Keeping track of the link profiles of inspirational websites provides me with a lot of new link-building ideas. In many cases I can reverse engineer the factors that made them successful so I can create new strategies based on those. I rarely get a "Why didn’t I think of that?" feeling, but the following example definitely made me jealous.
A new regulation in the European Union demanded websites to ask user permission for the use of tracking cookies and many sites had a hard time defining their cookie policy. A product review website, with no prior relevance to the cookie topic, added a section with "cookie deletion instructions" and they aided pre-selected sites in simplifying their cookie text. A great selection of Dutch authority websites ended up linking to their instructions and the site currently ranks for great keyword combinations.
Cookie Policies
Cookie policy pages are linked from many pages within a website and often receive a lot of link value. This is often a waste of link value because they don’t contain any important keywords you might want to rank for. I truly commend the idea that this page can be used for link-building because almost every site has one.
The information on the review site was quite simple. "What are cookies?", "Removing cookies," and "Disabling cookies" were addressed with separate pages containing surprisingly limited instructions. The steps for just a few Windows desktop browsers were given, so I probably need to create a better version containing the phone, pad, and OSX settings to hijack this strategy from the original target site.
Related articles
The cookie policy text on many linking websites is quite similar and in some cases it was exact duplicate content. This was the only weakness in the execution of this link-building strategy. The sites either all copied the same source or they were provided with the same text by someone. Because I’ve mainly seen authority websites involved I think the latter.
Great Links
In the link profile of www.consumentenbond.nl you’ll find a lot of source URLs containing the word "cookie." All these links were attracted with the same strategy. Even if you don’t understand any Dutch, you can easily see that the list contains universities, government organizations, insurance companies, charity, television/radio stations, large retailers, and many more authority sites. Here are just a few examples:
Universities (Dutch versions, because some English versions linked to Aboutcookies.org):
Local governments (more than 60 occurrences):
Insurance companies:
… and many more examples. Use Majestic.com, Ahrefs.com, or Moz.com OSE to discover what links you would be jealous of.
What Can We Learn?
This is a great example of out-of-the-box link-building. It is a mindset and not just a strategy. Both Aboutcookies.org and Consumentenbond did a great job. In many cases it seems pure luck or ignorance that activities like these attract a lot of links. I only hope that the link acquisition was as intentional as it seemed, but either way a great example. I will probably wait for a future chance to do something like this, but mimicking the strategy will probably still work in many countries. Good luck!