Fix Your Site Before Linkbuilding

“This is so great,” said Josepha, working on foundational linkbuilding for the new Homefront site.

Now, we’re fortunate to do work we enjoy, but basic linkbuilding doesn’t usually inspire this kind of enthusiasm, especially when we’re working on a holiday. I looked over at her enquiringly.

“This is a well-written site, so the category suggestions are working,” she explained.

I really hadn’t thought about that before, but she’s right. When we do linkbuilding for sites that should have content updates but don’t, it’s a lot more work. Linkbuilding for well optimized websites is a pleasure. Not only do the automatic timesavers work, but people are also more likely to accept requests to link.

The question of whether to do linkbuilding before, during, after, or instead of site optimization comes up with fair frequency. Here are my rules of thumb:

• Is your site bad enough that you don’t want people to go there until it’s improved? Driving traffic to a site that gives a bad impression of your company isn’t going to be good for business.
• Are you changing URLs? If the page won’t be there when future traffic arrives, it doesn’t make sense to link it. Usually, this means you’re fine to link to your homepage, but you should hold off on deep links till you make any planned updates unless you’re sure there won’t be changes in the web addresses of the pages.
• Is your site fine, and only in need of linkbuilding? Are you sure? If so, go for it. All sites need ongoing linkbuilding.