seo

Rules to Live By When Link Building in 2014

Its been a while since i posted about Blogging specially link building, So i thought it would be a good idea to post something about link building for my folks using SEO to drive traffic. Links are still just as important as ever to SEO in 2014, but only if handled properly. As many people are starting to realize, the wrong kind of links could end up being more of a liability than an asset, and result in Google taking action.

The worst part is: If action is taken against your website, it could take months before it recovers. Recently Google’s John Mueller said, “Over time (and this process can take months), as our algorithms re crawl the affected URLs, reprocess the links found on the web, and update their data, they’ll be able to take the new state into account.

Do Not Spam Links

In simple terms: Spamming does not work anymore. Towards the latter half of 2013 and the first month of 2014, it has become apparent that Google is proactively dealing with what they term as ‘unnatural links’.

As a result, spamming forums, blog comments or article websites with fake or low quality content isn’t going to cut it. Similarly link farms, excessive link exchanges, automated programs, and so on are risky propositions too.

Relevance is Key

Nowadays, using the exact same keyword is a surefire way to set off the alarms for ‘unnatural links’ – but relevance is still as important as ever. Last year Google introduced the concept of ‘Things, not strings’ that emphasized the fact that the links that point to your website should come from websites that deal with a similar topic.

Long story short: Relevance should be real, and not limited to anchor text. The topic of the websites linking to you should be related to the topic of your own websites, and that’s what is important.

Guest Blogging May Be Done

Just a week or so ago, Google’s Matt Cutts essentially warned that guest blogging is on the Google Webspam Team radar: “Given how spammy it’s become, I’d expect Google’s webspam team to take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward.”

Make no mistake, guest blogging is still going to be an excellent way to gain exposure, reach, and so on – it is just low quality guest blogging resembling spam that seems likely to take a hit.

Create Link-Able Assets

Increasingly, it seems as if the trick for link building on 2014 is going to revolve around creating link-able assets in the form of content or even applications.

Essentially, link-able assets are simply anything that people tend to link to because it is useful, interesting and unique. While such assets are not easy to create by any means, their value is beyond doubt especially since owners of other websites related to yours are likely to link to it – automatically and naturally creating the sort of backlinks that Google wants everyone to have.

Pay Attention to Authority

As far as authority websites with those .gov or .edu domains are concerned – not much has changed in 2014! Backlinks from these websites are just as powerful as ever, though even more so if they are somehow relevant too.

Moving forward it is safe to say that 2014 will probably see Google take even greater measures in an attempt to provide its users with the most relevant results. Throughout 2013 and this early stage of 2014, Google has shown that it is willing to walk to talk in policing its requirements on backlinks.

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