Link Building for SEO: The Truth Revealed

SEO Link Building

SEO link building … is it all it’s cracked up to be?

Articles like this can be tenuous at the best of times, but even more so when the author’s background (and by that merit; credibility) is left undisclosed. For that reason I’ll include a very short introduction about my background in the SEO industry, to give you an idea of where I’m coming from.

I started doing my first bits of SEO in late 2004, and in 2007 I was hired by one of the UK’s top SEO firms, working directly alongside (not under) industry leaders such as Ammon Johns.

In 2008 I started an SEO blog called EggRage, which was recently acquired by another large UK based SEO firm called SEO Positive, after building up a significant audience.

Later in 2008 I was hired by an international extreme sports company to be their head of website development and internet marketing, before leaving in 2009 to incorporate and put all of my time into my own company; Lyrical Media.

Link Building Services

I’ve seen all sides of the industry – and while I certainly wouldn’t claim to know even close to everything… I’ve got a pretty good view of the big picture.

An Introduction to Link Building

If you already know what link building is and how it works, then you can safely skip this brief introduction if you so desire.

In a nutshell, the reason Google became so large and successful is because of the way in which it treats links on websites. Google was the first search engine that didn’t just look at site content, and meta tags, it also looked for relationships between websites. It located and analysed these relationships through links.

As an example, if you have a small online store selling socks, then Google will look at which sites are linking to you, in order to establish the importance and relevancy of your site. If you are linked to by other small sock websites then you won’t be seen as very important… but if you are linked to by Wikipedia, the BBC, CNN, and Amazon – then your site will be seen as extremely important.

In order to record the relative importance of websites, Google introduced a scale of 0 to 10 called “PageRank”. PageRank is named so not because it’s short for “Web-page Rank”, but because it was named after Google founder Larry Page (a common misconception). If you’re interested in finding out the PageRank of the sites which you visit, try installing the Search Status plugin for FireFox – which will display both PageRank and AlexaRank in the bottom right corner of the browser for every page that you visit.

Link Building Basics & Ethics

The way in which Google analyses relationships between sites is one of the largest factors present in determining rankings – which unfortunately is the reason for “link spam” being so prominent. Many people (wrongly) assume that many low quality links to their site (PR0 – PR4) are as good as a few high quality links (PR5-PR10).

There are SEO companies out there right now who do nothing but link building. You pay them a few thousand a month, and they have outsourced people in Asia spam thousands of websites with links back to your own site – the worst part is that the SEO companies frequently fail to tell clients that this is 100% against Google terms of service, and can result in a permanent ban from all search results. Mark my words, these types of SEO companies will not be around for much longer.

Right now the industry is coming to the end of a gold-rush period. In the last 5 years SEO has suddenly becoming recognised as something real, and important. As a result, thousands of individuals and companies have started selling it. There are three main problems with this:

1. Around 80% of the so-called “SEO experts” around at the moment learned everything they know by reading tutorial articles online.
2. The SEO industry is closed. People in don’t help each other in the same way web designers do. It’s all smoke, mirrors, and closely guarded ‘secrets’.
3. Even if people did help each other, SEO is an art, not a science – there is no global proof or evidence of what works. If you post a piece of SEO advice on a forum, you can expect at least 2 people to vehemently disagree with you.

Knowing what I know about the industry and the companies working in it – I would never hire an SEO company, especially not for link building.

Why Traditional Link Building Doesn’t Work Anymore

A traditional link builder will tell you to leave comments on blogs, submit entries to online business directories, buy links on paid directories, buy links from other websites, participate in link exchange programs, and the list goes on.

They will also tell you that links from .edu and .gov sites are worth more than others, as well as links from white-listed sites such as Wikipedia.

Their next big seller is linkbait. Linkbait is defined as an article written and published solely for the purpose of generating inbound links. For example: You write some controversial article about (insert celebrity name) having (insert sexual act) with (insert species of animal), and try and get it featured on the homepage of StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, etc etc. All those links, and the further links from people who retweet and reblog are meant to be “good for SEO”.

But we haven’t yet touched on why none of these things work anymore. There are two simple reasons:

1. The people at Google are not stupid (seriously)
2. Even if it did work in some way, none of this stuff is in any way relevant. Let’s go into each one of these in a little more depth (it’s difficult to cover all this stuff without writing a novel).

Google is a 32 billion dollar company. It’s bigger than Intel, Toyota, and Disney. It employs some of (literally) the smartest people in the world. The techs at Google are aware of every single link building tactic, every single “trick” and “technique” to improve rankings, and every single exploit out there. They’re knuckling down on spam, and they’re doing it every day.
Over the years the algorithms have developed, and in my opinion, now a PR2 link from a relevant website to your industry is far more valuable than a PR6 link from some random directory. Why? – Because it makes sense.

So What Does Work?

In short – being real works. Not trying to game the system is the best way to make it work for you. Yes, inbound links are an important part of the ranking algorithm, but they aren’t the be-all and end-all. If you have a great site, with great content, and you interact with people in your industry, then not only will you get links that improve your rankings, but you’ll develop real relationships to help your business.

Write good blog posts, not as linkbait, but because you genuinely have something that you want to say. Talk to people on Twitter, not because you want to spam your website link, but because you genuinely want to connect with others. Participate in forum discussions, not to further spread the link in your signature, but to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise by helping others.

All these things will lead to links. The good kind of links. And from the right sorts of places.

I have high PR links from The Web Squeeze, Web Designer Depot, Smashing Magazine, SitePoint, WooThemes, The Envato Network, Noupe, DesignMoo, Spoon Graphics, Other Web Design Agencies, and Other Web Design Freelance Blogs. What more could a web designer want?

As a result, whenever I publish a new blog post – Google indexes it within 10 minutes and I’ll rank on the 1st page of results for any keywords that I use in my title.

Link building is dead. We are now in the era of reputation building.