Outbound Links for SEO

Link BuildingLink building is the process of getting your website ranked better by having other sites link to it. That’s the basics. But it’s not quite that simple.

The search engines see links to a site as a way to gauge the quality of a site, simply because if other people are linking to it, then there’s probably a reason why.

So people started to abuse this, of course. We’ve been doing this for ten years, so we’ve seen it all in that time. People contact you and ask for a link exchange. You link to their site, they link to yours. Every website had a page of “links” that would be a result of this kind of link building. Lots of websites popped up offering paid link-building services, offering to rev up your organic ranking by paying for links to your website.

In 2011, it was revealed that a major department store wound up at the top of the organic search listings for so many different searches that when investigated, it appeared that someone had paid to have thousands of links placed all over the Internet that lead directly to their website. Whoops. (Company denied any wrongdoing.)

The thing is, this worked. Until they got caught.

Links are still fairly significant in terms of getting your site ranked, but I want to talk about the best way to get those links. It’s definitely not through a link farm or paid link building.

[bctt tweet=”The best way to get links back to your site is by publishing content that people want to link to.” username=”sumydesigns”]

It’s so simple and yet so true. If you want to get people to link to your stuff, then produce good stuff that people want to link to.

Are people still abusing link building?

Yes. If people can find a way to make money on the Internet, then someone will do it even if it isn’t a white hat technique. The newest form of link building involves commenting on blog posts. I maintain a web site for a pool company, and they frequently get real, honest-to-goodness comments on their blog, that are truly related to their blog post…. but the submitter URL is another pool company and the link they submit clearly links to a service page on their site.

This irritates me because it’s not an honest way to get a link. I recommend to my clients if they see these kinds of comments is to either 1) not approve it or 2) approve it but remove the link first.

My advice is to stop seeking out links and start producing content. Everything comes back to having a great site that people want to read.

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Amy Masson, Web Developer
Owner/Developer

Amy Masson

Amy is the co-owner, developer, and website strategist for Sumy Designs. She's been making websites with WordPress since 2006 and is passionate about making sure websites are as functional as they are beautiful.

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