Link Building
In my opinion link building is a “sleeping SEO technique” by this I mean that realistically speaking there is very little you can do in this area – if you want to play by the rules.
I affirmed this belief recently whilst thinking about a link building strategy for Shareworld – I was trying to build a list of interested sites in similar fields to Shareworld that I could contact with the goal of exchanging links.
After browsing 10 – 15 sites and not finding any that I would really like to send visitors too, I decided it was a waste of time – none of the sites I came across would have been any interest to our visitors – and even if they were, we would be sending visitors to the competition.
Google has made it quite clear in various publications that it does not condone these sort of link building techniques, see a few examples:
There are many more examples, and you can read into these however you want, but at the end of the day, Google are trying to get an unbiased opinion of how other sites rate your site in terms of useful content – they don’t glean this from link exchanges – because any site will exchange links with you they think there is a benefit in it for them. Their rating system is based on sites that freely link to another site BECAUSE there is useful information there.
Granted, if you exchange links with every site you can find, and you create a link directory so out-going links are buried deep within your site, and you pay for links in order to get a higher PageRank, then you probably WILL get more traffic – initially.
But then in a few months you will wonder why your traffic is so erratic – its because Google are constantly trying to sniff out the techniques you have used, and discount them.
It also made me think about what links pages are actually for – to provide additional resources to your visitors.
And about what links in general are for – to connect the Internet.
So if you find a site that really would be useful to your visitors – and covers something you don’t, would you really hide it from your visitors just because the site doesn’t link back to you? No.
From my recent experiences i have gleaned the following:
- If a site is worth linking to, link to it – ask for a link in return – but don’t make this a decider on whether you publish the link – this is how the Internet SHOULD be, and if you set a good example, you never know, people might do the same to you – and aside from anything else, when your site comes up in the “came from” stats, you WILL get noticed!!
- If your writing an article, do some research and include relevent links throughout the article – once again, you WILL get noticed by the sites you link to, and it will make for a much more comprehensive article.
Follow these tactics and you never know – you might find that Google favors your site even more for taking an ethical approach to SEO/Web Publishing.
As a prime example, Shareworld follows the rules above – ALL of our links are to sites we think will be of interest to our visitors – 2 years ago we decided on this outlook, and removed all the links we had incurred from link exchanges. Our Page-rank dropped from 3 to zero, but we have been steadily growing ever since – and as of the date of publishing this article, we are receiving over 6000 visitors per month!
The only aggressive link building strategy I do condone is participating on other sites – write posts, articles and answer questions about your topic – this will get you links and also increase your traffic.
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