Link building in 2014

As Google continues to change the algorithms for how their search engine works, one might ask our old strategies still worth it? Link building is one of those strategies that has been kind of pushed back because of how poorly it has been used in the past.

Link building is often referred as back linking. They are essentially the same thing and that and goal is to bring a user back to your website from a link on another website. 

 It used to be that a website company would hire a SEO company ,who had networks with other affiliate companies for cross-linking. Simply meaning, the SEO company would ask all of its companies to host your link and vice a versa. Google would then rank your site higher than other sites because you had more back links pointing to your website. Google eventually caught on to this practice and subsequently lowered the rankings of many websites due to poor quality back links. 

Another common tactic would be, going on to social media networks and posting a link back to your website. There are entire companies that do nothing more then post links back to your website and comment boxes of social media networks, and blogs. This is what's called a "Black hat practice." A black hat practice means that that particular strategy is either unethical, or damaging to your Google ranking. 

Of course two people who have no idea how the web community works think that posting their website on a bunch of different random post somehow helps their website. They are literally destroying their website ranking and ultimately Google will recognize them as a spammer rather than contributor of original content. 

So how do you get to the top using a link building strategy?

The answer, go for quality over quantity. One good quality link is better than 10 suspect links. Any website that has been around for a decent amount of time with original content is considered a quality link. Anything with the domain name ending in .edu, or .gov is pretty much a safe bet. While many back links may happen by chance, the best ones are actually well strategized. Reaching out to known websites in the chance that your website maybe mentioned is key. 

Sorry to tell you SEO still takes hard work and intelligent strategy. If a SEO company tell you otherwise they are probably using black hat practices.