It’s a debate that has been going on for quite some time and dividing opinion leaders and experts in the field: talk of SEO, i.e., how to best position a site on search engines, and timely the question regarding link building returns.
Is it useful or not to Google ranking? And, if so,what rules should one follow to avoid incurring various penalties or otherwise wasting time without getting results? Link building is a rather old-fashioned practice, on this we all agree, for growing a website; it consists of increasing the number of links pointing back to one’s site thus increasing inbound traffic and at the same time growing the popularity of the site itself. At least on paper. Yes because, either because of an abuse that has been made of link building over the years, or because of the considerable increase that the number of sites on the web has recorded, Google has become more ‘intelligent’ and the parameters have changed. To date, and even on this everyone seems to agree, it is no longer enough to get as many links pointing back to your site as possible; you need quality. As in, better few backlinks but good ones. Doing link building, i.e., building a network of external links pointing back to our site, requires choice and discernment; not everything can be thrown into the cauldron but one has to pay the utmost attention to what one is doing.
The topic was also debated at the last Ses conference in London, i.e., one of the main Seo & Web Marketing events: there, too, link building was discussed, its importance, the rules to keep well in mind to put it into practice as well as practical cases. Some even quite curious ones. Such as those related to companies that have gone so far as to pay various sites or directories to have links to their site deleted; links that, perhaps, they had even purchased, paying for, in the past. And which are now no longer considered good because they are not of quality. This, too, is a focal point of the story around which there has been a shift in Google’s parameters, which are increasingly geared toward rewarding quality rather than quantity; it used to be that the latter carried its own weight, so the more backlinks to my site I could get, the more reliability the site itself gained in Google’s eyes. Direct cause of this was a wild market of backlinks; some traded at par (the infamous link exchange) others even paid. And qualitative parameters didn’t matter much (except of course for rare and obvious cases of sites from which it was better not to be linked anyway), but rather to collect as many backlinks as possible based on a simple reasoning: the more pages on the web that suggest my site, the more reliable the latter should become in the eyes of surfers and search engines.
The importance of quality backlinks
When Google introduced the quality parameter, the castle imploded from the foundations and many sites found themselves being penalized perhaps also by virtue of an endless series of backlinks collected over the years; backlinks that were not qualitative, not relevant to the subject matter and therefore seen as a mere commercial operation to increase accesses. Since then, link building has been refined by taking new paths; what seems to be the starting assumption is to try to get backlinks that are as natural as possible, that is, always thought of from the visitor’s perspective, to guide him through the topic being addressed and offer him useful insights, rather than from a commercial perspective just to have one more site refer to our web page. Just to understand it, if I am visiting a cutting and sewing blog, within an article I expect contextual links, that is, that refer me to other external pages of in-depth analysis but always on the subject of cutting and sewing; an external link not related to what is dealt with in the article, perhaps, again to remain on our example of the cutting and sewing blog, to a site of a financial company, will naturally not have the same value in the eyes of Google. By virtue of this we can well understand how important the choice of links pointing back to our site is and how much this parameter can influence Google in its evaluation: if we were to provide a handbook regarding the most risky links, we could say that they should be avoided:
- Commercial texts
- Links from sites that are neither reputable nor of high quality
- Peer-to-peer link exchanges between two sites
- Links acquired for a fee
- Comment spam
In the list, some people also tend to include guest posts; which, if not exactly deleterious, should still be used intelligently and without overdoing it.
Constantly monitor the backlinks received
Another factor of extreme interest referred to earlier is that related to the removal of non-quality backlinks; as mentioned this was discussed on the occasion of the last Ses conference in London last February, and it emerged how important it can be to monitor the sites that link to us in order to be ready to ask for the removal of backlinks from sites that are not of quality or, even worse, considered spam. As in the case mentioned above, with companies willing to pay in order to have non-quality backlinks removed. Therefore, it is important, especially within an SEO strategy for e-commerce, to constantly monitor what are the sites that link to us and assess their quality and reliability; in the case of links that are not up to par or, even worse, detrimental to our online reputation, request removal or ‘disavow’ (using Google’s tool) through which we can suggest Google to ignore all links coming from a particular domain and directed to our site. In conclusion, the best link building tactic is the one recommended by the greatest experts in the field and, as is often the case with the most effective things, it is based on an extremely simple concept; that is, to think as naturally as possible by reasoning about the person, then the visitor browsing the site, and not exclusively about the commercial and utilitarian aspect. We always think about what is useful, contextual, qualitative, relevant to the topic at hand, from an authoritative source, etc… quantity only, at least as far as Google is concerned, no longer pays.
