The Future of Link Building: 5 Important Messages
Best practices rapidly change within SEO as technologies (and Google's guidelines) evolve. But one thing hasn't changed: the importance of links.
Obviously there are other fundamental concerns (e.g., indexation, crawlability, duplicate content, site architecture), but link acquisition needs to be an active consideration.
Links are still the strongest signal we can give to Google about the importance of our content and site. So, if you're working to increase search visibility, links need to be a primary consideration.
The water is muddy right now though with Google's war on spam links, and from what I've observed attending recent conferences I think a few messages need to be addressed within SEO:
Links are still immensely powerful.
This is confirmed by:
1. Moz's 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors.
2. Matt Cutts, Google's distinguished engineer, in two different webmaster videos:
3. Amit Singhal, Google's head of search.
But we're all aware of Google's recent crackdown on link building activities. We're aware that MyBlogGuest didn't really deserve the penalty, and that more realistically it was a PR move.
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The Future of Link Building: 5 Important Messages