Just How Important is Link Building, Anyway?

If you're a seasoned SEO practitioner, you're probably already familiar with the wishy-washy way that Google treats backlinks. Back-links are external links that point to a website. In the earliest days of SEO, the rule of thumb was that the more back-links a site had, the better it would rank on Google and the other major search engines. Due to abusive practices by many website owners, Google changed its algorithms in a way that supposedly made incoming links a lot less impactful on a site's ranking. According to a recent study, though, back-links still matter. If you're confused, you're not alone.

For a long time, Google placed a lot of weight on the number of links a site had pointing to it from websites around the Internet. The algorithm treated these back-links as votes in favor of a site, which made a lot of sense. If people are linking to a particular site, after all, it must be fairly high in quality. Before people caught on to the importance of back-links, this was largely true. Like so many other aspects of SEO, however, many website owners took things too far.

Over time, website owners came to realize that the more links they had pointing to their sites, the more highly they'd rank. Back then, where the links came from didn't matter. Quantity was far more important than quality. Google's algorithms didn't discriminate. All of that changed around 2012, when Google's infamous Penguin algorithm update was unleashed. Penguin took direct aim at manipulative link-building practices, which included link networks that would post links to sites at random -- often in exchange for money or for links in return. These tactics helped sites rank prominently, but they made search results misleading at best. Needless to say, Google wants to help people find what they need, so they started penalizing websites that engaged in these so-called black-hat link-building techniques.

Since then, website owners have been understandably gun-shy about soliciting incoming links. However, they haven't stopped completely, and a new study by Moz highlights why. The company's biannual ranking correlation study reveals that there continues to be a high correlation between having a large number of back-links and a high ranking on Google. Still, Google continues to insist that it's algorithms give no weight to incoming links. Whether that's true or not, the study shows that among competitive keywords and phrases in particular, the most highly ranked sites tend to have far more incoming links than average.

Despite the study's eye-opening revelations, website owners should continue to avoid black-hat link-building techniques. Sites are still penalized for engaging in them. At the same time, they shouldn't abandon their link-building efforts entirely. Instead of relying on link farms, writing guest blogs and engaging in tactics that are frowned upon by Google, site owners should employ a link earning strategy. What this means is to create content that's so compelling, unique, useful and engaging that other sites sincerely want to link to it. Social media is a great tool for getting excellent content in front of other relevant sites, but there's no harm in sending friendly messages to the owners of other websites if you feel like your content will pique their interest.

What this all boils down to is that link-building is not dead. It still pays to have incoming links to your website. However, quality trumps quantity more than ever. Back-links from relevant, useful, highly regarded sites are the most effective, and they can't be earned through manipulative link-building tactics. As has been the case for so long, the key to winning the rankings game continues to be creating fresh, unique, engaging content. That's one thing that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

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