Everything You Need to Know
(About Link Building)
If you’ve read the Link Building page on this site and still have questions, you’ve come to the right place! The fact is that link building can be a complex and even controversial topic in the SEO community… wait, I see a hand raised already… let’s get started!
“Why is link building controversial?”
Link building is controversial because SEO’s have utilized link building over the years to game and manipulate Google’s algorithm. The amount of links pointing to your site (and the sites doing the pointing) has always been an extremely powerful ranking factor.
It used to be that SEOs would create thousands of links to quickly gain site authority for clients’ websites. The links used in those days could come from anywhere— websites with completely different subject matter, forums and user submitted content communities, and even websites created solely to house hundreds of thousands of links.
Spammy links were so powerful that search engines made deemphasizing artificial link building a top priority for algorithm changes and refinement. As Google updates rolled out over the years, many of the same techniques used to gain ranking power began to cause penalties that damaged rankings and lowered visitor numbers.
You might think that means link building no longer works to increase your SERP rankings, but you would be DEAD WRONG! 😠 The fact is that SEOs still value link building as one of the most important ways to increase keyword rankings.
So what’s changed? In short, link building has become more difficult. SEOs must now be careful that the links they create have a reason to exist. That means no links from sites with different subject matter, no links from link farms, and no spammy links in forum signatures!
“Just how sensitive is Google about penalizing artificial links?”
Now for some good news! The fact is that Google simply cannot be overly careful about links. Why? The answer is Black Hat SEO.
Let’s turn back the clock again to the days just after Google implemented its new penalties for artificial link building. Savvy and devious SEOs had a fiendish idea. If Google penalized spammy links, why not create those same thousands of spammy links and point them at COMPETITOR sites instead?
Now Google had a new problem. Its link penalties were being weaponized by Black Hat SEOs— yeehaw!
So what did Google do? It rolled back the penalties.
Today, you can still be penalized for spammy links, but you would need to expend serious time and energy TRYING to be spammy to receive one of those penalties! We’re talking about hard work!
The fact is that to this very day SEO marketers utilize link farms and spammy links as a marketing tactic to try to get you to buy link building services! (Sounds weird, right? Welcome to the wild world of bot based marketing.) Whether you realize it or not, there are probably 30 or 40 spammy links pointing to your website right now, built by bots without your knowledge or consent!
Fortunately for us all, the average effect of a spammy link is now approximately nada. 30, 40, or even 100 spammy links are neither good nor bad. If I had to guess, I might even say that possibly… within a certain limit… if you want to be specific… those spammy links might actually be positive signs that your website is on the radar! But that’s a subject for SEO philosophers and dreamers— a poetic SEO thought experiment beyond the scope of our business-like article today.
“Can you take back a link once it’s been built?”
This is an easy one. Yes! You can “disavow” one link or ten thousand links. But Google will give you a warning screen before you do it! Google’s warning screen suggestion is that you shouldn’t disavow a link unless you’ve been explicitly notified that you’ve been penalized. (Yes, Google will notify you in Search Console if you’ve been manually penalized! That’s one less thing to worry about.)
In my career I’ve disavowed a few links anyway. I feel okay doing this if the link is plainly spammy or if a domain links to your website thousands of times. Your mileage may vary.
“Where do links Accuracy SEO builds come from?”
Much like the rest of SEO, link building can scale way up (appropriate for national brands— and you’d better believe that those big brands are doing massive scale link building via every source under the digital sun) or it can scale way down to a minor component of a full service plan.
The difference comes down to time and budget. Although we can generally say that paying for links is bad, the fact remains that there are certain relevant link sources that require payment before you can create your link. Those are usually websites or organizations with member fees. Pay your $200 a year and you get to create your own page on a powerful website relevant to your industry. It is what it is…
On the other hand, we have link sources that are hard to find. These might be websites with broken links, obscure sites dedicated to your industry, or even Reddit threads where a link to your website would legitimately solve a question asked by another Redditor (whether or not that particular link confers authority is beside the point if it does that other old fashioned thing that links were designed to do: bring interested traffic to your website).
Paid and hard to find links might be appropriate for your SEO campaign if you’re several months into link building, have already exhausted simpler link sources, or just have a huge budget.
But what if you’re a small business with a modest SEO campaign? In that case link building can be simple. There are many dozens of review websites, directories, and other places where you might legitimately list your website in the natural process of “getting your name out there.”
Although some SEOs will argue about the value of this kind of small scale link building, the fact remains that directories and review sites are natural and safe. When we build a handful of links to sites like that, we say what we say about many of SEO’s best tried and true practices: “it can’t hurt!” ::shrugs and takes a drink of coffee::
“Will I know what links Accuracy SEO creates?”
Yes! You will receive a spreadsheet containing a list of all the links we’ve created! How else will you know about all the hard work we’re doing?
“Is there anything else I should know?”
What? You need to know more? If you do, contact us by clicking the link: “I have so, so many questions.“
Otherwise, get a free SEO analysis or just read more about SEO!
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