Link building and link building services have been around for a long time. For many years now, the major search engines have analysed the inbound links to websites, assessing their quality and relevance in order to quantify the content of the site. However, in the halcyon days of the early internet, link building used to be far less complicated than it is now.
If high volumes of content (relevant or not) could be linked to a site, then that site’s ranking would benefit. Because these methods were so straightforward, a cottage industry known as ‘link-farming’ came into being and these link exchange programs became the de-facto method of negotiating a site’s position up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Unsurprisingly, link-farming was not popular with the major search engines, who are less than impressed when any anomalies which can be exploited arise. In response, they tweaked their algorithms to make sure that this troublesome loophole could no longer be exploited and employed a zero-tolerance policy towards webmasters using linking schemes while actively punishing any sites who maintained irrelevant links.
To fully demean the effectiveness of these cheap link building services, the major search engines made sure that they fixed this anomaly so effectively that it absolutely could not be misused again. It follows then, that if the major search engines now pay such importance to the quality and relevance of the links, it is fair to assume that a higher degree of diligence will be attributed to this area of their super-secret algorithms. With site linking being a good indicator of perceived importance, and given that the major search engines have worked tirelessly within this area of their algorithms, it stands to reason that this area is now seen as the integral part of their ranking calculations.
Assessing a website’s relevance by the nature of its inbound links is fair as it is reasonable to assume that a page on a subject which is linked to an authoritative site on the same subject should be seen as beneficial to an enquiring searcher. So, to be successful in today’s world of SEO link building demands more than just dropping arbitrary links somewhere within the content of semi-related sites. As well as linking to relative web sites, today’s SEO link building demands the targeting of specific content pages, the nature of the link, and even the words that are used.
Instead of looking at link building just in mathematical terms, links need to be established on an individual basis, with the main focus being on highly ranked and relevant content data from respected sites. More thought is needed about how a link between two pages will help the respective sites rather than focusing only on the creation of the link. If the link is indeed helpful, then creating a connection will be that much easier, making it much more likely to register positively with the major search engines, which is of course, the point of all.