Vetting Link Opportunties that are Penguin Safe

[dsinger]

I am looking to go after sites that are, and will never be, affected by Penguin/Panda updates.  Is there a tool or a general rule of thumb on how to avoid such sites?  Is there a method anyone is currently using to get good natural links post Penguin 2.0?

[ChristopherGlaeser]

I used to spend a lot of time identifying high value sites in our niche and create relationships with the site owners to get back links.  In hindsight I think that was time that could have been better spent.  Now, I spend my time researching and writing articles that I think my users would find interesting, useful, engaging, compelling.  As these articles are published on our site, I post a link to our pages/accounts on Facebook and Twitter to create some buzz, and I may add a few marketing dollars to promote the post as well.  If the content of an article was well-researched and well-written, the shares, retweets, and links will come.  Some of the links are high value, others not, but they are all natural.

Best,
Christopher

[EGOL]

I do the same as Christopher, but without FB and Twitter.   My visitors do that for me.

In my opinion a lot of people who try this method and do not succeed have content that is less than inspiring.  For this method to work well you have to compare your content to the top ranking sites for your keywords and have clearly better, more substantive and superior photos.

I launch new content and only promote it on my own site and to the people who subscribe to my feed.  It might rank deep in the SERPs at first... when I check on it a year later it is usually on the first page of Google.  So I am not paying a lot of attention to rankings or to links.  And, because the content is generous in length it pulls in lots of longtail queries.

[dsinger]

so, leading with great content is the key.  I agree.  In my company, I am responsible for SEO execution and we have a content manager who is responsible for content strategy and execution.  We also have a handful of guest bloggers and staff bloggers who add a blog post about once a month to our site and then those posts are promoted through FB/Twitter.  Therefore, I am out of the loop when it comes to content direction and creation, even though I am the only one who knows the terms people are searching for and who ranks for those terms besides us.  Any suggestions on how I should approach any SEO tactics given I dont control content?

[EGOL]

Find out if the content manager knows about keyword research.

I do content management and have a graph on my wall that has two axes...

The horizontal axis is "Profitable"

The vertical axis is "Linkable"

Content ideas are written on post-it notes and placed at an appropriate location on that chart.  The goal is to work on those in the upper right quadrant first... then generate more ideas for that same quadrant.

After all upper right quadrant content is produced then pick the most fun jobs from the upper left and lower right quadrant.

Generate more ideas for all quadrants but lower left.