Pillow Link Guide: What are they? How to build them?

Pillow link building doesn’t get nearly as much love as it deserves, but it is one of the best link building strategies for a new website looking to diversify its backlink profile. 

Sometimes, when you build links manually, your link profile can appear unnatural to Google. 

This might be because most of your links are using keyword-optimized anchor text, or maybe they’re all dofollow links, or perhaps they’re all pointing to the same pages. 

Regardless of the reason, you can use pillow link building to build a more varied link profile that looks far more natural in the eyes of Google. 

Ok, so what is pillow link building? 

Essentially, a pillow link building strategy is one that seeks to diversify a backlink profile. 

It is a helpful tactic if you have a preponderance of one type of link (e.g., all branded anchor home page links from HARO). 

Pillow links are usually not the highest-value links in terms of Domain Authority (in fact, they probably won’t increase your domain authority at all). 

And while they are easy-to-target, low-hanging fruit, they are the kinds of links that most domains are going to have and, therefore, a fundamental part of your link building strategy. 

When would you build pillow links?

Let’s say you have a new site that you’ve been building strictly guest post links to. 

You want to maximize the amount of link juice you get from these guest blog posts, so you add in keyword-optimized anchor text linking to your main money page.

Other than the keyword-optimized anchor text–which Google doesn’t like if you do it too often–this would be a good link that will help your ranking. 

The issue arises when this is the only kind of link you are building. Google actually warns against doing large-scale guest posting campaigns that use keyword-rich anchor text. 

In this case, you could use pillow link building to help diversify your overall backlink profile, building white hat links that: 

• Include nofollow links
• Point to different pages on your website 
• Don’t use exact-match keywords in your anchor text
• Come from social media profiles

When pillow link building makes sense

You can use pillow link building tactics before, during and after your main link building campaign, and there are pros and cons to all of them. 

Before building links

I’ve seen site site owners build their pillow links before they do any other kind of link building. 

If you build pillow links while your site is still new, you make sure that you have a strong base of links moving forward that helps ensure Google doesn’t view your site as unnatural later on. The Google algorithm will see that you exist, you send powerful social signals and could also generate referral traffic in the process. 

During a link building campaign 

I like pillow link building because there is no reason you can’t do it while carrying out your main day-to-day link building campaign–HARO, guest posting, skyscraper, etc.

At the end of the day, pillow links can be powerful links that help your site, so why avoid building them when the opportunity is there? 

After a link building campaign

Sometimes people leave the pillow link building until they have already done their main link building in order to fix any issues with their site. 

You might find pillow link building more useful once you have diagnosed any potential backlink profile issues (like Too much over-optimized anchor text). 

The main reasons people build pillow links

Usually, link builders are building pillow links in order to 1) improve their anchor text ration 2) improve their nofollow-dofollow link diversification and 3) diversify the pages that external links are pointing to. 

Anchor text ratio

Anchor text is the text that you attach a hyperlink to so that when someone clicks on it, it takes them to that target page. 

Earlier on in the article I mentioned “white hat links” and added a hyperlink to the text: 

That hyperlink takes you to a blog article I have published on white hat links/link building. When someone clicks on this link, they expect to be taken to a resource that deals with white hat links/white hat link building, and that is what they get. 

Using good, relevant anchor text can help a target page rank for the keyword you are trying to rank for. 

This is because it lets the Google algorithm know what that page is about. 

Because your anchor text impacts search ranking, a lot of SEOs prefer to use keyword-optimized text whenever possible. 

Doing this from time to time can be good for your SEO, but overdoing it can send spam signals to Google and have the opposite effect. 

The bottom line is that if you’ve built backlinks naturally, you will almost certainly have a variety of different anchor text. Some of the anchor text you might have control over yourself, while other anchor texts are going to be chosen by the referring domain. 

In addition to keyword-optimized anchor text, you will also have: 

• Branded anchor text (e.g., dofollow.io. This is especially common with HARO link building)
• Naked URL anchor text–where the link is attached to the URL 
• Title anchor–links that are attached to the title of the target page
• Other anchor types–links in non-related words or phrases

When you start building pillow links, you can use different types of anchors so that you are diversifying your backlink profile, making it look more natural. 

You can use regular links for your high-value anchors that link to your main money pages and your pillow links for everything that’s unoptimized. 

Pillow link building to improve your ratio of dofollow-nofollow links

Dofollow links, of course, confer the most link juice because they are an unequivocal trust signal from the referring domain. 

For this reason, new link builders that don’t fully appreciate the importance of a diversified backlink profile can end up pursuing dofollow links rather single-mindedly. 

When your website or even a particular page has only dofollow backlinks pointing to it, however, it can be an issue. 

It is natural for a website, over time, to attract different kinds of links–both nofollow pillow links and dofollow links. Here’s an article from Search Engine Journal that has accumulated a bunch of links since publishing:

I’ve circled the 86% dofollow link ratio is has (what’d you’d expect, for SEJ, honestly). 

Pillow link building to improve target page diversification

If, when doing a backlink profile audit, you find that the majority of your links are pointing to the same info or money page on your website, then your domain’s overall backlink profile will probably appear unnatural to Google. 

Pillow links can be a great way to build links to pages that you aren’t targeting with your everyday link building campaign. 

Building pillow links to these other pages can help ensure you have links pointing all over your domain. 

This is especially important if you have a disproportionate number of links from guest posts. 

Search engines also like to see that you have links from directories, forums, blog comments and social sites in your link profile. 

Using pillow links to fix a backlink profile

The link building process can be messy, and if you aren’t orchestrating everything carefully, you can end up with a sub-par profile. 

If all your links are of a certain type–all nofollow forum links, all guest posts, etc.--you need more links of various types to balance things out. 

The good news is that you can use pillow links to fix the issues. First, you need to know where your problems lie. 

To do this, have a look at the link profile of pages that rank for your target keywords and make sure your link profile is similar. 

You can use Ahrefs to find out the kind of backlinks that a page has and see things like:

• The anchor text that is used to link to a specific page
• The number and ratio of dofollow and nofollow links 

For instance, you might consider a search term like “best hiking boots for wide feet.” The top-ranking site on the search engine results page belongs to a domain called footwearnews.com. 

If you click on the overview of this page in the Ahrefs chrome extension, you can see that it has 6 backlinks, one-third of which are dofollow. 

In terms of the anchor text beings used, three are exact match, one is a naked URL and one doesn’t have any text at all. 

By checking the top posts that rank for this keyword, you will have a better idea of the link profile of all the pages ranking for this keyword. 

Following that, you can find out where your issues lie and then set about fixing them with some strategic pillow links. 

Different types of pillow links

Pillow links are usually those you can build fast with little to no upfront cost or effort required. Below are some of the most common ways to build pillow backlinks. 

Social links

Social links–i.e., backlinks from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, etc.--are an important part of any backlink profile. They’re also an increasingly important part of traffic diversification in the midst of massive, damaging Google core updates. 

They are easy to build, and there are plenty of platforms you can use to generate good social signals. 

You can get started by creating profiles for your website and business on popular platforms. Make sure you add a homepage URL to these profiles. 

Each time someone shares one of your posts on these platforms, you build powerful social signals. 

Below is an example taken from dofollow’s Facebook profile: 

You can see that we have a link to our homepage that is front and center. 

Google is likely not going to give you much of a boost just because you have a social profile. 

But they are probably more likely to rank your website if you do have social profiles because they communicate trust and legitimacy. 

It’s even better if you can actively add and share posts on a regular basis on all your social profiles. 

Additional benefits of social profiles

In addition to being a good opportunity for link pillowing and sending social signals, establishing a presence on social media comes with other benefits for your website as well. 

Having your social profiles well established allows you to claim your brand name and make sure that no one else tries to go after it. 

You can also use your social profiles as a way to connect and network with other people in your niche, opening up opportunities for relationship-based link building. 

Someone who stumbles upon and likes your social profile might be more interested in working with you–providing you with a guest blog post opportunity. 

Blog comments

Another good way to create good pillow links for your site is to build blog comments. 

You can use blog comments to drop links to your website and its pages, but you have to be strategic about it. 

Black hat link builders often use automation software to spam blog comment sections with links, which both Google and other site owners hate. 

The way you build blog comment links is to search for keywords that are related to the page on your site you are trying to build links to and see which of the top-ranked articles have comment boxes. 

You can then drop comments on all of the posts that let you. Usually, the objective is to include a link back to your target page in these comment sections, which will be given a nofollow tag by default (if it’s even allowed to remain).

Often, moderators get rid of comments with links as a matter of course, or automatically have them flagged as spam to make dealing with comment spam easier. 

You have to put some effort into a blog comment so that it doesn't just seem like you’re chasing an easy pillow link. I like how this link is actually contextual and not just the kind of spam that you probably see in your inbox on a daily basis. 

Directory backlinks

Directories can be another good way to build solid pillow links. The goal is to find specific sites in your niche, not just any old directories. 

If you are a local business, there are very often directories and citation pages that list all of the businesses in a particular industry in a region. 

For example, here is the page for a financial advisor in North Carolina hosted on a directory site called “Financial Services Directory.”

If you scroll down, there’s a dofollow link to this company’s website: 

Directory links don’t have a big impact on your SEO, but they are good for diversifying link profiles and can also drive traffic to your site and improve your brand awareness.

There are two kinds of directories: 1) general directories that allow any site, in any niche, to add their site/link (e.g., Blogorama, About Us, Best of the Web).

And then, there are niche-specific directories that only allow a certain type of website–Yelp for local businesses and restaurants, G2 for business software, etc.

If you’re interested in adding your website to web directories, Search Engine Journal has created a great resource that contains 21 different options for you. 

Why directories are helpful

Niche directories are great ways to add pillow links to link profiles. 

They are also a good way to get some referral traffic and increase your brand recognition, especially if you’re a service-based business. 

Blogging sites

When I talk about blogging sites, what I’m referring to are platforms like Medium and Quora, which allow anyone to sign up and write blog posts. 

In addition to these two, there is also: 

• HubPages
• Vocal
• Newsbreak
• Indie Hackers
• Hacker Noon

The nice thing about using these sites for pillow link building is that you have total control over anchor text, target page and what you write. 

These types of platforms can be a great way to send pillow links to your inner pages, as well as important sources of referral traffic. Google Analytics shows you how much referral traffic you get.

If you write something that gets picked up and widely shared, it might result in thousands of people visiting your website. 

Forum links 

This is one of those link building ideas that isn’t as popular or influential as it uses to be, but there are still a lot of niche forums out there that are capable of providing good, niche-relevant links, when done right. 

The catch

The catch with forum links, however, is that you have to be quite careful how you do it. 

Google doesn’t like overly optimized anchor text in forum profiles and comments because a lot of spammers do this. 

Forums are also acutely aware of any link builders in their midst, and they will call you out, often with a lot of hostility, if your thinly-veiled pillow link building attempt is not offering any value. 

Pillow links are a legitimate part of any SEO strategy

A site’s ranking comes down to a lot of things, but authoritative niche relevant backlinks are undoubtedly one of them. 

The trick is to make sure that your backlink profile reflects a wide range of different link types. Too many of one kind of links–dofollow links from guest posting, branded anchor text links from HARO, keyword-optimized sponsored links to your money pages–and Google may conclude that your link profile is not “natural.” 

Pillow links can be a great way to provide some diversity and depth to a link profile that you might have either forgotten about while building links or that simply took shape in a certain way over time.