.

A quick look at their site revealed a set up that just didn’t help in terms of SEO. The site was hosted on domain A, while the domain they were building links for, domain B, was redirecting to the domain A. Therefore domain B had no real pages of its own, despite the thousands of links already built for it. Domain A was also relevant to the industry, however had a mere 14 links while most of its indexed pages were in the supplemental index.

The client didn’t seem to be really opened to suggestions from us, arguing that they were “already working with another vendor for SEO”, therefore they just needed us to provide a quotation for link building…

Management decisions in terms of branding, marketing etc. conflict sometimes with some of the basic rules of search engine optimization and SEM. Without the right setup, an aggressive link building campaign will not yield the expected results and help improve the rankings of your site. Organic optimization of each page of a site, relevant and unique content are factors that just can’t be ignored if you want your site to reach the top. In the above case, deep link building was not even an option since all links were to be built to the home page of page B.