CASE: Link-Building in Japan

Link building, acquiring a “quality” link from other websites to your website with “related” anchor text is one of the important SEO practices to increase traffic to your website.

This is no different in Japanese SEO best practice, and if you have Japanese content that wanted to be reached from Japanese audience / and ranked in Japanese search engine with Japanese query if you want to get links from quality Japanese website.

Here we explain that one of our case of link building campaign we’ve been doing for one of Internet Service Company based on the UK which just launched their Japanese website.

For the link building outreach in Japan, I have explained step-by-step process here. Japanese Link Building Outreach – How to acquire backlinks from Japanse sites

Challenge

One of the challenges of this client link building is mainly a language barrier to obtain quality links from the Japanese website.

It was hard for them to understand which website has related topics for their service and what should be the appropriate anchor text, moreover, it almost impossible to outreach webmasters in Japanese.

PBN and Link Farm in Japan

Some might consider building PBN to get links to their website. We certainly do not recommend doing it. 

It has long been said that link quality is important for SEO and it is expected that the quality of links will become even more and more strict in the future.

Although PBN and Link Farm are not widely used in Japan, link quality will become more important in future SEO measures.

Related article: Does PBN (Private Blog Network) link building work in Japan?

Solution

Here we’ve started building links from a variety of websites using the below strategies.

Preparation: Create quality content that people wants to share

Needless to say, getting out the quality content (ideally a few pages) is crucial for people want to link that page.

Before starting a link building we have made 3 well-written references like pages, which are something like “Complete Guides to ~“, “TOP 100 ~ resources“, or “Unknown Facts about ~“.

Online Forum or Web 2.0

Although Web 2.0 or online forum is a bit outdated, it is still somewhat effective to spread words of your service and letting people know and luckily obtain do-follow links.

There is a couple of main Japanese version of Quora type of online question-and-answer website which is very active in Japan. 

For example below are;

• Yahoo Chiebukuro (“Yahoo!知恵袋”)
• Hatsugenkomachi (“発言小町”)
• OKWave

These Q&A sites are very active and answers that are well explained to questions will be automatically copied to their related services site as well.

Therefore, finding a related question and actively answering well might look self-made link building, but has great potential to spread around all other websites too, and some of these are do-follows quality links.

Below is the example of we’ve answered the related question. The original Q&A site was no-follow links but that answered was automatically copied to other sites and got couple do-follow links from them.

Outreach

Outreach to webmasters to ask to link your website is one of the key link building practices. 

We craft made personal emails for every webmaster and contact dozens that satisfied below requirements;

• Related topics website
• Ahref Domain Rate 20 over
• No spammy, well-organized website

The things we asked for this webmaster is simply asked or negociate to share our site with our prepared anchor text, designated links, and of course do-follow links

We made contact list by standard technic like;

• Someone already mentioned about your service but no links
• Obtaining from your competitor’s backlinks
• A simple search in related topics

For more details about outreach link building, please see Japanese Link Building Outreach – How to acquire backlinks from Japanse sites

Free Trial Reviews / Affiliate

For products or services which offers free sample or free trial, the trial request and review article is very famous in Japan.

Usually, if the webmaster is getting products or services for free, they do not expect any paid reward.

We have approached a couple of reviews in related topics and ask if they want to write a review article about client service in exchange of free sample with do-follow links, which did certainly give us good amounts of quality links to the client website and build a great online presence in Japan as well.

Also, if the client service has some sort of affiliate or referral program, it is always good to announce that too related topic webmasters to get links and also potential traffic.

Results

We have start building links using the above approaches and we did it constantly. We do not recommend a massive link increase in the short term, and we are aiming to get 3 ~ 5 quality links per week.

After a couple of months, we have obtained great numbers of links from a quality website with white and natural ways and it still keeps increasing even today.

It is needless to say that it impacts well in the client’s Japanese site’s search ranking and traffics in Japan.