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SEO – Effective Link Building Strategies for 2014

By January 8, 2014SEO

The various ‘Penguin Updates’ introduced by Google since April 2012 have completely changed SEO forever.

Link building involving the creation of spammy links does not work anymore and that’s a good thing. To succeed with your website in 2014, you have to do the right things in the right way.

1. Link building is still relevant in 2014

You’ve probably seen a few “link building is dead” articles on the Internet. People who say this have usually only experienced poor quality link building in the past.  To some extent, however,  they are correct :

  • Automatically creating backlinks in bulk does not work anymore.
  • Creating bogus social network profiles to get backlinks does not work anymore.
  • Spamming forums and article websites with fake or low quality content to get backlinks does not work anymore.
  • Automated link networks do not work anymore.

In short: spamming does not work anymore – but good quality link building does!  Google’s Matt Cutts made that quite clear in an interview last July:

“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover [how relevant or important somebody is], and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

2. Link Relevance is now essential

“Things, not strings” is one of the most important concepts that Google introduced last year. The context (relevance) of a link has become even more important.

The links that point to your website should come from pages that are related to the topic of the linked page in your own website. Google has been saying this for years but now they are penalising links that do not meet this criteria.

If all of the links that point to your website use exactly the same keyword phrase to forge the links, you can be fairly sure that this will trigger an ‘unnatural links’ warning on your Google Webmaster Tools account.  Conversely If the links to your website contain keywords that are related to the topic of your web page, Google will find your website relevant, and in some cases an authority for that topic.

3. Once again: spamming is risky

Some people still think that they can trick Google’s algorithm with the ‘brand new secret method that will get your site on Google’s first result page with just a few mouse clicks.’ We get daily emails offering a quick solution to SEO.  The fact is there is no quick solution!!  The spam tools used by these ‘black hat’ seo merchants do not work anymore.

Google has consistently said that it does not like link schemes and you should avoid the following types of links:

  • Buying or selling links that pass PageRank.
  • Excessive link exchanges.
  • Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links.
  • Using automated programs or services to create links to your site.
  • Text advertisements that pass PageRank.
  • Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank.
  • Links with optimised anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.
  • Low-quality (free) directory or bookmark site links.
  • Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites.
  • Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites.
  • Forum comments with optimised links in the post or signature

If you use these methods to build backlinks, you run a high risk that your website will be penalised by Google.

4. Make it personal

Links that require human intervention are the links that Google considers in the ranking algorithm. Quality is much more important than quantity.

A handful of high quality links are much better than hundreds of automatically created backlinks.

For more information on our professional SEO services please call us today on 01273 328877