Link Building is Dead

A few years ago, building and exchanging links was a very effective process for building reputation and enhancing your search engine results. 

Its not that it doesn’t still work today to some extent, but it is yet another area that has been abused by the masses and in doing so has contributed to its downfall.  It has led to the search engines enhancing their algorithms and filters to analyze and inspect every angle of every link - is it reciprocated? where is it located? how relevant is it? when did it get added? what’s the anchor text?  what’s the page title?  how many other sites link to this site with this same anchor text?  how many other links are on this page? who else do they link to? and so on.  

But you see the irony is that contextual links between sites are more important than ever.  If a link has passed the cavity search that Google and others inflict on it, then it will help boost your reputation which will in turn boost your rankings.  The problem is that the traditional “link exchange” program is either too hard, too time-consuming, too risky, or too ineffective. 

Its time to evolve your approach (if you haven’t already done so by now) and your mindset.

Sometimes a different approach requires us to change our nomenclature.  No matter how much we redefine the activities that occur with “Link Building”, it still always makes people think of link exchange or reciprocating links.  Lately, we’ve simply been using “Off-Site Optimisation” to describe the set of activities that we perform to enhance a client’s popularity and reputation for their web site.  It seems to help.

Mostly, our “off-site optimisation” involves activities that create links based on content – articles, blogs, comments, social media, and creating “link bait” to name a few. 

Approaching the owners of sites relevant to our client’s

Related Posts

1. SEO Speak: Link Building
2. Writing Articles for Link Building and Improving Rankings and Traffic in the long term
3. The Google Link: Command and your SEO link building
4. Google talks link building
5. Linking? Who should I link to? And who should I allow to link to me?
6. 3 Way Link Exchange Being Abused by Unethical SEOs
7. Link Diversity in SEO – what is it?
8. Splash pages really are dead…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 5:22 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.