Link Building Dead or Alive? Brief summary

Link building has always been Google’s yardstick for measuring a site’s popularity and therefore has always been considered as one of the effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies. Link building formed the core of Google’s initial search algorithm and figured as one of the top parameters for website rankings. However, several sites tried to achieve ranks on search engine result pages by exploiting link building, resorting to unnatural links and spamming. This made Google to tighten its algorithms and penalize the sites with low quality, irrelevant and less trustworthy links. This led many to think that link building is less significant now and investing time in building links may not prove to be impactful. However, this is far from truth.

Link building is very much alive and continues to be as significant as ever. The only thing that has changed now is how we acquire these links. As Google algorithm evolves continuously, it is becoming more and more sophisticated in detecting unnatural link patterns. So, 2016 may see certain aspects of link building process, strategies, tactics and techniques to die, but not link building itself. As long as the world of Internet grows more powerful and people continue to connect with others and share their content, comments, ideas and messages, link building cannot die.

Companies that offer affordable SEO service through white hat SEO techniques will continue to focus on link building.  However, the following unnatural link building techniques that have been widely used for past several years may not find a place anymore in 2016:

• Black hat SEO techniques that result in tons of either only low quality links or only high authority links (as in case of private blog network) may become obsolete as Google’s Penguin algorithm updates consider such links completely unnatural and hence heavily penalizes sites with such links.
• Unnatural link building practices resulting in sites gaining a lot of links in a short period of time followed by a sudden decrease. In Google’s eyes, this is unnatural as back links for any trusted and authentic site are acquired gradually with the rate increasing over a period of time.
• Link building technique is no more about quantity but quality and diversity. Legitimate sites acquire links from different sources including comments, forums, blogs, etc. However, bad link building techniques result in a large portion of a site’s links coming from a single source such as blog comments. Too many links with the same anchor text can put these sites into Google’s radar.

Reliable and affordable SEO service providers just need to focus on techniques that allow us to build natural, relevant and quality links. Here are few link building tips that may go a long way today as well as in near future:

• Invest in effective social media campaigns to get more of viral social traffic. Links from social media platforms is a great way to come into search engines’ notice.
• Ask people and your acquaintances for links. In today’s times, there are very few who do not have a social media account, site or blog. Leverage it.
• High quality guest posts offering useful informative content to readers and posted through a reputed guest posting agency could be really effective.
• Build a personal brand online through social media platforms and other authentic online avenues.

Link building continues to be an essential part of SEO and successful online marketing strategies. All that matters now is quality link building and so we must put in our efforts in the right direction.