Quality Link Building used to be so easy. All you needed to do was to find websites or blogs or forums anywhere, and comment. You could go to some synthesizer music blog, leave an irrelevant comment about how you had 20% off leather wallets at your website, and you would have a link that counted with Google. And you didn’t really have to worry about quality link building; practically everything counted, from reciprocal link exchanges to posting articles on the content mills.Ever since Google’s Panda and Penguin updates came out at the beginning of this year though, things have been quite different. Google doesn’t just want to see lots of links to your website all over the Internet anymore (even if that is still in important to a certain degree). They want to make sure now that the people linking to you, have quality, well-respected websites. They want to make sure that no-one’s just taking advantage of the system and getting links in just about any which way. You really do need to start thinking about quality link building now – where your links come from websites that aren’t tainted or known for their jiggery-pokery.
When you bring this up with some website owners, they are appalled. They will point to their competitors who are clearly still stuck in the past. They have thousands of links that come from websites that are complete garbage, and they seem to do very well nevertheless. Why can’t they do the same, they ask.
The thing is, Google’s algorithm change hasn’t managed to catch every website out there yet. There are quite a few that have slipped in through the cracks. But it’s quite clear what their intent is. They’re looking for some kind of quality. Link building, as Google sees it, isn’t about gaming the system or about cheating Google. They are clearly on the warpath and their algorithm refinements will find a way to screen out the bad websites sooner or later. It doesn’t even matter if it’s a major company – JCPenney and Overstock were very publicly penalized for gaming the system with poor quality links. Who says that your small competitor won’t have the same done to him?
Okay, so you do see the sense in this, but how do you know what websites to turn to for quality link building purposes? How do you tell a quality website apart from a poor one?
Of course, most often, you can tell just by looking. If a website seems to have horrendous design and it is plastered with all kinds of ads, then that’s your first clue. You could look deeper – if they have lots of very poor quality content, they are probably going to manage to get on Google’s “devalued website list very soon. Also, you could look at the comments. If there are lots of spammy comments in the comment section with lots of links, then you know right away that this is an easy website. And you don’t want to have your links seen next to those spammy links. Quality link building is about going to websites that aren’t like this.
