18 Link Building Experts Weigh In How to Rank Boring Pages

In this roundup, 18 link building experts share their tips on how they build links to pages that aren’t inherently ‘linkable’.

How do you rank a product page, a category page, or any other page that’s hard to build links to?

It’s notoriously difficult to build good links to product and category pages since most bloggers and webmasters don’t want to link out to these pages. And their reasoning is understandable. After all, is a product page for imitation sunglasses really a useful resource for anyone’s readership?

Most webmasters and bloggers see a link to a category or product page on your website as nothing but an advertisement. And, are they wrong?

But, if your website exists just to sell those imitation sunglasses, you need to sell that product. And your goal with SEO and link building is to get that product page in front of as many people as possible– which means trying to rank that product page in the search engine results.

You understand the dilemma. But how do you overcome it?

There are differing opinions on which tactic works best and for this post, I decided to hand the mic over to other experienced link builders and pick their brain to see how they approach this.

With that in mind, I asked 18 link building experts the following question:

“When you want to rank a page that’s difficult to build links to, such as a product or category page, what’s your approach? Do you:

A Build links directly to that product or category page, knowing you’re in for a tough job?

B Instead, concentrate on building links to a good piece of content or linkable asset instead? If so, are the results from that method as positive and worthwhile as building links directly to the product or category page?”

When you read through these answers, you’ll see there are various ways to tackle this and there’s a little bit of everything sprinkled in the answers.

It just goes to show there isn’t one single, proven path to success. Instead, there are a variety of valid approaches to every link building and SEO obstacle!

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Patrick Hathaway, SiteBulb

My approach to this situation is to look at the bigger picture. It’s unlikely that you have only one page that you care about ranking, so you need an approach that is scalable and repeatable.

So if you’re going to build links directly (A), you’re probably gonna have to buy them. Sure you COULD try to make the page itself the linkable asset, but if you have lots of similar-ish pages this will be very hard to scale.

As such, I would lean towards option B, supplemented with a smart internal linking strategy. Create link-worthy assets on other internal pages, build links to the assets, then use internal links to direct the accumulated link equity to the pages you want to rank. Similarly, look for other opportunities throughout your site to add more internal links to the pages you want to rank, in a repeatable and scalable manner. For instance, this might be through ‘featured products’ on the homepage, or ‘top categories’ on a sidebar, or ‘similar products’ on other product pages.

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Julie Joyce, Link Fish Media

As I don’t mind buying links, I would go with option A. If you’re willing to pay, you can usually get what you want. From what I’ve seen it’s easier to get a page to rank by building direct links to it and not second-tier ones where you’re building links to a page that then links to the page you want to rank. Even if I was not going to pay for a link, I’d still focus on the page directly but I know it would be difficult, so I’d try and work with the client to develop that page with more content or something more worthwhile than just a product or category description.

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Melanie Nathan, SEM Rush

My answer is definitely B. Create some linkable assets that your niche IS BEGGING FOR. If it’s already been done… DO IT BETTER.

Are the results from that method as positive and worthwhile as building links directly to the product or category page? Yes. In many cases, the results are actually BETTER if the content/asset is good enough.

This is because a) good content sells itself and b) with good content you’ll get social shares too. This rarely happens with an ordinary product page.

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Matt Diggity, Diggity Marketing

At the end of the day, in order to rank quickly and efficiently, you need to build links to the pages you want to rank.

I ran a single variable test earlier last year, isolating the effect of linking en masse to a “link magnet page” which internally linked to the money page.  The results weren’t pretty.  Significant movement didn’t progress on the money page for about three months.

Ain’t nobody got time for that. You can indeed get links to any page you want.  You should see some of the niches that I’m in. Some folks may hate to hear this, but if you find resistance getting links for the pages you want to… money talks.

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Tony Randall, anthonyrandall.com

This is a timely question because a client of mine recently hit #1 for a 450,000 searches p/m keyword for one of their product category pages.That page was mid 40s for the same keyword when I started over a year ago. Guess how many links I built to that specific page? Zero. A couple to the folder above it, but absolutely none to that specific page.

I simply try to acquire links that are going to send signals that the site I’m trying to rank is overall of high value to searchers in a variety of keywords and phrases.

In general, I think a lot of people get hung up on trying to land links to product pages when they should be focusing on their overall strategy. Link building is about finding missed opportunities and fixing them. That’s the whole “optimization” aspect. If that opportunity is to a product page then that’s awesome and you should jump on it. Just keep your eyes peeled for places you can get a link to *any* page of your site and you’ll be doing link building better than most.

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Tim Soulo, Ahrefs

It mostly depends on your skills/resources. I mean if you have background in content marketing and content promotion – it would clearly be easier for you to publish content that will generate backlinks and then funnel all that link juice to “unsexy” pages. But if you’re good with some link building strategies – you’ll probably execute on those.

If you’re asking me personally, I would put 80% of efforts into content marketing and another 20% into building direct links via guest posts and outreach.

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Garrett French, Citation Labs

We would: A) build links to the page AFTER adding citation-worthy data, facts or other information to the target page we want to rank. And in addition B) build links to linkable assets. So in short – both, but A only if we can create real justification for a citation.

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Andrew Dennis, Page One Power

I would go with option B, focusing on securing links to an asset that I know is link-worthy. Of course, I would also make sure that asset has internal links pointing to important product or category pages to ensure link equity is passed along to those pages as well.

This does not mean I would forego all link acquisition for specific product pages, since there would likely be a handful of opportunities to secure links directly to them. However, I would concentrate the majority of my efforts toward earning links to linkable pages and then directing equity appropriately via internal links. Any successful, sustainable link acquisition campaign has to be built on linkable assets.

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Andrew Shotland, Local SEO Guide

We tend to go for building links to a good piece of content for a few reasons:

1. It’s easier to get legit links to these URLs v. category URLs

2. It encourages the client to actually publish some good content which has SEO & user benefits outside of its ability to attract links

3. The results tend to be positive but as in all things SEO, your mileage may vary!

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Debra Mastaler, Alliance-Link

I would develop a piece of content that included a product as a solution to a problem and then link to the product page directly as a way of citing the solution. Depending on the product, I might use an image as the link, pictures are usually more effective than words but it really depends on the niche.

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Mandy McEwen, Mod Girl Marketing

I would build links to a solid piece of content and then on that page include internal links to the product page. I would probably also send links to the product page as well, but focus efforts more on that piece of content like a long-form blog post with images, possibly a video, etc.

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Taylor Tomita, Taylortomita.com

I would go for a two-for-one deal, and turn the category or product page into the linkable asset. You could achieve this by including a section of useful information about the product(s) on the page – perhaps a buyer’s guide or answering questions being asked in the niche (do some keyword research!). This way, the product or category page makes way more sense to link to from a link building perspective, and the page reaps the benefits.

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John Doherty, Get Credo

What if I said I do both? Obviously links directly to the page you want/need to rank are going to help you out the most, but as you said they can be very hard to get. Content is easier to build links to, but links to those pages that then link back to your important page are not nearly as effective.

So what do you do? The approach I like to take is to build out content around the topic of the page I want to rank, then leverage that content into other content and promotion opportunities that I can use to build links to that content, and sometimes to my desired page. Content is your foot in the door to building links in this approach, and it tends to work quite well!

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Tad Chef, On React

That’s a great and very specific question but nonetheless there is no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on several factors. The niche/market we are in is important. Is it a consumer product? Then we can spice up the product page with images of people wearing or using it. On category pages you can add cornerstone content like guides. This will also work better for b2b products that are not visually appealing to average people. I have also seen sites ranking exceptionally well just because they had a popular blog that received many links.

At the end of the day you have to look at your linkable assets, potential audience, budget and the likes and then decide what to do. The outcome depends on the context.

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Don Rhoades, Gonzo SEO

I would do both. Bifurcating efforts in this case will prove worthy in the long-run. There is another element I’d consider as well – internal linking.

The (a) part of my answer is accepting the challenge of getting links to a product or category page – there are opportunities out there, although some have to be made. Because of the nature of these pages, they are less likely to fit in a lot of link schemes. They do however, possess the value of shortening a path to purchase. Depending upon the type of product, there may be plenty of opportunities to link to a product page from resource-pages, or even participating in conversations happening on forums. Actual sales conversions trump ranking for keywords, in my experience. This method is the best to try to drive both rankings and sales.

The (b) part of my answer is a battle-tested method for generating topically relevant context to your product pages. Everyone from Mint.com to OKCupid.com have user-specific data they use to develop content that is unique to them, attracts interest/traffic, and can be cited as a data source (natural links). So long as this traffic and link equity is pushed to the product page in some way, creating tangentially related content to build links AND context around is rarely a bad idea.

The (c) part of my answer is to use an internal linking strategy to ensure the click path is minimized to your product pages. My favorite quick/dirty tutorial on how to scale internal linking is John-Henry Scherck’s method using Screaming Frog and MajesticSEO.

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Venchito Tampon, Sharprocket

A & B.

A. Generally speaking, it’s hard to build links to a product/category page given its commercial context. However, there are ways to build links to them only if you can identify opportunities, some of which are:

Requesting links from partner pages. If you own an eCommerce site, for example, there are partners links pages (retailers/manufacturers/suppliers links pages) that you can reach out to and request for links – pointing to either your category page or your product page, whichever fits relevant to the linking page.

Leveraging infographic mentions. There are awkwardness and failure expectations when you request for a homepage link instead of a link pointing to the right destination page – but not for infographic outreach. You can actually send an email to a webmaster who uses your visual asset, without hesitation and requesting to link to your homepage instead of the page originally hosting the infographic. This makes sense/good because you normally see a caption with a link below a visual asset (via Brand) – links to homepage

Using brand popularity. We have big clients we haven’t had a hard time asking bloggers & linkers to link to a commercial page given the client’s brand prominence in its respective industry. So much willingness from them, that they’d be adding recurring links from their future blog posts.

B. If there aren’t any opportunities to link to your bottom of the funnel pages, what you can do best is to internally link to your commercial page from your linkable content. Relevance is key here as you don’t want to confuse your visitors from pointing to pages they even don’t know relevant to what they are reading from your blog content.

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Eric Carrell, Dofollow.io

I like to take an 80/20 split to link building. I focus 80% of our efforts on skyscraper style outreach where we build incredible assets and put them in front of a large, relevant audience and simply ask for a link on a relevant page of theirs.

We have a lot of success building links this way. The goal is to a) increase the sitewide authority enough that all pages (boring and not) get a boost; and b) internally link from the linkable assets to the pages that we want to rank.  The other 20% of my efforts are focused on guest posts. These allow us to build direct links to harder to reach places.

I do not pay for link placement. I earn my links based on the inherent merit of the content. I don’t want my links on pages where anyone with $20 to spare can get a link.

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Devin Boudreaux, Page One Power

First, if I didn’t have any creative control or input, I’d investigate who their target demographics are & see if I can find any relevant directories suited for those and get these harder to get pages added in there via a directory listing. People tend to trash on directories, but quality/relevant directories are a great place to get those harder pages listed since in my experience you can get those deep/product pages linked. Just dig around the directory beforehand and if it’s not trash, go for it. Plenty of directory links I built years ago are still live/being indexed/kicking butt for clients.

If I did have creative input, I’d push for creating some linkable content/assets that best serves their demographics that currently isn’t being met; found via competitive/industry research. Create a portion of the website that is very user focused and “free” in a sense that it’s not trying to “sell sell sell.” The likelihood you’ll get a section of this links is a lot higher and within section, throw in some internal links in creative/useful ways to push users to those product pages, and send signals to those product pages too.