This is quite a controversial topic and there is no better subject to put the cat amongst the pigeons in the SEO world. Link building has always been the dark art side of SEO, and one area where prospective clients get nervous when looking to hire a company.
Here I am going to explore why I think link building is not the no.1 metric in the SEO world anymore. But first of all, lets understand the evolving world of search.
What Is Link Building
Link Building is just one part of SEO that helps show Google that you are the most trusted, authoritative source concerning your niche. This is called off-page optimisation and is the stuff we do to rank your website in Google, which only partially involves your website directly (more on this later).
Think of it as a vote. Back in the old days of the algorithm, Google needed a way to rank websites in order of relevancy and authority. So when someone typed a phrase into Google, the algorithm went away and returned results relevant to them. So, a link is a vote from one website to another. The more links you had, the higher up Google you went.
Authority Score
The authority of a link can be measured in many ways. Back in the early days of SEO, Google kindly told us what they thought about a websites authority and trustworthiness in the form a score from -10 called Page Rank. 10 best the best, and 0 meant the site had just started or had zero authority. Google stopped revealing this publicly in 2013, as the metrics changes on how they ranked the overall authority of a site.
Now you will see popular link building software metrics such as Moz’s on DA (domain authority and PA (page authority) and Majestic’s TF (trust flow) and CF (Citation flow). Whilst these metrics have deprecated in importance, they can still you a guide on how link-worthy a site is.
Past Link Building
As the article is about current link building practices and if link building is still relevant, I will only touch on briefly past link building methods. Luckily, most of the practices that gave SEO’s a bad name are no longer effective but will not harm your site. Google discounts links and all that you will have wasted is either time or money (or both!). Before the Penguin update, that looked to stop the practice of bulk and manipulative link building, The following methods would have worked regardless of the niche
- SEO Friendly Directories
- Article writing & Duplicate Articles across many sites
- Guest blogging on private blog networks set up for SEO
- Social Bookmarking Links
- High Page Rank Links using Forum Profiles
- Web 2.0 Links
These were often built in bulk with a typical package being 300 SEO friendly directories, 100 Articles, and 50 Forum links. Within three to four months you could effectively rank for any keyword phrase using the phrase you wanted to rank for in the link.
Luckily, these link building practices are no longer sustainable or advisable. If you see these in an email or proposal, more than likely you will not see SEO results.
Is It Still Important
I started with the controversial statement that link building isn’t the most influential ranking signal on rankings. Up to last year, I would consider links to be worth 60% of all SEO efforts to ranking a site. However, with Google shifting ever more to machine learning and measuring things like click-through rates, the intent behind a keyword (whether it’s informational, transactional, or research), I think links are diluting as a sign that a site is trustworthy or rankworthy. If they can be led by user interactions within a site, why would they rely on a link that more than likely has been placed artificially on a site?
However, I said “diluting” not unimportant. I do think having a good authority score, does help in getting you to the first page, however, if you are after a top-three place and to stay there long after a core update, you need content that users interactive with which then warranted a high ranking place in Google search engine result pages.
Current Link Building
So, with this in mind what should you be doing link building wise? The thing you need to be bear in mind when looking at any link building opportunity is to ask yourself “if Google didn’t exist would I bother?. If you are doing it solely because it has a good authority score like Domain Authority (DA) then you need also need to question whether it is relevant to your niche too.
Relevancy is the key. I would much rather have a link on a site that is relevant to my client’s niche than a high authority site on some third party blog network with a domain authority of 91. The reason I say this is that this score can easily be gamed and doesn’t reflect the SEO world as it stands. In the world of “entities”, “topics” and related things, if you are in the home improvement niche, surely it is better to have one article on a home improvement site, than 10 links on various general blogs.
Types Of Links
I will go into the types of links you can build in greater detail in my next blog post, but there are still some great strategies to attract relevant and attractive blogs including: –
- Competitor Analysis – Looks for low hanging fruit. Relevant sites that you could easily get a link from too. Manufacturer > supplier links, Trade Directories, UK based directories in your area
- Link Reclamation – Look for blogs that mention your site but don’t link back to you, (unlinked mentions), unlinked mentions that do link back, but not to the most relevant page, images that are not correctly linked to the source
- Broken Link Building – Reference sites that contain high amounts of other related sites, where the links haven’t been updated and you can highlight to the webmaster the broken links and offer your site as a replacement.
- Outreach – Find relevant publications/blogs in your niche, and find a linkable asset (more about this in the next blog post) that you could pitch to journalists/blog owners.
Summary
For those brought up in a traditional SEO world, hearing that you have to pay more attention to UX and the intent behind a word, maybe frustrating. You can no longer buy your way to success in the SEO world. Having a high domain authority but not paying attention to what Google expects in the form of content related to a keyword phrase, could see your search traffic and thus conversion gradually erode. Not putting all your eggs in one basket, has never been a truer phrase.
If you have any questions relating to this or any aspect of SEO, just drop us an email or ring us on 0114 398 4110
