Link Building Services – A Question of Black or White?

May 05

MikeGeneral Business Practices, SEO link building, SEO No Comments

Link building to improve your website rankings has become a well established technique in terms of Internet marketing.  But there are right ways and wrong ways of going about it.  Before embarking on an aggressive link building campaign, you should know the differences as the consequences for not following best practices can be severe and detrimental to your business. If you are not too familiar with the principles of link building then it can be easy to fall into the clutches of an unscrupulous “link building” firm who will tempt you with offers of massive numbers of links and improved search engine rankings in next to no time.  Lately, I’ve been receiving dozens of emails per week of firms overseas promoting 500+ links for roughly $14 – don’t be fooled!

Link building used to be an easy process.  Many websites offered to “exchange links” with you, by which you would enter their web address on your site someplace and they would do likewise.  It was quite common to visit a website and see a page titled “Links” which would list any number of other websites for you to click on and visit.  Typically, websites were exchanging links with anyone who asked, whether or not their site was related to their own.  The effectiveness of this did really rely on you being able to exchange links with higher ranking sites.

Today, things are done differently.  “Links” pages are no longer viewed in a positive light by search engines.  Link building has become a weapon of mass marketing in Internet terms, leading to many SEO firms offering to take on a link building strategy for you and propel your site in search rankings.

Unfortunately, while there are many good SEO firms out there that will carry this out in an SEO legal manner, known as “white hat” techniques; there are also many more that will engage in so called “black hat” (the firms that I mentioned above) techniques when it comes to link building.  It’s not just me, many business owners are finding numerous emails landing in their inboxes each day from sites offering thousands of links for just a few dollars and the guarantee that their website will be top ranking in a matter of weeks (or days in some cases).  The old saying “if it sounds too good to be true…” comes to mind, purely because link building takes time, it takes good research and it requires a targeted plan.  Also, remember no one other than the executives of Google knows Google’s search algorithm.  Beware of any company that guarantees rankings.

Why is link building so vital to SEO? Search engines love links! It makes them think your website is uber popular and as a result they will place you higher in the rankings – think of it as a popularity competition!  Unlike what most so-called SEO professionals will tell you (the “black hats” I mentioned a couple of times above), quantity IS NOT everything.  It’s important; however, the quality and relevance of links needs to be your first consideration.  If the search engine deems for your links to be non-relevant to your business, the links will be rejected and your site can even be removed from the search engine!

Black hat link building however, is simply another form of spamming, posting links to your website on pages that bear no relation to your site or business.  Unfortunately, it is your site that will get penalized not the company that posted the links in the first place.  Hence why you should be careful when selecting a link building partner – “black hat” link building may appear to be a great value but they will not only fall short on their promises but will increase your business’s potential for getting caught and banned from the search engines.  After all, you get what you pay for.