I’ve always been a big fan of trying to have a broad range of inroads to a site. Over the last few years, I’ve seen so many sites with penalties that crushed their traffic that I place a high value on building secondary sources of traffic.
Wouldn’t it be nice to still get some relevant traffic, even if (heaven forbid) your main site weren’t showing up in the SERPs? This is where second-tier links can help.
I will go ahead with a disclaimer that says that I am in no way advocating doing anything blackhat or spammy here. I’m not asking you to try link wheels or totally ignore your usual quality standards. I’m not telling you to buy a bunch of low-quality links to sites that link to you. I just want to point out the benefits of paying attention to this type of link work.
What Is Second-Tier Link Building?
It’s pretty simple stuff: You seek to build links to pages that link to your website — in whatever way you want to do that. (With the first tier being building links to your website.)
You can use social media to promote the articles that link your site if you like. You can also directly ask an author to link to one of your articles on another site. The point is to link to something else that, in turn, links to you.
This method can help with rankings if done well (just like any other good links), but what I really like about it is the potential for traffic as people click through. With that mindset, it isn’t a big deal that some of the most popular sites that can generate second-tier links will nofollow those links.
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