Link building, the art of getting valuable content in the hands of the web users. It’s certainly an art for many, a career for others and of course a nightmare for the rest of the pack. You can try to fool yourself, but you’ll never fool the algorithm.
Take for example your childhood. Your mother told you not to eat too many sweets that day, otherwise you might not get any at all. What did you do? You patiently waited for the air to clear, and then get your sweets. It could have happened right after lunch, or dinner. The point I’m trying to make is that with link building it’s exactly the same.
You build links, and if you hurry (which, most search engines don’t advise for), you get what you asked for. Quick results, with no telling about the future. It’s one of the many reasons why I moved away from traditional link building, and instead I’m trying to focus upon branding and establishing myself as someone who knows what he is doing.
You can be the judge of that.
We’ve just seen an official statement from Google web spam team; blogging for SEO purposes is dead. This marks the end of an era in link building industry, that many took advantage of – and were able to cash in nicely, some made enough money to last them a lifetime. Others will suffer greatly, potentially for a lifetime.
I’ve seen a lot of link building techniques, many of which have been truly blackhat. I’ve seen big money come and go by using these methods of building quick and easy links. I’ve seen (including; myself) people fail miserably, I’ve seen influential companies and bloggers get away with the most absurd methods of gaining popularity.
Those who had money to back them up, were able to stick around and continue their way with a clean record. Others, gave up and moved away from the industry as a whole.
We don’t want these sad stories, we’ve got our own story to make. We’ve got to learn that some link building ways are simply not meant to be.
Related: Top 10 Free Online Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners
I have tried to fool myself numerous times, but I think the fact that you’ve once made that mistake is where you really learn from it.
Buying Links from Fiverr
This is probably at the moment, the hottest place for getting links for many people. It’s cheap, and it’s a very quick service. What you might not realize is that trying to tell yourself everything is going to be fine is not really going to change the way Google’s or any other search engines algorithm works.
I’ve tried Fiverr, I bought a couple of links to see what it’s all about. I got my order delivered in less than a day, the links that I received on a couple of blogs – they were below low quality to say the least. I could see very well how many other people were purchasing these services, as one of the blogrolls had over a 100 links on it.
The math is simple, 100 x $5 = $500. It’s a nice profit for the seller, no doubt, but you’re literally paying $5 to have your site alienated by search engines.
Automated Link Building Tools
I don’t even know from which end to begin, there are so many automated SEO tools out there, and they all guarantee the same results, just as quickly as the tool before. I guess it comes down to the user interface by the end of it. lol
The first few that came to my mind were Market Samurai, SENuke, ScrapeBox and xRumer.
You have to understand that these tools do work, and they do deliver results. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times, and it still happens to this day. The thing you should GRASP is the fact that you’ll eventually get penalized, no matter what. It might take for the algorithm longer to figure out who you are, but it will do it eventually… for the simple fact that there are THOUSANDS of people using overusing these tools.
These tools can be, used for good purposes, mostly for things like scraping websites, if for example – you’d like to take part in the 200 Email Outreach program. I can understand how useful these tools can be for purposes like that, everything else is just pure spam created by pushing some buttons.
No real interaction, no real emotion, nothing. Just spam.
3 Way Links (Link Site -> Link Site 2 -> Your Site)
This method of creating backlinks used to work really well for some internet marketers that realized it can be done, it took a long time (3-4 years?) for search engines to finally have algorithms implemented and put in place to prevent people from blatantly creating sites that are used only for linking purposes.
These days, pretty much only one way links are accepted as good links.
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Algorithms aren’t getting more stupid, they’re becoming intelligent, to say the least. This method of building links is going to get you swiped off from the search results rather quickly. Avoid it at all costs.
Link Exchange
The days of asking webmasters and other bloggers to help you by linking back to your website is over. It’s pretty much useless and pointless to even ask someone to exchange links with you, for the simple reason that you should instead be focusing upon building a brand.
Links that come directly from articles that are relevant to your content have tens of times more value that having your link on every single page from a website you’ve exchanged links with. You can check out this post to see why link exchanging was already a bad idea back in 2009.
Focus on building great content and promoting it to people who share the same interests as you do.
Guest Blogging
I mentioned it above, at the very beginning of the post, that guest blogging is now officially going to decline – if you’re in it for the links, not the long-term benefits.
I’m of course talking about doing guest blogging only for the sake of having a link, and not focusing upon delivering great and relevant content to the website that has given you the permission to post for them, which as we all can guess – is only going to become harder after the cold hard news hit us.
I’d say that instead of trying to build links through guest blogging, try to build authority and maybe even try the approach of promoting your social media accounts. I’m quite confident that it’s going to be the route that many are going to take, and I can only see good things happen to those people.
5 Link Building Techniques You Should Avoid
We are entering the era where it’s all about branding yourself and your business. Head over to Forbes for some juicy secrets about branding.
The way of branding things online – it’s the same as having a personality. Your blog or business, whatever it is that you operate – it needs to be authentic and speak up for itself.
For too long, we took every website online seriously and didn’t even realize it’s people trying to make quick money and get away as soon as possible.
This is why I advise not to build links with bad techniques, but instead focus on building something that people are going to love and will want to return back to.
What do you think?