Link Building this Week (48.2008)
28 Nov
It’s the week of Thanksgiving, so I figure people had different things on their minds than links. How to prepare a turkey properly, for example. Nevertheless, there were still a few link building related posts worth mentioning.
Barry Schwartz asks when link building companies suddenly became ‘black hat’ SEOs. While I do think there’s a difference between offering link building services and obvious paid link services, I do get Barry’s point. Also, considering their latest actions, I can only assume that Google wants to push link building to the background. However, when companies try other approaches (we’ve seen this before as well), they DO became black hat -but that’s something completely different.
And also:
- Eric Ward wrote about The winter of linking’s discontent
- Rand Fishkin discussed footer link optimization
- Angela Moore explains why you shouldn’t think like a student when chasing .edu links
- Eric Enge interviewed Rand Fishkin and asked quite a few questions about Linkscape
- Tom Critchlow shows how you can actually get links from your linkbait
Link building morphed into link buying is a scary state of events. But if you’re competition is doing it and they’re coming out ahead… What can you do?
Users who buy and sell links are being penalized by Google. This is not a good game to get into.
@Terius – report them? That’s what some people do unfortunately and I don’t think I could ever come to it. It seems like a mean thing to do but Google does have the option there in the webmaster section. But I’m like most, I don’t support paying for links or reporting someone for it. There are hundreds of unique ways of building links and chances are you’ll eventually claw your way up there.
Great recap for the week Wiep!
Well link building is gaining a huge place in the SEO industry.It helps webmaster gain better rankings in google.Well it’s up to us to choose which link building method is the most for us..
That’s one way to do it Ryan. Though I also cannot go that far. I don’t think I’m that much against link buying personally but if it’s against the “rules” set out by those who regulate (and their rules are there for fairness) I cannot do it myself.
I just feel there is a really fine line, between link swapping, reciprocal links, and link buying. I mean, your selling a link on your site for a price, the price just happens to be, and link in return, the price could easily be a sum of money.
To me there is too fine a line to be able to distingiush.
Alan
I think the only way Google will succeed in pushing link building to the background is to offfer other (free) ways for websites to promote themselves. Apparently there are plans to take link popularity down a notch in the Google ranking algorithm, which would change the current SEO techniques and steer them towards whatever the most important metric might be… Yet another opportunity for the big G to start monopolizing an internet niche.
Hard to determine what Google might use to replace links within their algorithm.
I agree with Alan above, if you swap links surely it is the same as selling links.
Your still giving a value to a link on your site. Only the value is not money, it is a back link.