Link Building: The Good vs. The Bad

Link building is an active part of off-page search engine optimization (SEO) and one of the toughest to tackle for SEO specialists, webmasters, and the like. Now more than ever the question of ethical, quality link building and link baiting has come about.

Today the following question was proposed by Chris Ellis, Business Development Manager at Greenlight, ”

What constitutes good link building and bad link building?”

(View Complete Question on LinkedIn)

Here is my answer:

“Good Link - a link from an industry related web site, indexed in Google, with minimal outbound links from the linking page. Acquisition time and cost aren’t as relevant as the relevancy of the website, and the all in anchor text coming from the linking web site.

Bad Link - a link from an irrelevant resource with unrelated contextual keyword targeting and more than 20 outbound on-page links.

Time is not relevant to popularity, count is, so quick or slow, it carries no weight.

Ease of acquisition has no bearing as the ease of truly high quality links is based entirely on the quality of your web site as well as the rapport you build with the webmaster of the linking site.

Ethical, well the obvious answer has to do with the quality and integrity of the link builder and how they value the stability and strength of the links they build.

The link building techniques that are utilized to acquire links, in my professional opinion, are acceptable if the best practices and guidelines of the major search engines are followed as well as the link does not risk the quality and integrity of the site in question as well as the site where the link resides.

Remember that search algorithms primary basis are to reflect the natural search habits and desired results of searchers. These are not made up figures, but data driven considerations to increase the quality of the results as they relate to end users.”

Link Scenario:

We have a web site about car audio. Our keyword focus is “car audio”. Let’s call it www.examplecaraudio.com

Good Link: Link from a car, audio, or car audio related web site, ex. Jim’s Car Audio Review; that includes relevant anchor text relating to your web site. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site from another site.

An example of good use of anchor text to our sample site would be:

“Jim’s Car Audio Review offers reviews of the latest car audio products and provides tons of other resources to find out more about car audio and related resources.“

If you are a webmaster, search specialist, site owner, or you are simply attempting to increase PR and popularity via a link building campaign, it is always in your best interest to know where your links are coming from and ensure it is a quality resource.

Think of links as referrals. Which situation would you prefer:

Would you prefer referrals from a qualified resource, like when your doctor (a trusted resoruce) refers you out to a specialist with excellent references?

Or, would you prefer to have your doctor stand in front of you, write down names of random “specialists” from the white pages, toss the names in a hat and pick one out for you?

The idea of link building, as ridiculous as the second situation may sound, can be that terrible of a shot in the dark. When you allow out side resources to develop unqualified links, that may stem from low quality resources, you’re allowing them to tarnish the quality and integrity of your site and ensuring lower rankings.

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