HOW TO DECIDE WHICH LINKS ARE BEST FOR YOUR SITE
As we continue our discussion of what it means to build links in 2015, it is important to remember that in Google’s prioritization of backlinks as a crucial linking factor cannot be overstated. At the end of the day, no matter how perfect the site you’ve created is, if it’s not earning links from other sites, it just won’t rank as well as if it had a rich and diverse backlink profile.
However, the importance of links was also overstated in the past so that many webmasters acted as if building links was the only thing that mattered about their sites, ultimately creating poor-quality sites that are in constant danger of being penalized by the Penguin and Panda algorithms.
At the end of the day, according to Google’s Webmaster guidelines: “Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”
This is a very wide-ranging and vague definition that essentially shifts the discussion from link building to link earning. Meaning, Google believes that your site should never have to be in the position to ask for links because the content you are creating that the relevant sites will be wanting to link to your perfectly-designed website.
While this might be a realistic goal for every company in a perfect world, most companies who wish to rank for a certain set of keywords do not necessarily have content or the means to create content that other sites will want to link to. This is when employing certain link building methods—including submitting to directories, guest posting, and reaching out to other webmasters—can be of use. However, and this is especially true for buying links, if you are going to be doing traditional link building, you should make sure the site from which you are receiving the link matches the following criteria.
Sites that link to you should be relevant in terms of content and link to other competitors of yours. In addition, the link should never be an exact match—the anchor text should never be the keyword you are trying to rank for. Furthermore, the link must make sense; if a user clicks on it, he or she should be satisfied with where it takes him or her.
In addition, link building is always a matter of quality over quantity. Getting one link from an established authority site like Time or Newsweek is worth a hundred low-quality director links. Finally, the site that you are receiving the link from should be of great quality; there is little to no value in getting a link from a crappy site.
However, it doesn’t matter if you get a link from, say, Huffington Post. If your site is full of duplicate and keyword-stuffed content, poor UX design, a lack of technical SEO implementation, and status error codes, then those amazing links are probably not going to give you the ranking boost they should. But we’ll go further into the maintenance you should be conducting to keep your site healthy in a future post.
For the time being, when it comes to building links, you should always be seeking high-quality, authoritative sites that make logical sense and will actually provide value to site users.
