SEO Bad Links, Good Links and Great Links

From a SEO’s perspective once you have identified winning keywords, and your content strategy is in place to target those keywords (while ensuring that the optimized content is easily accessible to search crawlers with no error pages, broken links, redirect and 404 errors), the next and most important step to higher rankings is building quality links to that content.

Link building is probably the most time consuming and difficult task at hand for the seo expert. Little wonder there is so much attention, hype, mystery and stigmata that is surrounding link building strategies.

Now there are many link building companies who make promises of 1000 links in 1 hour, or link exchange programs that assert to miraculously pass link juice to your website. We also know that search engines frown at such behavior, and yet they may not be actually penalizing such manipulative sites for now.

I have seen many sites that blatantly ignore search engines on-page guidelines, and having links from sites that are obviously manipulating for links, but we are not here to evaluate these exception cases or judge the search engines.

In addition, search algorithms have a lot more variables in place now to evaluate a link from being worthy of passing on the link juice or not.

All this adds to the general confusion for companies planning their link building strategy, budgets and what constitutes a bad link, a good link and a great link.

A bad link, is bad link building …

Now we don’t know if the search engines actually wean out certain links as bad links or if they penalize a site which is getting a link back from such a website, but we do know that search engines value those links that come from popular and credible sources.

The advice I give to clients who are in a hurry to get linked-up is - why play hide and seek with the search engines when sooner or later you will be found. Why take a chance to be penalized, or worse, banned from a search engine?

So what is a bad link? A bad link can be defined as a link that comes from a source that has little or no content, is not popular, is involved in black hat seo, link exchanges, and is basically trying to deceive the search engines and the users into believing it to be of some value.

Good link building can take time and patience …

Good links can come from social, web and user communities the seo expert targets by specifically submitting the website/ content to these websites manually. If a website which are popular (have a good page rank) and a good link reputation gives a link to your website/content pages then it can be counted as a good link.

One can submit to web directories (make sure they are managed by human editors and not automated), article submissions sites, social bookmarking sites, Google knoll, Yahoo answers, Wikipedia (in some cases), and relevant blogs (and by commenting on the blogs) that have a high page rank.

Good links can also be earned by taking the effort to find other sites that have relevant content to yours and painstakingly requesting them to link back to your website. Try not to participate in reciprocal linking (one way links are the best, as search engines assume that you have gotten the link purely on credit and not favor).

You can also see your competitions links, and then try and attract some of those good ones for yourself. The bad news is that you are playing “follow the leader” with your competition.

Many impatient link builders prefer buying links from websites by offering the owners some money in exchange for a link. I leave this one to you!

Give me Great link building anytime…

So what makes a link great?

Is it the fact that the link comes from a website that’s popular, has a high page rank and an active user community? This could very well be categorized in the good links section so what constitutes a “great link” to a search engine.

A link is counted as a great link if a website (even with a decent page rank) links back to your content because they found your content on their own, and found it valuable enough (for their users) to link back to it. This is also called as link baiting i.e. your great content is the bait to get other websites to link back.

While a lot of time, effort and money can go into creating good links, once you stop your link building campaign, your links stop too! This does not mean that you don’t need to focus on getting those good links, but rather build a link matrix that balances both the worlds.

The thing about great links is that it needs great content! And if you can focus on delivering and promoting your unique, compelling and engaging content you are already on your way to higher rankings.