Links. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Truth

Back in 2009 you could get a link from anywhere, with keyword driven anchor text and you could see your website fly up Google’s ranking for that specific keyword. Within a few weeks you could be contending for one of the top positions and your website could earn a fortune (even a one page landing-page). You didn’t need to invest time or money in doing this; it was as easy as it came.

However, Google got smart to these spammy sites, and realized that SEO’s were taking advantage of the search engine and its results. The reality was Google’s search results were poor for general customers looking to get somewhere. Something had to be done, and the first things that needed to change were links.

Why Are Links Important?

Look at it this way, a website with no links at all in Google’s eyes is a website that really doesn’t hold much value because no one seems to care about it. Websites that have hundreds of links from link farms or poor quality sites falls into the same basket, these are viewed as sites that are trying to game the system.

Then you have the third group of sites that may have some really good quality links but they contain keyword rich anchor texts which were looked down upon by Google in the last few years. These type of links used to be powerful but now they can do the complete opposite and penalise you in search results, ruining your site.

The trick here is to either pull back your link profile from Google Webmaster Tools, and contact websmasters to change the link text to something more organic (like the domain name or domain itself) or file a disavow text file which basically tells Google to ignore that link when they crawl your website.

With the right links in place, your website could easily outperform your competitors.

What is The Right Link?

SEO’s now look for earned links or earned media, so these are links that haven’t been paid for in anyway, these are links that have been organically created through either a great service or product or an amazing piece of content that is worthy of a link. Whether that content is stat driven, or offers something useful for a user it doesn’t matter, as long as that content is of the highest quality.

If a link can be gained from a Tier A type publication or Tier B blog then it shows Google that these sites are linking to you for a good reason. By Tier A I mean sites such as newspapers or high-profile media outlets, and your Tier B’s are sites that are big but aren’t one man bloggers.

In some cases you will need to approach these sites to discuss opportunities but never should there be a forced effort to get a link, it should be natural.

If you are worried about how to get these links then one agency that implements white hat tactics is Good Monster, here you will be able to work alongside them in getting the right attention for your site.

Just remember its quality over quantity, and out-witting your competitors.

Author Bio:-

Sunny Popali is an everyday learner and editor working at Good Monster an SEO agency in Syracuse. He is passionate about helping online businesses to achieve their goals with cost-effective SEO & Digital Marketing services. He believes that you should keep conversion rates in mind.