Accomplished SEO agencies and self-taught SEO-minded businesses both understand the value of link building. In fact, MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report concluded that link building is a very effective SEO technique for use by small, medium and large organizations alike. The verdict is that link building accounts for nearly half, 41% to 47%, of the total effectiveness of 10 top SEO tactics, only three of which produce more results than link building. So, link building is indeed effective, but is it here to stay? A brief look at its history is in order.

The Past

Rise of the Spammers

In the “good” old days, everyone could upload content to lists and directories, and the links flooded in. Search engine spiders crawled HTML code and occult ranking algorithms determined page worth. Webmasters purchased upgraded packages from host providers to handle the increased traffic and everybody was happy.

Enter the spammers of the late 1990s: thousands of tiny keywords per page that were the same color as the background, stuffing meta tags, page titles and marquees with keywords, and numerous other tricks. Top search results were flooded with irrelevant or objectionable material.

Search engineers at Google, Yahoo and other companies devised methods of ending the flood of spam in their respective indices, cleaning up search results pages and making search more relevant in the process. Then, they set their sights on link building tactics. This focus has only intensified over the years.

Shifting Attack Vectors

Focus eventually shifted from lists and directories to link exchanging – a way for honest webmasters to link with other relevant and related websites. The spammers, however, upped the ante in 1999 with link farming and spamdexing, exploiting the Inktomi search engine’s dependency on the popularity of links. Spammers did this until updated search algorithms took into account the “neighborhoods” of these spamdexers, monitoring spammers’ activity for evidence of abuse. Updated algorithms punished who they caught.

The Present

PageRank

PageRank, introduced in 1998, was incredibly controversial because of its focus on “link weight,” which is a method of assigning value to a link based more on its perceived quality. PageRank remains a bit controversial due to this and other reasons. Like it or not, we must live with PageRank – probably well into the foreseeable future.

Importance of Social Media Links

Matt Cutts stated in a January 2010 YouTube video that Google treats social media links the same as links from standard domains like .gov and .edu. However, Google only assigns PageRank when it’s able to fetch the page a link points to. Links to private Facebook pages cannot flow PageRank, and spiders cannot crawl those pages to determine relevance.

The Future

Importance and Velocity

The web’s landscape is changing. With alterations like clustering, XML feeds, and indexing content other than HTML, link building campaigns will have to focus even more on importance and velocity. Importance, because links must be appealing enough to invite a click. Velocity, because staying fresh with updated links is becoming more important.

Link building is not only here to stay, but will increase in importance as search results focus more and more on personalization and the links that people share within social networks. In addition, many people are thinking about devising new ways to continue link building in the future, using new tools and ideas to streamline the process and adapt to the changing web.

About Jordan Metts

As long as he can remember, Jordan Metts has only wanted one thing: to share his thoughts with other people through writing. As a professional writer, blogger, and provider of SEO services, Jordan spends most of his time helping other companies and webmasters improve their online presence and accessibility to potential readers.

The Bad: Common “Black Hat” Practices

Despite the many anti-spam ordinances that have been made by search engine figureheads such as Google’s Matt Cutts, there are still several unethical, black hat techniques used by search marketers to bolster the performance of their clients’ websites. Unfortunately, search engines are not quite to the point where all of these methods are automatically caught and penalized and they rely heavily on human reporting, but this doesn’t mean that they have not drastically improved over the years. Below are some of the most common black hat practices still in use:

• Keyword Stuffing – A common attribute to many spam sites is that they “stuffed” with the same keywords over and over. In one of our recent consultations with Jonathan Jonas of Sober.com, we found that his competition had words such as “addiction” as many as 150 times on a single page that only contained around 800 words. The goal here is to make search engines think that the page is extremely relevant to the word “addiction”, when in actuality the information is more or less useless.
• Invisible/Hidden Text – If you’ve ever looked at the footer or source code of a website, you may have seen text that was the same color as the background, or hidden from view with CSS. This text is simply meant to hide what would otherwise hinder the user experience, but to trick the search engines into thinking there is more relevant content on the page than there really is. For the most part, search engines are fairly adept at detecting this and penalize heavily for it, often banning the sites from indexation.
• Link Building Bots/Programs – We’ve mentioned before that inbound links should take quality as a priority over quantity, but having a plethora of inbound links from thousands of different domains can be effective in some scenarios. Link building programs or bots often post generic, anchor text optimized comments and links on blogs or automate the submission of a website to thousands of low-quality directories in an effort to garner rankings for a targeted keyword. While this used to be a way to obtain first page Google rankings in a matter of days, there are now penalties in place for websites that see huge bursts in inbound links from non-credible sources. You can use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see how many incoming links there are to your site and see if your SEO company is using a program to build links, rather than doing so manually.
• Doorway Pages and Websites – Pages on a website that are stuffed with certain keywords but not visible to users are known as “doorway pages”. The objective is to have search engines pick up on these “highly relevant” pages and drive traffic to them, even if they provide no real context to the site they are on. Using the example of “addictions” we mentioned above, the site in question had a doorway page for each type of addiction simply for the purposes of tricking the search engines. This concept applies to entire websites or website networks as well, where the site provides no real content of value and simply links back to a parent site. It is important to check your website Analytics so that you can see where you traffic is coming from. If you notice there are a several obscure, spam-oriented sites sending you traffic, you might want to address your SEO company.

The Good: Common “White Hat” Practices

Now that you know what to look out for when it comes to shady SEO practices, you should know the methods by which an ethical SEO company will improve your website’s performance. Note the difference in how ethical SEO methods prioritizes organization, research and quality over spam and quantity.

• On-Page Optimization – We recently wrote an article that describes how you can properly research and organize information on your site to be the most search engine friendly, but the overall goal of on-page optimization is to appropriately target specific keywords because they apply to your brand and your target audience, NOT just to garner traffic. A targeted audience that arrives at a well designed, cleanly organized website is much more likely to convert (purchase, signup, etc.) from you than bulk traffic who arrived from some obscure corner of the internet.
• Unique Content Creation – One of the most central ways to getting targeted traffic is creating content that will appeal to your target audience. Blogging, videos, podcasts, and tweets are all extremely important when it comes to attracting people interested in your product or service and helping search engines to determine a clear theme for your website. Neglecting other factors, if your site has 200 pages in total all discussing different types of running shoes, new running shoe product lines, video promotions and other relevant content, it is going to rank higher for the related topics than a site that has 40 completely different topics. Furthermore, creating content on your topic allows you to demonstrate that you are an expert within your niche and therefore are likely to be referred to by your visitors.
• Natural Link Building – While creating unique content may result in a multitude of natural inbound links, ethical SEO campaigns often require you to work to obtain the links manually. Natural links are varied from several different sources and are not all optimized with certain keywords that you are targeting. Natural link building is the result of good networking with other webmasters, bloggers, and journalists in your industry that want to link to you because you’re an authority. Moreover, the goal of these links is to be placed on sites that have the most authority and credibility with search engines already so that you are associated with them, rather than a network of spam blogs. You can find a good resource on beginner’s link building here on our blog.

Ethical SEO and Future-Proofing Your Campaign

While search engine algorithms can and do change on a regular basis, those that have employed ethical SEO methods generally have very little to fear when it comes to their rankings and overall campaign performance. We and other SEOs have seen a multitude of documented cases where websites go from front page rankings to page 5 rankings (or even de-indexation) overnight, all as a result of their shady methods being discovered. Unfortunately, in many cases the company that is suffering the loss did not realize that their SEO firm had employed such methods, which is why it is important to read the aforementioned list of black hat SEO techniques.

Just as you wouldn’t build a physical storefront with shoddy materials that are forbidden by the building code, you don’t develop an SEO campaign with shoddy practices. The last thing a company needs to do is invest a large sum of money in development, only to have to pay another contractor to rebuild everything once the “building inspector” (Google) comes by and closes the “store” (your website) down.

The central reason that ethical or “white hat” SEO practices are endorsed and advocated by search engines is that it allows the content on the web to be organized and identified in the best possible manner, which supports their main objective. There will always be those that attempt to “cheat the system” by tricking the search engines, but over the course of time these methods have and will continue to be identified, brushing away the spam from search results and uncovering the truly helpful, quality content.

Quality Over Quantity

A common misconception for people marketing their website is that having more links on other websites pointing to yours makes you more prominent. When approaching link building, you need to have the mindset that it is just like real life networking with other people. The efficacy of relevant, reputable sources noting that you too are a credible organization is extremely high both on the web and off. For example, if you own a restaurant and you have a few friends who say your food is great, that’s wonderful, but it isn’t as nearly as powerful as if you had Emeril Lagasse give you an raving review. Having a single high quality link to your site is much more valuable to both users and search engines than if you have several unestablished websites linking to you.

High quality references make the best inbound links

Avoid “Bad Neighborhoods”

While quality links from reputable sites are important, it is equally important to avoid having your links in “bad neighborhoods” or sites that contain spam on them. In another real world example, let’s assume that you see a group of people and it consists of a drug dealer, a bookie, a prostitute, a thug, and a chef. While the chef is innocent enough on his own, his association with the shady characters in the group destroys his credibility and gives him a negative connotation – this concept applies for links on the web as well!

That sausage seems oddly suspicious...

You want your inbound links to be around other credible, reputable links rather than be associated with spam by both users and search engines.

Start with Business Directories

Now that you understand some of the core fundamentals of link building, you can begin conscientiously placing you links out on the web. Listing your business in credible business directories is a wonderful foundation for inbound links to your website. However, understand that there are a lot of directories out there that require payment for a link and very few of them are actually worth the money you spend. Search engines such as Google actually look at several factors when determining the worth of a link from a business directory and this excellent video from Matt Cutts shows how Google evaluates business directories:

Examples of Credible Business Directories

Alexa | Best of the Web | Better Business Bureau | Business.com Directory | DMOZ Open Directory Project | Google Business Directory | Google Local Business Center | InCrawler | Yahoo! Directory | Yellowpages | Superpages

Notice that the above directories are all highly notable, reputable directories that are deeply categorized so that your website can be associated with others similar to you and yield a great amount of relevant traffic.

Blogging and Customer Service

Keeping an up-to-date blog with information about your company, your service and your industry is an excellent way to display your authority and authenticity. As a startup company, you need to demonstrate that you are highly knowledgeable about your field and keep an open line of communication to demonstrate you are willing to provide excellent customer service. “Customer service on a blog, what?”

Most people will tell you that the primary function of blogging for a company is to help drive traffic and to create resource material that people want to read about, which is true and we could talk ad nauseum about that like so many others have, but as a startup you need to focus on building your brand and proving that you are writing for and listening to your audience. Your focus should be on impressing the people that comment and ask questions by giving them well constructed responses and making them know that you care. People are loyal to the company that gives the best customer service, not the one with the flashiest or most expensive product. Continue a high standard of customer service by answering questions on other blogs in your industry and not only will people visit your site as a result, but you’re building quality inbound links at the same time!

Engage in Social Media

By properly utilizing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Technorati and any other widely used social media site, your brand and your links can be easily seen by hundreds if not thousands of people right from the start. As you grow your presence and become a well known figure in your community and industry, people will undoubtedly begin to retweet your posts, post about you on their blogs and support your company as a whole. Success in social media is defined by the amount of user engagement you have and this is invaluable when it comes to building inbound links.

The explosive growth of your content going viral or the steady growth of tens, hundreds and even thousands of people talking about you consistently is incredibly powerful. Focus on providing excellent customer service with great, authoritative content and you will be well on your way to a highly successful link building campaign.

Further Reading on Link Building

• What is Link Building?
• How Link Building Has Changed
• Natural Link Building Practices