Link Building
Link building is the most popular off-page SEO method. Basically, by building external links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can so that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher. For example, if someone likes this article and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information.
Over the years webmasters were trying to build links to their websites so that they rank higher and they ‘invented’ a number of ways to increase link count. The most popular ways were:
Blog Directories – something like yellow pages but each entry was a link back to a website
Forum Signatures – Many people were commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature)
Comment link – The same concept as forum signatures where you comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back. Even worse, instead of using your real name, you could use keywords so instead of writing ‘comment by Alex Chris’, you wrote ‘comment by How to lose weight’ or anything similar.
Article Directories – By publishing your articles on an article directory you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.
Shared Content Directories – Websites like hubpages and infobarrel allowed you to publish content and in return, you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.
Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words, I could link your website to mine and you could do the same. In some cases you could even do more complicated exchanges by doing a 3-way link, in other words, I link to your website from my website but you link to my website from a different website. Notice that I used the past tense to describe all the above methods because not only they do not work today, you should not even try them because you are more likely to get a penalty rather than an increase in rankings (especially when it comes to Google).
The birth of black hat SEO
Link building was an easy way to manipulate the search engine algorithms and many spammers tried to take advantage of this by building link networks which gradually lead to the creation of what is generally known as black hat SEO. Google has become very intelligent in recognizing black hat techniques and with the introduction of Panda and Penguin, they have managed to solve the problem and protect their search engine from spammers. Of course, there are still exceptions but they are doing advances in every new release of their ranking algorithm and very soon none of these tricks will work.
Blog Directories – something like yellow pages but each entry was a link back to a website
Forum Signatures – Many people were commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature)
Comment link – The same concept as forum signatures where you comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back. Even worse, instead of using your real name, you could use keywords so instead of writing ‘comment by Alex Chris’, you wrote ‘comment by How to lose weight’ or anything similar.
Article Directories – By publishing your articles on an article directory you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles.
Shared Content Directories – Websites like hubpages and infobarrel allowed you to publish content and in return, you could add a couple of links pointing to your websites.
Link exchange schemes – Instead of trying to publish content you could get in touch with other webmasters and exchange links. In other words, I could link your website to mine and you could do the same. In some cases you could even do more complicated exchanges by doing a 3-way link, in other words, I link to your website from my website but you link to my website from a different website. Notice that I used the past tense to describe all the above methods because not only they do not work today, you should not even try them because you are more likely to get a penalty rather than an increase in rankings (especially when it comes to Google).
The birth of black hat SEO
Link building was an easy way to manipulate the search engine algorithms and many spammers tried to take advantage of this by building link networks which gradually lead to the creation of what is generally known as black hat SEO. Google has become very intelligent in recognizing black hat techniques and with the introduction of Panda and Penguin, they have managed to solve the problem and protect their search engine from spammers. Of course, there are still exceptions but they are doing advances in every new release of their ranking algorithm and very soon none of these tricks will work.
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