A Guide to Using Advanced Search Operators for White Hat Link Building

With Google stepping up its game big time against webmasters trying to manipulate the search results, many black hat SEO techniques have become a thing of the past. However, white hat SEO isn’t exactly easy or quick, or at least many don’t think so.

If you know the right approach to white hat link building, however, you can not only get the same or better results, but also the peace of mind that you won’t wake up to find your site being penalized and your traffic disappearing overnight.

We will help you figure out this right approach, which involves using advanced search operators and search queries.

Typical White Hat Link Building Strategies

The infographic we shared below goes into great detail about how you can go about getting the type of links that are believed to be the foundation of white hat link building. It covers guest posts, resource link building, sites that allow submitting or listing your site, as well as non-profit organizations that are happy to link out to sites that donate a certain amount to them.

Unique White Hat Link Building Strategies

These are something that not many know about, which means that you’re likely to have a higher success rate with them than the strategies mentioned above. Let’s take a look at these unique strategies.

• Getting links by sharing something very useful other than content

Basically, this strategy involves creating a useful tool, widget or infographic around an important topic of your niche, or something that helps solve a common problem. You can then pitch reputed and established sites in your niche and ask them to promote it.

If it’s indeed useful for their audience, many of them will likely be more than happy to share it with their readers. To find link building opportunities using this strategy, you can use the following search operators and queries.

Your industry name intitle:tools
Your industry name intitle:badges
Your industry name intitle:widgets
Your industry name intitle:infographics
Your industry name top/recommended/favorite/useful/awesome infographics

Pro tip: Infographics seem to be working great for this strategy as websites love to share the ones that convey a lot of information in a creative and unique way that’s easy and fun to digest for their readers.

• Sponsored Posts

These are similar to guest posts, except that the post itself makes it clear that it’s sponsored and, unlike guest posts, you’re free to promote your own brand.

Keyword intext:”this is a sponsored post”
Keyword intext:”this was a sponsored post”

Replace the “sponsored post” part in the above search queries with “paid post”, “sponsored review” and “paid review” to find more opportunities. These work especially well for promoting specific products.

• Link Reclamation

This is a surprisingly easy way to get the links that you probably deserve anyway. This basically involves asking sites that mention your brand or site without actually linking out to your site to hyperlink the brand mention with your site’s link.

Brand name –rd:sitename.com

Searching for your company name with and without spaces using double inverted commas. Example: “The New York Times” and “TheNewYorkTimes.”
“Company URL”
“Yoursite.com”

RELATED: Marketing Combined with AI? How Plausible is This to Happen

As well as the others mentioned in the infographic. Getting links using this strategy is as easy as just asking for them!