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Making your websites backlink profile more natural
A part of building out a website is making your website look like a natural businesses would. As you don’t want to raise suspicion that you are intentionally manipulating the rankings. Part of this is building out pillowing links.
Doing so will allow you to diversify not only your anchor texts (as typically these pillowing backlinks will be generic blank URL backlinks) but also your no follow / do follow ratio. As if you are just going to just use PBN links they will be for the most part do follow and if you look at a normal website there is a distribution of both do follow and no follow backlinks.
Social profiles and citations are a way to diversify your backlink profile of your websites. It is also a trust signal to Google as the majority of businesses when starting out will follow the same process.
Social profiles
When I start off with a new website I start off by using https://knowem.com/ to build out social profiles as typically a new business with try to ensure they can get their business name on these social media platforms.
What you do is run your desired social media username through their tool to find out what is available and get your virtual assistant (VA) to make the profiles for you.
If you do use a VA make sure you get them to send you an excel sheet with all the details for each account made so you can recover the accounts if you need to as well as log in if you want to be active on these social profiles.
I wouldn’t go crazy, just stick to the bigger, more established social media profiles. I would usually make sure I get the following as a minimum:
https://www.facebook.com/
But there are plenty more listed on the site and some that may be more niche relevant, for example https://www.etsy.com if your website is based around arts and crafts.
When creating social profiles I would recommend dropping your website URL in the bio on these if there is the option.
If you don’t have a VA to outsource too you could always go for KnowEm’s smallest package which is $85 and they build out 25 social media profiles of your choice.
Or of course you could do it yourself but then it becomes time versus money spent.
With social profiles often you can use these to drive traffic to your website in the beginning but it does require some knowledge on how to gain initial followers. If this is something you want to learn about post below in the comments and we will get an expert on social media marketing to do a guest post. The main benefit with social media is once you have a follower base you can literally share new articles and receive almost guaranteed traffic.
Citations
Citations are directories where you put your business name, address and phone number (NAP). When building out these links it is very important to ensure that you are using the same NAP on each directory as you do on your website and Google my business (GMB) profile.
Citations provide a combination of follow and do follow backlinks and some are paid while others are free.
They help you to rank local searches in the map pack as seen below, which can really drive a lot of phone calls / clicks with local service clients.
The most common directories are websites like the Four Square, Yelp and White pages.
When building citations it can also help to build some niche relevant ones. You can usually find these by looking at your competitor’s by using search commands such as the one below:
But you can also look at generic lists such as this one for ideas. You can also look for local ones for local relevance by searching terms such as “location business directories.”
If you are building a site without a physical location it can still be beneficial to build citations especially in lower competition niche’s as Matt Diggity showed in this case study. This is down to preference, if it is a localised niche it can be helpful but if you are going after international terms it may be more of a hindrance than a help.
You can find a list of strong local citations here at Bright Local.
Again with citations this is something that you can pay to be done by the likes of PBN Butler, outsource to a VA or even do by hand.
Again it is a time versus money question, building citations can be relatively time consuming and services such as PBN butler can cost around $1 per citation.
Although citation building is relatively monotonous and easy it can be time consuming especially if for example, your VA messes up trying to fix the citations so ensure that you have good standard operating procedures (SOPs) sent to the VAs.
Indexing
When building these style pillow links they typically are harder to index. This is because typically they won’t have any backlinks pointing to them. So you could send backlinks at these pages (which can be costly depending on the amount you have built) or you could use an indexer such as https://seoindexer.com/.
In the next lesson we’re going to cover how to create link assets for your website, which allows you to gain high quality backlinks for a relatively low investment.

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