Link building is a very misconcieved topic because there are many ways it won’t work, and even the few good ways it does, it won’t deliver the type of SEO results it used to.
So where does the Link Building book fit into all of this? Well this review will explain.
Quick Report on The Link Building Book:
Creator: Paddy Moogan.
Price: $37, no up-sells.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 10 stars
I tend to have a bias towards programs and ebooks that talk about link building because it’s such a volatile way to do SEO that it’s hard to trust anything you hear.
The Link Building Book in a nutshell:
I’ve never seen or have read any resource or book that covers the topic of link building as definitively as this one. Literally every angle of link building you could imagine is covered here, whether it be for your own personal use or for helping clients as well as working with SEO companies and all sorts of scenarios.
There are also a lot of side topics about what to look for in bad links, good links, risks and rewards involved with different approaches to the topic and even case studies listed.
I would list the table of contents, but it’s literally 8 pages long. The ebook itself is 470 pages.
What I liked about Paddy’s Link Building book:
Paddy has really done a tremendous amount of work on this ebook and it has been updated for 2015 which I like (though I updated this review for 2020), so for anyone who is fanatical about link building, this eBook is for you (though I wouldn’t put so much faith into link building).
The most important thing I took from it and I think you should too if you read it is that Paddy talks about how “earning links” to your site is the most important part of the whole process and he’s right. That’s been my policy over the past few years, especially after seeing the dark side of the link building world and what can happen if you mess with the ever changing system or try to abuse it (such as black hat backlinks).
The safest link to your site is the one which comes without you asking for it or buying it. It’s the one where people who read your content, go off and talk about it, share it with their friends and they share it with theirs.
This is the point Paddy (and I) want to drive home to anyone who wants to have a high authority website that gets ranked high, gets shared and talked about. That should be every website’s goal.
Things I didn’t like about The Link Building book:
The most important part of the ebook in my opinion was just listed above, but the unfortunate part is that it’s not written enough in the book. I think I might have seen it less than 5 times overall and the rest of the content (remember 470 pages…) in the ebook talks about various other methods that can basically be safe today, but risky and even bad tomorrow.
Really the point of the ebook is to give you a full set of choices you can embark on, but I don’t recommend fully investing into it’s teachings because again, there is too much volatility in this topic and Paddy, in spite of providing so many different methods, lists a lot of them as being risky and doesn’t even recommend them. So I give full credit for Paddy giving you a full tutorial, but since so many methods have pros and cons, which ones can you completely trust?
There isn’t any except the one I talked about above (the safest link). Very little of the things recommended are fully trustworthy and I’m not saying Paddy is lying, it’s just that you never know when a new Google update can come out and shut down one or more of the methods in style and Paddy does warn about this.
Because of that potential problem, I didn’t think it was necessary to list all these different methods, talk about them for so long, only to mention the “BUT this can happen”. It kind of defeats the point in my opinion.
Want a clear way to SEO success? Follow this program.
Final Rating: The Link Building Book
Yellow Flag
4 out of 10 stars. Excellent book, but there’s 3 shades of it (white, grey and black) with the only real good one (white) having the least amount of attention in my opinion.
My Final Thoughts:
This ebook lists MANY things I didn’t particularly trust, somethings I just didn’t like, but what I did like was how the bottom line was stated in being that you should earn links and have people WANT to link to you, not looking to abuse or game anything. While that is the thesis of the ebook, it could have been mentioned a lot more.
My whole thesis vs what Paddy says is not to toy with this stuff and just do the truly safe things. Focus on content building above all and you will set yourself on the road to getting those safe links, they’ll just come naturally.
The 3 shades of link building and which one you should stick to:
Black: Buying link packages, the spammy kind basically. A MAJOR no. Never do this. Paddy also clearly says this is bad.
The grey area: Those volatile things. Guest blogging, asking for links back to your site, article marketing, forum marketing. In my opinion, it’s just a way for you to try and artificially gain links. Not my style but this is what the bulk of the ebook really describes.
The white area (Aka, DO this): Socially sharing your website’s content with friends and your network that brings value to them and has them WANTING to share and also having the great content that ranks high, naturally attracts people who then also share it and you never have to ask them to do it, they just want to.
That’s the best kind. And there’s only 1 program I’ve ever found that teaches it: Wealthy Affiliate.
If the ebook only briefly mentioned the volatile things and said there’s a risk factor with this and that, but more so focused on the white area topic, this ebook would easily be recommended as a must read.
The way it’s written now, I think there’s too much time covered in the grey area and it might lead people into a loop because some may try it, but others will want to be 100% safe about it like me and just avoid it completely.