Quality backlinks are an essential factor in growing your website. But they’re not easy to build. They require dedication, time, and energy. Many still choose the easy way out by buying just low-quality links. These links are a waste of money because Google’s algorithm is sophisticated enough to disregard them. Keep reading to discover what links you should invest in to grow your website.
What Is Link Buying
Link buying is the process of paying webmasters or editors to place a link on their website. These are called external links, as they will point to a URL on a different website. People buy links simply because the more links point to your website, the more chance it has to rank on top of the SERPs, granted you have a good SEO strategy.
The quality of the links is imperative when it comes to ranking. High-quality, relevant links will increase your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs, whereas low-quality links might penalize you. The best-case scenario is that spammy links won’t affect your rankings. They are, however, a waste of resources.
Contact us to find out how we can effectively build links for you.
Google’s Stance on Link Buying
Plain and simple: Google doesn’t want you to pay for links. It wants you to earn them. Because in Google’s eyes, backlinks are a vote of confidence, and it doesn’t want that to come from a shady practice. However, there is a difference between paying for any link to cheat your way into ranking higher and paying the actual contributors.
When editors create valuable content for the internet, it is only fair to compensate them so they will add a link pointing to your site. It’s a part of white hat link building: The practice of building links on high-quality and relevant content that took time to create and serves the actual internet users. The owners of such content will be selective when adding links to their sites.
What’s on the other end of the spectrum is black hat link building practices. These shady tactics include keyword-stuffed fluff content, blog comment spamming, and placing links on useless websites. They have no value as they don’t respond to search queries, and the algorithm doesn’t like them. They are unethical, hence open to penalization.
What To Look For When Building Links
To answer this question, you first need to know what backlinks do. They work in two ways: by passing link equity, or link juice, to help you rank higher in SERPs, and by increasing organic traffic. These have a symbiotic relationship. Increasing one will increase the other. There are a few terms to get familiar with before you start reaching out to contributors to acquire links for your website.
Do-follow Links
To put it simply, these types of links are crawlable. They point Google Spider back to your site, and by doing so, they pass link juice and improve your ranking. Ideally, this is the type of link you’ll want to build.
No-follow Links
These have a tag telling Google not to crawl it. Unlike do-follow links, no-follow links do not direct Google Spider to the linked site. Because of this, they don’t affect ranking. However, they can still increase organic traffic by getting people to click on it. They are also needed to have a natural-looking backlink profile.
Keyword Diversity
Keywords are words or phrases that appear on the linking page and describe what the target page is about. A natural-looking backlink profile is a must if you want your site to get along with Google’s algorithm. Over-optimization looks unnatural and can trigger penalties. To avoid this, you should aim for a healthy dose of anchor text diversity.
Site Quality
Ideally, you want links from authoritative, relevant websites. These high-quality sites pass link juice and can increase your site's authority, whereas link farms and PBNs can hurt your SEO efforts and lower your ranking. Website quality should always be at the core of link building efforts.
Natural Link Velocity
Another critical factor to effective link building is the consistent rate at which you acquire backlinks pointing to your site. Sharp increases or declines can draw unwanted attention from Google. Quantity over quality.
Where Should You Build Links
If the goal is to build links to grow the visibility of your website, you should build links on relevant, high-quality sites with an editorial process that doesn’t link to just anyone. Don't depend solemnly on third-party metrics like DA/DR when evaluating a site. Instead, look for consistent traffic, helpful content, and the site's overall feel. If it has a purpose and adds value, it will make sense to Google.
Avoid buying links from:
- Link farms- these usually exist to make a quick buck. They won't improve your rankings and might trigger penalization.
- PBNs- Generally, these sites exist solely to sell links. They might appear to have a business model on the surface. But they don’t add much value and are prone to penalizations.
- Directories and blog comments: This might have been a good tactic for link building in the past. As Google’s algorithm evolved, getting links to your site from directories and blog comments has become useless.
How We Build Links For You
We use one approach for all: white hat link-building. We don’t buy links; we build them. We do this by taking a content-first approach that adds value to search queries. Well-thought and executed pieces of content are vital when reaching out to editors and webmasters. Our link-building efforts ensure the long-term sustainability of good-quality links that helps you grow your website and outperform your competitors. Our strategy goes like this:
- We ensure you have linkable assets editors will want to use to enrich their content.
- We do a competitor analysis to see who’s linking to those in your niche. We also find relevant and high-quality sites on Google.
- Our dedicated team carries out manual outreach to editors and webmasters of those sites.
- We choose anchor texts that will ensure a natural backlink profile while not compromising on the keywords your website wants to rank for.
- We build high-quality, relevant do-follow links that positively impact SEO efforts.
To Sum Up
Buying useless links is easy. Building links that will increase your online presence is problematic. Black hat link-building tactics are a sure way to get penalized by Google and waste your resources. On the other hand, white hat link building is worth the grind.
Why Trust Us On SEO
Eric Carrell & Sebastian Schaffer have been working in SEO for over a decade, building their own projects - understanding and testing SEO strategy, along with building hundreds of white hat links per month for our projects. They take their learnings and experience and apply them to the strategy that drives our link building strategy for our clients.
Eric & Seb have always believed in quality over quantity, doing things the right way so we future proof our client’s websites against future Google updates and the evolving industry of search.
While Seb handles the company strategy around culture, processes and structure, Eric is constantly working to improve our service offering, customer experience, and following the industry in parallel with Google’s Quality Guidelines so that we are always one step ahead of our competition and aligned with what Google wants to see for your site to rank higher.
