What are the rules of link building?

Not sure if you are building links the right way or still subscribing to outdated practices? We simplify which link building tactics still matter and which are a waste of time. Links are one of the top three ranking factors in Google, which can greatly benefit your website by increasing its search engine visibility and in turn bringing traffic in. However, businesses are still confused on what’s okay to do and what’s not when it comes to link building.

What to do

Value of the link – You should find out what kind of value the link you find can bring to your website, whether it can potentially bring traffic to your website or not. You should also consider if it is relevant and what the authority is for the link. So you would need to weight out your options and determine what’s really of value for your website.

Local listings – Local business citations are different platforms and services that can get you started a little quicker. By doing so, it shows Google that your business is where you say it is located. Within the listing it would have up to date business information such as the name, address, phone number.

So when it comes to link building for your business location, you can create a page on your website that says where you can find your business. By doing this, you can then link to those local listings to help search engines such as Google to get it indexed.

Unlinked mentions – The easiest way you can get a link is by figuring out who or which company has mentioned your brand or your business and not linking to it. So if you they have mentioned you and they haven’t linked back to you then you can simply reach out to them in order to get that link back.

Reclaim broken links – This is a great way to get back some of your links within a short amount of time and not much effort. Any link you have from a website that has now got a 404 error needs to be rectified or updated.

What not to do

Asking for specific anchor text – When you do these kind of things, it will appear as spam. Your website should be linked to however they see fit which would look more natural. Search engines such as Google will consider it to be more organic, and it will help your site in the long run.

Buying or sell links that pass PageRank – This is something that some businesses do where they buy or sell links that have a no-follow attached, this can actually show that it is paid for, whether it is for advertisement or not.

Low quality directory links – You should try and avoid using low quality directory links as it does not help with ranking and you can possibly get penalised for it.

Link schemes, private link networks or private blog networks – This is something that you would really get into trouble with as Google will penalize or de-index you altogether because It looks very spammy.