ASM Development - taking websites beyond design

Google UK Offers Advice On Quality Link Building

Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post written by the UK Google team offering advice on how to develop quality links to your site. They also offer some advice on how not to gain links. Building quality links is one of the main factors that can affect the position of your pages in search results.

It is important to also point out that it is only one factor and other factors like on-page optimisation are also important. It is interesting to note the importance of social media in building quality links as expressed by the Google team. So what does Google recommend? In a nutshell:

• Getting involved in the community around your topic – through forums and relevant blogs by playing an active and valued role, not by leaving spammy links.
• Providing content that solves problems, answers questions or supplies a tool. It’s interesting to see the recommendation for videos.
• Providing information in the form of statistics, survey results and research.
• Using humour and other link bait tactics – they also noted that these were fine for short term gain but did not always offer long term benefits.
• Submitting to directories that were in your niche and moderated.
• Looking at how similar sites build links.
• Placing social media bookmarking buttons (or share type buttons) on your site.

When it comes to factors that shouldn’t be followed, it really only came down to three. Buy links, randomly exchange links, and mass submissions to directories. These are of little or no value and really don’t help your site’s long term reputation. In the future, masses of inbound links will probably count for little if they are ‘poor quality’ links – or links acquired through mass submissions.

You need to be smart with your link building program. Google states it’s a slow process and it can be. However, by slowly building quality links, you will find that as you climb up the search results page, their position will most likely remain stable and fluctuate as others. Do also remember that link building is only one component – on-page optimisation, social media marketing and search marketing should also be considered. Still, it’s nice to have feedback from Google on what they consider to be quality links.