Is Link Building Dead?
For the past five years at least link building has been the primary occupation of SEOs around the world. Some SEOs teach that you can’t achieve high rankings without building inbound links. I disagree, but that’s a digression. The real matter is whether or not link building as we know it today will soon come to an end. I think it may.
Link building began as a response to Google’s emphasis on inbound links for the basis of authority. PageRank is determined largely by the quantity and quality (as judged by Google’s guidelines) of links point in to a website. But the philosophy undergirding that quality is a bit skewed.
In the past, Google has viewed links into a website as votes in favor of quality content on the linked-to website. But that is not always the case. There are a number of reasons why one website might link to another, and not all of them are good. It could be that a link is a way of mocking or ridiculing the website being linked to. It could be that it serves as a resource link for the basis of a criticism. Perhaps it isn’t a vote for quality at all.
Nevertheless, that’s Google’s philosophy. And it has spawned an entire industry of link building, link buying, and link spamming. It is almost out of control and it could very well be ruining the Internet. Perhaps Google’s sense of quality is skewed in teh wrong direction. When they figure that out there will be a change.
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