The SEO space is all flooded with news and articles about how linkbuilding is all a thing of the past. Any attempt to manipulate the SERPs, either through buying links or creating spammy links, is going to be flagged sooner or later and your website is going to suffer. In such a space where algorithms keep changing so often, what is the best way to build links? The answer is simple – Don’t build links, earn them!
How Do You Earn Links?
A simple answer would be – avoid using any link-building tool. Go manual and make sure each link you create actually deserve to be there. Say for instance you go to a blog and leave a comment. You give a valid comment and also leave your website’s URL in the comment body (since most comment URL sections are nofollow now). Now this comment would be approved only if the comment and the link is actually relevant. If it is not, the webmaster would simply delete it. Now you see the effort behind a link that is earned, right?
Private Blog Networks And Automated Linkbuilding Tools Are A BIG No!
I was working a consulting gig the other day and one of the challenges the client had was getting a good boost in SERPs. They had used heck lot of tools and services to get them the quality links they needed but none of those worked. They also showed proof that they were using proper link diversity, anchor text diversity and were using some of the best linkbuilding tools available. They had configured their linkbuilding tools to generate (supposedly) good backlinks. Despite everything, their linkbuilding effort was just not good enough to give them a boost in terms of search engine visibility.
On spending some time examining their link profile, I was able to clearly see that they were loosing links faster than they were creating. On further inspecting, my associate discovered that they were using spammy content/ submission methods for majority of their links (even when they believed that they were doing good linkbuilding). Most of these websites were deleting their backlinks in the longer-run once they discovered the spam. We found that over 60% of their links built till October last year were already gone by January this year. This made the link profile look real spammy. This also hurt the trust value of the domain. Though they never received a ‘link spam’ notification in their Webmasters Tool account but they sure never benefited from their efforts.
The moral of the story – “No matter how you tweak your tools, a backlink that is not earned is not good enough!”
So what do you think? Do you still use automated linkbuilding tools for building links to your website? How has your results been? Share your views in the comments section below.