From Cats to Vloggers: How to Do YouTube Link Building Right

If we asked you what the second-largest search engine was behind Google, what would pop into your head? Here’s a curveball – it’s a little site called YouTube. With over 1.9 billion monthly users, YouTube is also the second largest social media platform. For a site with that kind of userbase to be known mainly for cat and prank videos can be a little misleading. To put it simply, videos are the way forward across every part of the digital landscape.

Vloggers and influencers have been riding a steadily climbing viral wave since the beginning of the 10’s and this still doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Whether it’s Casey Neistat riding around New York, David Dobrik and his legion of teenage fans or the thousands of respectable micro-influencers, brands have had to adapt to the huge numbers these accounts draw in. If good quality and trustworthy influencers are talking about your brand, we don’t have to tell you about the obvious benefits.

If you want your brand to stand its ground and make your digital strategy a success, link building has to play a major role. Link building is the creation of links on different sites coming back around and linking back to your site. The catch? They’ve got to be good.

But what are ‘good links’ and how do we know how to make them? The best metric we use for great link building is the flow, which comes in two distinct parts – citation and trust.

Let’s start with trust flow – this is how your site is valued in regards to the value of other sites that are linked to it. On the other hand, citation flow is how your site is valued in view of the amount of sites that link to it (i.e. volume).

In regards links, there are two variations – follow & nofollow. With follow links, their weight as links are passed on to the sites that they are linking towards (this is rather brilliantly called ‘link juice’). If you can get a large amount of these links pointing towards your site, the gains can be huge and very satisfying.

What about nofollow links? These do the exact opposite (as the names suggest) and tell the search engine to not follow that specific link, therefore improving your link profile. These come in very useful when a page is trying to connect to a spammy or corrupted link.

Getting the balance right between these two types of links is very important for creating a successful link profile that impresses the Google algorithm. Both are as important as each other in terms of bringing traffic to your site.

So where does the big wide world of YouTube come into all this? Well, each link from any type of YouTube content is seen as nofollow. Period. When focusing on outreach, the main goal is to grow authority. Achieving numerous follow links with trusted influencers who are connected with your brand will inevitably steer traffic to your site.

Ultimately, it’s vital to use YouTube in your outreach strategy because of the amount of active users and high levels of engagement on the platform. If you want eyes on your brand, it really is a must. Don’t be scared to make YouTube a big part of your link-building – the possible rewards are too big to ignore!

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