Link Popularity & Building Strategies

In the early days of the internet, web hyperlinks
were more or less the only way to get visitors to
a site, because search engines were in their
infancy. Later link building became a topic and
it has been a hot topic ever since. As search
engines grew to become the major sources of web
traffic, search engines started to rank sites
according to the quantity and relevancy of their
incoming links and content. And the power of
quality links is still increasing…

We all know that links rule the WorldWideWeb.
Link building, which used to be a routine task of
any webmaster, has grown into a full scale
industry with millions of dollars in annual
turnover. Ranking algorithms views links as a
human judgment or a person’s positive endorsement
of a website. Basically, the more endorsements
pointing to your website the higher page rank
your site will get. This is the organic and
“natural way” of acquiring links and search
engines really loves sites with a lot of organic
inbound links.

Since the natural way of getting links for a new
website is very time consuming and can actually
take forever some additional “fuel” is often
required. Many strategies for link building
exist, but since the ‘natural way’ often requires
a lot of work many webmasters often try to find
other ways to get links pointing to their
websites. But Beware! Some of these strategies
can actually be very tricky and do a lot more
harm than you would ever think of. To avoid being
labelled as a site trying to “fool” the search
engines there are a few critically things to keep
in mind when making a link building strategy:

Link buying. This practice is pretty much
discouraged by Google, because it undermines the
idea of the proxy for human judgment and if
Google find out that you are being linked from a
typical “links page” you may not get credited for
that link to your site. It won’t hurt you but it
won’t help you either. What CAN hurt you,
however, is if YOU link out to a link farm or a
so called “bad neighbourhood”. Then your site may
very well become sandboxed by google and drop out
completely from their indexing. So when you are
buying links you have to be very savvy.

User friendliness. View your site from the eyes
of the user when building your links. The whole
point is to make your link exchanges look like
they are acquired the natural and organic way and
this is very important. Do not store links in
separate link pages - links must be in the body
text or in a sidebar preferably among other
relevant links. Make the anchor text look like a
real endorsement, so don’t just stuff a bag of
keywords in there. This is a CRUCIAL point many
webmasters are missing!

Forget about reciprocal linking as they do not
have any significant weight any longer.

To sum it all up:

Make your linking strategy look as natural as
possible. As long as you are not linking to bad
neighbourhoods and fishy or un-related sites you
should be fine. You do NOT get penalized for bad
sited linking to you as that could be out of your
control. Avoid the known patterns of link trading
and think “outside” the box to avoid being
penalized by the search engines. Happy link
building!