Link building - still effective ?

[kiraftw]

Hi, I know 70-80% of the links on Google have no-follow keyword. What I need to know is if link building by using guest posting and a combination of no-follow links through social media is still effective ? What would you suggest in terms of link building. I have read all the articles on moz and everything, but I need a personal touch on this matter.

Thanks,
Andrei

[TheZenAgency]

I would tend to stay away from these techniques, aim to build your links through quality content creation that people genuinely want to link to.

Guest blogging shouldn't really be used as an SEO technique.

If however you are guest blogging to increase your brand awareness, increase your community etc. This would be fine

[donford]

Hi Andrei,

Link building is important. How you go about it may have been evolved since you last looked at the subject.

When you break it down Link Building was and still is all about building associations on the web to your site. Evaluating a link, the Anchor Text on the link, how many other links are on the referring page, how popular the referring page is, and now if the referring page is part of a spam network determines exactly how valuable that association is.

Knowing that you can also surmise that if you get a link on a popular site it will have much more value than that of a low value site. The trick is how do you actually get that link? The answer really depends on the site.

Guest blogging gained popularity because anybody could write an article and generate a link to their own site or content. Now blogs are a little less forgiving about giving out links and many will nofollow all user generated links. However, you can still find your quality content linked by website authors with follow links. This in a sense is how it always should have worked.

The original vision of web authority remains; the web masters give credit with follow links to things they feel are relevant. In turn search engines recognize this and give more authority to the pages and domains. This method of ranking was well before Social Media even was a blip on the screen. Today the search engine factor in so many other things like social signals, viral content, ad-blocks, user engagement and much more. But the fact is that the underlying vision is still intact. The associations you build via links are important signals to your site.

My basic recommendation on link building is as follows. Know your market. Know where your customers are engaging their peers, and establish yourself as an authority at those spots. Create unique creative content on your site. When appropriate drop links to your content. As an authority on the subject you will find your audience more receptive and may find your links being picked up in other spots all on their own.

Rand hosted a whiteboard Friday about Content and SEO on 10/24/2014. I encourage everyone to read Jeff Ferguson's comment (first) about this white board. It is very informative and provides a different take on how and where link building is going.

Good luck,

Don

[dynamyt100]

i want to say here that I have a competitor website who is ranking VERY well for spammy low ranking backlinks and he seems to continue to evade any penalties. Its very frustrating for those of us who try to adhere to preferred standards.

[MonicaOConnor]

Don is spot on here. Content and Link Building are the top of the SEO priority list. I strongly encourage you to do more research and ignore anyone who tells you that blog posts and any other form of content back linking is out dated. There are so many ways to build links, and the most important thing to remember is that they need to be organic and to quality sites.

Just because someone is ranking well and they appear to have really spammy links doesn't mean that 1. they aren't going down the road of punishment and 2. their link profile is why they are ranking well. There are 200 ranking factors, and about 17% of them are link related.

To touch on social media. It is growing in importance everyday. Social signals are extremely important and anyone who advises against social marketing is way outside of the best practice loop. Be very careful.

You don't want to build no follow links, they carry absolutely 0 link juice If you are building them in places where you will get referral traffic from them, then by all means, build away. Link building was originally devised as a way to drive traffic. It lost it's purpose because it became so manipulated, and now, with the help of penguin, it is starting to get back to its roots. Links have always been the highways and byways bringing traffic to your site, and if your links are driving traffic, they are doing their job. Whether it is from social, blogs or forums.

[donford]

This can be very frustrating. I watched one of our competitors sling shot to to out rank us on many of the terms we were competing on. We had them here at Moz as a tracked competitor and when Panda / Penguin updates hit they tanked. That was satisfying

Just keep on doing things right, Google has the money as really is trying to stop these sorts of tactics.

[kiraftw]

Hey guys,

Thanks a lot for the valuable insight. It's definitely going to help me. I also had the impression that linking back to high quality domains by creating unique and valuable content is a great way of improving the SEO.