The Age Old Question: Whats the Future of Link Building? by @neilpatel
Link building is a bad word to most SEOs and online marketers. If youre an agency who does link building, you get fired by your clients. If youre an in-house SEO who does link building, you get fired from your company. If you do link building, your site gets hit with a penalty. However you slice it, link building is evil incarnate in the world of search engine optimization.
Or is it?
It seems to me as if SEOs have to tow the party line. Link building is evil and therefore, SEOs must act in likethey believe link building is bad. Because SEO is still recovering from the smut of old link building days, we have to recover our reputation by declaring loudly, with the rest of them, that link building is horrible!
But every SEO knows that link building is absolutely imperative for successful SEO(link goes to an article on the topic on my own site). Were caught in the classic Catch-22 of modern SEO the need and evilness of link building.
I want to sketch out what I believe the future of link building is, but first, we need to take a look at two important subjects: Why link building is bad, and why link building is good.
Link building is the locus of classic black hat techniques from a few years ago.
Remember the wild west days of SEO, when you could PayPal a few bucks to someone and get 200 links to your website in a few hours? Get me to the first position on Google was totally not a problem, as long as you knew what strings to pull and what links to build.
However, it was spam city. Google wised up and started putting the kibosh on these practices. Algorithms got better at detecting against-the-rules junk, and SEOs responded by respecting the limits imposed upon them.
Today, you are totally unable to rank by exploiting the black-hat techniques that SEOs used to pawn off as optimization. Alarmingly, there are still some shady agencies that do commit such disrespect to the search gods. In reality, what these agencies are doing is accepting money in exchange for smearing a website in the dirt. Penalties shall come upon them like a plague.
I cant tell you the number of times that Ive responded to a distraught call or email from someone saying We hired an SEO agency to help us, and now we have a penalty!
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The Age Old Question: Whats the Future of Link Building? by @neilpatel