Why and how you should be link building in 2017

Link building is well known to be one of the best ways to increase your rankings whilst becoming more recognised within your niche.

It’s important to ensure you build links gradually and properly. With constant Google updates, it’s important to review your link building technique.

What is link building?

Link building, also referred to as outreach, is an SEO tactic used by many individual companies as well as white label SEO agencies which the aims to increase page ranking by linking to other relevant websites. In an ideal scenario, you will be linking to a sight with a higher domain authority than your own. This is because Google will crawl the trusted website, and pick up that your website is linked, and therefore trusted by them.

Link building can be a timely and costly process, it can be even more so depending on your niche and the competitiveness of your keyword. Link building is a gradual process and it can take a long time to see good improvement in page rankings. In order to start this process, you need to work on building good, lasting relationships with other websites and blogs.

How is Google changing the way it views link building?

Google is always releasing updates that directly affect the way link building helps increase page rankings. A few years ago, for example, linking your website to a low-quality website would mean that the link wouldn’t have a very good effect on the page rank, and in some cases, ignored altogether. Today, however, low quality links can have a seriously negative impact on your page rankings.

Since Google first rolled out Penguin in 2012, gaining rankings through outreach alone has become more and more difficult. As Penguin continues to mature, it’s filters are getting more efficient at recognising spam links. This means there has been a notable increase in penalisations from Google.

Link building tactics to avoid

In order to avoid any Google penalties, websites should ensure that they are linking to relevant pages, writing good quality articles and not constantly linking to one keyword. A few tactics you should definitely be avoiding are:

Comment spam

Commenting on blog posts within your industry and joining in with relevant discussions is a good way to build traffic to your website, and showcase your expertise in this area, however, every comment should be manually typed and different. Copy and pasting comments into hundreds of blogs will be picked up by Google as Spam, for which you can face a penalty.

Spun content

There is software available that will change one blog into hundreds of new blogs. It works by taking one hand written and well thought out article and adding words, phrases and moving around the sentence order.

This software, whilst appealing to many people with limited time, will actually cause more problems than it solves. This is because many of these new blogs will read in a very confusing or in coherent way. Taking these low-quality blogs and linking them to spam blogs or low quality directories will no doubt have a negative impact on your page ranking.

Obvious paid links

When looking at different websites and blogs to build a relationship with, it’s important you judge their website not only by domain authority and trust flow but also with outreach in mind. If the page has lots of advertisements and obvious links it may be advisable to avoid linking to that particular website.

These are just some examples of tactics to avoid in this year. As Google updates get better every year, make sure you are always reviewing your outreach technique. Ensure what you are posting is relevant and helpful to the audience, and only ever post articles on trusted websites.