Content Marketing Made Simple

Link Building Techniques - Google's View

You’ve no doubt heard about all sorts of ways to acquire in-bound links to your site. Here’s a list of some common techniques being used today:

• Cross-Linking
• Reciprocal linking
• Link farms
• Submitting to directories
• Requesting links from other sites
• Link-baiting
• Social bookmarking
• Buying links from other sites
• Press releases
• Forum spam

Some of these techniques may be perfectly acceptable, while other may get you banned from Google for sure. That’s why it's critical that you understand what Google thinks about them before you implement them or hire someone else to implement them for you.

Here’s what Google has to say about hiring an SEO company when it comes to link-building or other aggressive techniques designed to manipulate their search engine algorithms:

“While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index.

… Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” (source)

While Google makes it clear that some techniques violate their guidelines, they also make it clear that there’s nothing inherently wrong with acquiring links, as long as it's done the right way, using acceptable techniques…

“Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.”

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Google isn’t afraid to explain to people how their algorithm works, including the importance of in-bound links. They even advise people to make sure that other relevant sites are linked to them, since that is how their search engine spider finds new links.

In my opinion, here is the best quote from Google on this matter:

“Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.” (Source)

(You can learn more about Natural Optimization Techniques in my other post.)