Words: Adam Samuel - Nubricks
Published: 12th december 2008
Link Building the Spanish Way
Spain is one of the established property markets and saw its boom a few years ago. Many businesses sprang up and loaded sites into an ever crowded space. The property market in Spain has faltered recently and some sites are no longer maintained or have disappeared completely. However competition is rife amongst the remaining top sites, as they are still looking to generate an income, so it is a great time to be going to site owners and striking link deals with them.
Searching for appropriate links
When searching for appropriate links, look out for:
- Real estate/property specific sites
- Province/region/area/local area sites
- Related Industry sites (Travel, hotel, currency, mortgages, etc...)
- Directory sites
- Local/national news sites
Looking for the right deal
As the web has grown, so has the cost of every link. It is important to try and evaluate what a link is worth, here are some points to note:
- PR (Page Rank) is Google's measure of a sites authority, new sites start with PR0, it is only a guide and is usually more than 6 months out of date, but gives you an indication of a sites authority. To put it in perspective ebay.com is a PR8.
- Make sure the site looks professional and updated
- Is the page that your link will be listed on, linked to from the home page of that site?
Check the link
Make sure you get a clean link, which means when you scroll over your link on a site you see your url - http://www.domain.com/
not http://www.somesite.com/jump.cgilink=321
Another way to get a link
Some sites may accept content in return for giving you a link so write an article and credit yourself at the bottom with an appropriate keyphrase link.
Top Spanish themed sites
(In no particular order)
Links for traffic
TypicallySpanish - As this site doesn't pass significant link value, getting link should give good brand awareness and deliver you targeted traffic.
Links to help rankings
Spain Data - €75 p/y
Data-Spain - €10 p/y
Spanish Fiestas - £375 p/y but they are having a redesign soon, so worth asking for a deal.
Spaindirectory - Free
Spain-UK - €24 p/y
Spain2you - $3-10 one off
Other sites of interest
(In no particular order)
Classifieds1000 - Free
OtherCountries - €75euros p/y
Ezilon - $69 p/y
Iozoo - €29.90 One off
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User Comments
Good morning
As a matter of fact, I did not know link building for Spanish sites and for English sites link building vary a lot but reading your blog says all and it was really helpful
Thank you already
Anna
Jugar Poker,
http://www.poker-casino-online.es
Whats been missed is that Google has taken a hard stance on paid for linking. With sites who relied on paid links falling down the rankings because of them.
Natural links are thd ONLY form of links that Google likes.
Don't fall into the Directory linking system of paying an annual fee to have a single link which doesn't give you any 'link juice' when there are much better ways out there.
If you want to know more have a look at http://www.themedlinkbuilder.com for an excellent way to get as many links as you want for free.
Arthur,
ThemedLinkBuilder.com
Sorry to hear you feel this way Andy. I do not accept that this type of link building is a waste of time at all! Getting links is an art and link builders utilise a myriad of techniques to achieve their goal of high rankings and this is one of them. I use it myself.
This article is a starting point for people looking to get started building Spanish links and I firmly stand behind my belief that these links WILL add value to a link building campaign for a Spanish orientated website. By no means am I saying buy these links and you will rank for "Spanish Property" but they should part of a campaign.
Had you done your research you would know that Nubricks does employ the link building techniques outlined here and more, on a much larger scale and these have also been applied to a Spanish Property site we've also owned since 2001 that ranks well.
Social bookmarking and blogging are whole other niche within link building and a topic for an article in its own right.
You are misinformed if you believe that a homepage link carries virtually no weight, as this is just plain untrue, Nubricks links are a testament to this and the reason we rank in the Top 3 for high value terms such as Overseas Property.
Getting links and driving traffic are indeed two very different strategies and I think you have judged a piece on specific link building for Spanish sites with a larger brush.
Adam Samuel,
Nubricks.com
Blogging is another excellent way of attractive attention to yoru website. Real Estate and Mortgage blogs like ActiveRain.com and Wannanetwork.com help achieve a lot of visibility in Google searches.
I have published my website www.realestatefair.net just two weeks ago and have already achieved most of my key word search targets by balancing SEO, content and blogging, press releases and social networking.
Sal Antsipenka,
www.RealEstateFair.net
Pretty pointless waste of time most of this is. It's not the way Nubricks build their links either. Completely missed blogging and social bookmarking as credible forms of link building.
If it's not a homepage link it will carry virtually no weight or search authority nor drive useful visitors to the target web site.
ANDY,
ALMERIA-GRANADA.COM