The Breakthrough Link

Breakthrough: a condition that develops despite measures to prevent it.

I noticed there are generally two types of link for any link building campaign. One is the ordinary links, with the characteristic of easy to obtain, low quality assurance, and everyone can gets it. The links are usually gained from the traditional link building method: press release, forum, article directory, web directory and so on. These links carry little or no weight to influence the ranking, especially in Google.

The other type of link, is what I coined as the breakthrough link. These are the valuable, highly trusted and high authority link. These type of link is usually impossible to obtain for tom, dick and harry. Typically the result of strict editorial on the website. It does not necessary have a high PageRank, but have a high TrustRank.

Why do I call it the breakthrough link? Because once obtained, it will at least triple hike your search engine ranking.

Using my own blog as an example: Last year when I just started this blog, I wrote about Black Hat SEO. Read/Write Web, a highly authority technology news blog and Technorati’s Top 50, linked to my post about Black Hat SEO. Within few weeks, my website got out from the SandBox effect (yes, I got that when I first start up), got all my pages indexed, and rank well for many terms especially “Black Hat SEO”.

Yes, one link can make such a huge difference.

How can I obtain the breakthrough link?

Build content. Don’t be stingy on spending time to write about one piece. The benefit of getting link is priceless, and a good content increases your chance to being linked.

Get the words out. There are countless of blogs out there, written a better content than yours at the same day. So how to get yours noticed? Social bookmarking (digg, del.icio.us, reddit) is a good way, but the chance of getting found there is like finding needle from ocean.

The better way, is to write a genuine, friendly email to the A-List Blogs ( a.k.a your breakthrough link target). Don’t be shy or scare to come across as spammer. But, be sure that your piece is relevant to the blog, and worthy to their readers as well.

What about your experience of gaining a link that have tremendous impact to your website ranking?