Controversial Link Building Techniques

As we all know link building is a tedious process which no webmaster likes to do, it takes time and effort to build a good amount of inbound links in order to draw some relevant traffic from the search engines, the only problem is that not every webmaster knows how to do it right; since most webmasters tend to be quite lazy the thought of requesting relevant reciprocal link exchanges comes to mind and we immediately think of automated link exchange networks, while this worked some time in the past, as of today, this has become an ineffective link building technique which offers close to no benefit to the surfer, specially when several low quality sites appear in your link list.

Since the weight given to reciprocals went down it is important to focus on one way links but how do we obtain these type of inbound links?, again since we have picked lazy webmasters as our example we can deduct that the next obvious course of action would be to buy links, yes, this is the lazy people's way out, while acquiring several highly ranked links would be quite expensive such webmasters also take high risks of being discovered by Google's algorithm and being banned from the search engine result pages, so the question pops once again what should we do?

Now that we have established some of the wrong ways to acquire links lets suggest some great link building techniques which can result to be quite controversial but this is the goal we are after, you see, if people are not interested in your content or if they have seen it over and over they are very likely to hit the "back" button of their browsers which is not a good thing according to Google's analytics software; if you have used this tracking method you know that they measure the "stickiness" of a site by recording the amount of time visitors spend in your site and the number of times they "bounce back" to the search engines.

In order to gain inbound links we must place ourselves (and our sites for that matter) in the center of an ongoing discussion, now this doesn't mean we should register in many forums and spam it with link posts, that is not what this method suggest, instead you can find a good discussion topic which is sure to grab people's attention, for instance:

- Write an article about an ongoing discussion related to your niche. If you had a science site it would be a great idea to research current science news such as the recent controversial article which talks about "Evangelical Scientists trying to Refute the laws of Gravity with a new -Intelligent Falling- Theory", now this specific article is extremely controversial since you will have several people trying to explain the laws of gravity through science and others through faith or unconventional methods. Since you wouldn't be the first writing about it you can use it in a blog and then add your particular point of view which should have enough "spice" to trigger a discussion, but be very careful since you don't want to create a bad reputation for your site.

- If adding your own point of view to this article is not your style you can try to find a "funny side" to this story and either write about it, make a funny Photoshop picture related to it or even make a short video and post it on Youtube, quoting your site at the beginning and the end of the video. Social sites can be quite explosive as far as the attention your material can get so make sure to post it there to build huge amounts of back links.

Twisting hot stories (without breaking any law) and adding your point of view can sure be controversial once you use social sites to spread your word, that's why it is recommended to offer an RSS feed to your comments and articles, you can also use Press Release sites to get unparalleled attention, but what ever you do make sure to be ready for the amount of feedback you will get from your target audience.

As you see republishing a controversial article does nothing for your site but adding "extra material" to it is ultimately what gives it value and will help you get valuable one-way links. Make sure to make your site easy to link to by formatting your URL properly, you don't want to have a great article linked to an address such as " http://yoursite.com/index.php?458ref=abcd&cont=4454" as you see this is not an intuitive and easy to link to URL.

Do this with several controversial (but relevant) stories and you will see massive amounts of one-way links coming your way.