New Site Success: Smart Link Strategies! | FatRank

**James Dooley:** Watch your link building strategy for a brand new website. We get a lot of questions where people ask what they should do once they have bought a new domain and published the content. My approach starts with citations. These are business listings and you need your name, address and phone number on the website before you order them. I prefer going hard from day one with branded anchors and naked URLs. You take a slower, more controlled approach with link velocity. Both methods work. Citations build your first layer of foundational links. Most of them are no follow but that is fine because this stage is about building trust signals and brand presence. **Karl Hudson:** After citations you move into pillow links. These are things like web 2.0s and social profiles. Think of them as a moat around a castle. You create branded profiles like jamesdooley.weebly.com, jamesdooley.tumblr.com, jamesdooley.blogspot.com and link them all back. Add YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter and anything that strengthens the brand footprint. Most are no follow. Some are do follow. The blend is natural. For local sites and even affiliate sites I add Google stacks and cloud stacks. They work well because they strengthen entity signals. All of this only works if you index the links. If you do not index them Google will never see the work. Indexing has become harder with AI growth because Google is overloaded with URLs. That is why indexing tools matter. **James Dooley:** A press release gives you another hit of mentions. It builds velocity. It supports E-A-T. You get 200 to 400 links depending on the service. They drop off over time so you repeat every few months. After this foundation phase you move into do follow backlinks. Start with branded anchors because they never cause penalties. Slowly introduce keyword anchors once Google trusts the pattern. Never go heavy on exact match anchors. That is the number one penalty we see at Backlink Doctor. **Karl Hudson:** For a new website I prefer guest posts over niche edits because a 2016 article suddenly linking to a brand new domain looks odd. You build guest posts first then bring in niche edits six months later when the domain has age. Digital PR is powerful for big niches because trusted seed sites strengthen authority. Most digital PR links are no follow but they still work because they pass signals and build brand coverage. **James Dooley:** Tier 2 backlinks support your tier 1 links. You can use them on guest posts, cloud stacks and some social links. They help with indexing and they increase the chance of crawlers finding the URLs. They also add power to guest posts which helps them rank. When the guest post ranks, you control the SERP because you own both the main ranking page and the supporting pages. It also helps with reputation management because you shape the narrative. **Karl Hudson:** While link building you must keep building topical authority. A twenty page website will never rank well in a competitive niche. You need entities, supporting articles and a semantic content network. Informational pages attract natural links which you then funnel internally to commercial pages. In tough niches like gambling we used statistical content to attract links because it was cheaper. Those pages became strong enough to redirect or internally power money pages. **James Dooley:** If anyone watching has an existing site and you realise you have skipped foundational links, skipped tier 2s or only built a handful of citations, fix it. Thirty citations is not enough. Go into the hundreds. Get the referring domain count up. It is cheap compared to guest posts and it builds trust. **James Dooley:** We hope this breakdown helps you shape your link building strategy for new websites.