Link Building SEO

Essentially, through link based metrics, Google is outsourcing their quality control to website publishers. Google considers a link from one website to another to be akin to a quality endorsement. High-quality websites that rely on their reputation to drive revenue will only link to other high-quality sites. Were the Guardian to link to a low-quality site (and should its users follow this link), it would provide a bad user experience, and thus harm the Guardian’s brand. Google understands this and assumes that good websites will perform quality control on their outgoing links, ensuring linked-to sites are of a sufficiently high standard. As such, if The Evening Standard links to you, Google sees it as a quality vote from the Evening Standard. And, if the Evening Standard votes for you, Google will vote for you too.

Alongside great onsite content, backlinks remain one of the most influential ranking factors in search. A strong backlink from a high-quality website is proof (in the eyes of Google) that your site has passed the linking site’s quality control tests. Therefore, the more high-quality backlinks a website has, the more likely the website will be to perform well in search results. Link building can also increase referral traffic, build brand awareness, and encourage search engines to crawl and index specific pages.

There are many criteria for assessing the quality of a backlink. The best links fit naturally into an article and have not been forced in purely for the sake of gaining a backlink. They also come from reputable platforms that are topically and locationally relevant to the linked website. Finally, the user should always come first, so any links should complement the subject matter and provide a genuinely useful resource or insight for the reader.

Black hat link building refers to the practice of obtaining poor quality links purely for the purpose of manipulating search engine results. These tactics violate Google’s Spam Policies and run the risk of receiving penalties as a result. White hat refers to link building practices that abide by Google’s guidelines.

First introduced in 2012, Google Penguin was an algorithm update introduced to reduce web spam. The update penalised websites that violated Webmaster Guidelines by using black hat techniques to obtain links and manipulate rankings. It also rewarded those with high-quality link profiles. For many years, websites hit with a Penguin penalty would see their rankings suffer. However, Google now usually “devalues” spam rather than penalising sites

Broken link building works on the premise of helping webmasters fix their broken links by providing a superior alternative for them to link to. Approaches include reclaiming links that once pointed to your site but no longer do, or reaching out to a webmaster to point out broken links and helpfully suggesting your newer and up-to-date resource as an alternative.