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A Guide To Linkable Assets For Effective Link Building

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A Guide To Linkable Assets For Effective Link Building

Not all content is made equal, and not every blog post receives external links.

Getting inbound links for every blog article is unbelievably time-consuming due to the amount of outreach required to secure links to just one article or page.

Instead of establishing a link building program around outreach, having a linkable content asset can earn you links and improve your outreach response rates.

This article will help you get started creating linkable content so you can build a natural link profile in less time.

Let’s start by defining a linkable asset.

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What Is A Linkable Asset?

Linkable content assets refer to high-quality content pieces created to attract backlinks from other websites, either via promotional efforts or link building outreach strategies.

These assets can be presented in various formats, such as infographics, written articles, videos, online tools, or downloadable documents.

An optimal linkable asset is a thorough, long-form resource that surpasses top-ranking content in the same niche. Your content should provide value, be unique, and cater to the interests of your target audience.

For an efficient traffic flow to your website, links must direct users to a specific webpage. Therefore, the asset should either be an HTML page, or integrated within a page.

There are a wide variety of linkable assets, one of which is the History of Google Algorithm Updates, published by the Search Engine Journal (SEJ).

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Based on data from Ahrefs, this page has successfully gathered nearly 3,000 referring domains.

ahrefs linkable content backlink profileScreenshot from Ahrefs, May 2023

Well-established brands tend to receive more links compared to new or lesser-known sites.

SEJ has built a solid reputation for producing high-quality SEO content, and its trusted name in the field has played a significant role in the success of this particular asset.

The efficacy of a linkable asset often depends on a site’s proven expertise, experience, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) within its domain.

Enhancing or establishing E-E-A-T can increase the appeal of your content to publishers. Now, let’s briefly delve into the concept of E-E-A-T.

Applications Of E-E-A-T In Linkable Content

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines introduced the concept of E-E-A-T, which helps users assess content quality.

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E-E-A-T has become increasingly significant in SEO, content marketing, and link building. To optimize a linkable asset, ensure it demonstrates each of these elements:

  • Expertise: Showcase the author’s knowledge and understanding of the topic through education, experience, or publications.
  • Experience: Highlight the author’s firsthand knowledge of the subject via personal experience, interviews, or research.
  • Authority: Establish the author’s reputation and credibility through credentials, affiliations, or the quality of their work.
  • Trustworthiness: Demonstrate the author’s honesty and integrity through transparency, neutrality, or avoiding conflicts of interest.

While the Quality Rater Guidelines and E-E-A-T don’t reveal the algorithm’s workings, Google claims that raters who follow these guidelines achieve similar results. Optimizing an article for E-E-A-T can improve its Google ranking and shareability.

Pro tip: Address questions real people ask in your niche to exhibit expertise and experience.

The emergence of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, has raised questions about demonstrating E-E-A-T in AI-generated content. Next, let’s explore generative AI in content creation.

Harnessing Generative AI Content Ideation

Generative AI is revolutionizing how content marketers conduct research, develop ideas and create content. Tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Bing Chat can significantly reduce research time and provide compelling content topics.

As AI content generation is still emerging, search engine and publisher policies on AI-produced content continue to evolve.

Incorporating subject matter expertise (SME), personal experiences, case studies, and in-depth topic exploration can ensure that AI-generated content remains authentic and avoids plagiarism.

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How To Get Content Ideas With ChatGPT

Select a topic or niche, then prompt ChatGPT with “Act as HubSpot’s blog idea generator and provide a list of 20 unique long-form content ideas for [topic/keyword].”

Choose relevant, unique, and searchable ideas, and refine them by comparing them to top-ranking content on Google.

How To Create An Outline With ChatGPT

Prompt ChatGPT with “Act as [industry blog or person] and create a comprehensive outline for an article ‘A Guide To Linkable Assets For Effective Link Building’, using contemporary content marketing techniques.”

An editor will then refine the AI-generated outline.

Use Bard to identify questions to address in the content with the prompt “What are common questions around ‘[topic|keyword]’.”

Update the outline to include the questions and answers from Bard, and modify the ChatGPT-generated sections from an experienced expert’s perspective, deciding which sections to include or remove.

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Pro tips: Use tools like ZeroGPT or ChatGPT AI Classifier to ensure your content doesn’t seem too robotic.

When To Use ChatGPT Vs. Other Generative AI

Bing Chat & Google Bard can access their individual search results and current content, while ChatGPT receives monthly updates and lacks internet access.

Utilize Bing Chat & Bard for research and rely on ChatGPT for titles, outlines, and process lists.

Generative AI has the potential to enhance topic selection and outlines for linkable assets and even address some downsides of linkable content assets.

Next, let’s examine the pros and cons of linkable content assets.

Pros And Cons Of Linkable Assets

While high-quality linkable assets can generate substantial links and traffic, this link-building strategy has drawbacks.

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Pros

  • Scalable link acquisition: Using informational content allows link opportunities across numerous topical areas.
  • Enhanced organic visibility: Long-form informative articles can attract thousands of monthly visits across various keywords.
  • Relationship building: Linkable content assets help establish relationships with influencers or industry experts, fostering collaboration and trust.
  • Long-term value: Relevant and valuable content assets can continue to attract backlinks and traffic over time.
  • Brand exposure and credibility: Linkable assets can boost your brand’s reputation as an industry expert, increasing trust and credibility.

Cons

  • Links not targeting ideal pages: Links typically target the asset, but a commercial page may be preferable for improving ranking.
  • Time and resource-intensive: Creating high-quality linkable assets can be challenging for smaller businesses or teams due to the required time, effort, and resources.
  • No guarantee of backlinks: High-quality content does not guarantee backlinks or SEO rewards.
  • Difficult to measure success: Assessing the impact of linkable assets on SEO can be challenging, as it might take time for search engines to recognize and reward acquired backlinks.
  • Competition: Increasing competition for backlinks and organic visibility makes it harder to stand out.

Using Linkable Assets For Link Building

Content can be tailored for specific link-building techniques or audiences, or created for a general niche.

Technique-first

This approach focuses on creating content for a specific link-building technique and audience.

Identify sites, forums, bloggers, or influencers interested in a particular topic, create content that appeals to them, and distribute it through email outreach or promotion to earn links.

Examples of technique-first methods include the Skyscraper technique, ranking statistical articles, niche forums, competitor link building, and guest posting.

Content-first

This strategy involves creating content for an audience or niche, then finding links for that piece. Use existing content or create new content that appeals to an expert audience.

Ideation techniques can involve a subject matter expert (SME) focus group or answering questions without solid answers online.

Unique distribution approaches for content-first include Help a Reporter Out (HARO) distribution, emailing an existing list of relationships, targeted social ads, and content syndication through press releases.

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Next, let’s explore some examples of assets that you can recreate.

Types Of Assets

Creating content to secure links has been a significant focus of link builders since Brian Dean published an article about the SkyScraper technique in 2015 and many before that.

However, there are a lot of content types that work well for securing links. The options for content types seem limitless.

The following is a narrowed-down list of asset types that can improve outreach response rates and earn links under the right circumstance.

Statistical Roundup Lists

This article will aggregate statistics from reputable studies and then organize them into appropriate categories so they are easy to search.

SEJ has a great example of a linkable asset with the roundup of 71 Mind-Blowing Search Engine Optimization Stats.

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These are organized into organic traffic, spending, local search, users & search behavior, link building (my favorite topic), Google search, and SEO vs. other marketing channels.

search engine journal statistical roundup article

Unique Research Study

These assets are unique studies with accompanying methodology and insights published in a blog article or a general webpage.

These assets are typically surveys, analyzing company data, or compiling & analyzing data from resources like Google Research, data.gov, or Kaggle.

Ahrefs publishes a lot of data. This study is one example, claiming “90% of content gets no traffic on Google.”

This asset has charts from the study embedded into the article, making both the images and the article linkable.

Listicles Of Companies, Tools, Or People

The term “listicle” is a portmanteau of the words “list” and “article.”

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These articles typically featured a bullet or numbered list with each item accompanied by a brief description, explanation, or commentary.

The format of a listicle is easy to skim to find the most relevant information quickly. However, a listicle can oversimplify a complex topic.

The great thing about these articles is that they can be created in almost any industry.

The article 12 Free Logo Makers You Can Try Right Now from a promotional printing company Quality Logo Products, shows that this technique can be used in any niche.

This article provides examples of potential logos along with the pros & cons for each logo maker.

linkable asset example of listical's of appsImage from qualitylogoproducts.com, May 2023

With any listicle, showing examples of using the tool or items is a way to demonstrate experience and build stronger trust with the audience.

Informative Infographics

An infographic is a visual representation of information, data, or knowledge designed to convey complex information quickly and clearly.

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Infographics often use a combination of charts, graphs, icons, illustrations, and text to present the information visually appealingly.

The carbon budget infographic by World Resources Institute uses a graphic of the earth to explain how much of the carbon budget (i.e., the amount of carbon the earth can produce before the temperature rises by 2 degrees) will be used by 2045.

carbon budget infographic exampleImage from World Resources Institute, May 2023

 

Excel & Google Sheet Templates

Templates are simple ways to organize a project with many moving parts. Even if the templates are not perfect for the project, they can serve as a source of inspiration for spreadsheet organization.

Theoretically, a template can be used for anything from home organization to advanced project planning. The higher search terms tend to be focused on project management.

An example is “Excel budget templates,” which has up to 100,000 average monthly searches.

This technique is very popular with B2B SaaS and project management (PM) software but can be used in any niche. ProjectManager is one of the PM sites producing Excel budgeting templates.

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This example is simple but has secured over 100 referring domain links.

project management template for link buildingScreenshot from ProjectManager, May 2023

More Asset Types

Planning Tools

A planner is an online web app that simplifies planning a specific task. The tasks can be for a simple consumer or a business planning task.

Calculators As Content

An online calculator can take the shape of an investment calculator, home improvement, or even a depth calculator.

Checklists Or Cheatsheets

These lists of steps or tasks to complete a specific project can come in the form of an online app, excel template, or pdf.

Conclusion

Creating a linkable asset that publishers, bloggers, and general websites will leverage can reduce outreach time and even earn links without any outreach.

Although these pieces are time-consuming to create, they can reduce the overall time to find links.

An asset can be a complex research study or a simple Excel template to organize planning.

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Next time you’re launching a link building campaign, create a piece that is easily linkable.

More resources:


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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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