In order for the search engines to crawl the vast universe that is the worldwide web, they use links as avenues to get to various pages. The search engines employ complex link analysis procedures to discover the relationships between pages. The use of links by these search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and other is not something new. As a matter of fact since the conception of internet technology links have been treated as votes for importance and popularity by the search engines. They are more like an opinion poll of the various websites that are available on the internet.
However, there has been a significant change in how the search engines treat the links. The search engines currently use sophisticate algorithms to carry out nuanced scrutiny of various sites and pages based on the link data that they collect. Still there has been a lot of gossip that link building does not help search engine optimization (SEO) anymore. Quite on the contrary, you cannot do without link building in this day and era.
Link building in 2015
It is hard to refute the fact that links are not everything in SEO but at the same time they do mean quite a lot to the search engines as well. It is not possible to determine the algorithm that is used by the likes of Google and Bing but SEO experts have tried to make conclusions of what is most important to them. Professionals in this field have attributed a considerable portion of the engines’ algorithms to factors that are related to the links.
By the use of links, the search engines are able to assess the popularity of a website or a webpage. This is based on the number of pages that are linking to them and also the popularity of these linking pages. At the same time the engines are also able to determine various measures such as trustworthiness, authority and spam. It goes without saying that trustworthy websites tend to connect to other sites that are trusted and spammy website connect to their relatives. It is a case of the proverbial birds of a feather flocking together.
It is thanks to this focus on the analysis of links that growing a site’s link profile is an important activity for improving its performance on the search engines. Any SEO professional will tell you that link building is one of the most important tasks that are required for search ranking and improving the traffic being directed towards a specific website.
Valuable links
Consider a site like Wikipedia: now this is a website that has built a wide link profile. Wikipedia has millions of sites linking towards it. This is why it is highly ranked on the search engines. What is it that you would want to know about the universe or an individual? Wikipedia probably has what you are looking for. This might tempt you to think that having billions of sites linking to your website is great for you. It is not exactly the case. The value of the links is what is of primary importance to the search engines and not the number of links.
So, how do these search engines assign value to links? There are several elements of a link that will have to be considered. They are not exactly the elements that search engines use but from years of link analysis, companies providing SEO services have come up with conclusions on the link signals that are of great importance. These signals and many others are considered by SEO professionals to be of great importance when placing value to a link.
1. Global popularity
Again consider the case of Wikipedia, this site is probably the largest encyclopedia you can find on the planet and it still continues to grow. It has so many diverse websites linking to it. This can only mean that it is probably an important site as it is popular. In order to earn this global popularity, your site will need to get a variety of other sites (trusted sites) to link to it. The more popular a linking site is, the better it is for your site.
2. Local popularity
If your site has links from other sites within your niche then it is going to have better performance than one that has general sites linking to it. For instance, if your site is a fashion blog then it helps to have multiple links from other sites in the fashion industry more than it will help you to have a link from a company selling metal cages for birds.
3. TrustRank
No one loves spam sites- not even the search engines. It should come as no surprise that close to 60% of the worldwide web’s pages is spam. Search engines try to weed out this irrelevant content by using various tools for measuring trust. Many of these tools are based on the link graph. Getting links from trusted websites boosts the score of a website.
4. Link neighborhood
As aforementioned, spam linking is often two-way traffic. A site that has linked to a spam site is most probably a spam itself. It probably has many spam sites that are linking back to it as well. The search engines assess these links in general and they are able to determine your website’s ‘link neighborhood’. It is thus paramount that you select the sites you link to carefully.
5. Link freshness
This is not a joke the links must be as fresh as the groceries you pick out from the supermarket. This is at all if you want to improve the popularity and relevance of your site. Usually link signals decay as time goes by. A site that was once upon a time very popular becomes stale and it fails to earn new links. It is of great importance to continue adding links as time goes by.
Bottom line
Link building might not be as popular as it was a few years ago but it is still important for SEO purposes. You cannot ignore it and concentrate on social media and content marketing as some people tend to do. However, even as you build your site’s link profile, make sure that you do so properly.