Links are the bread and butter of website marketing. If nobody is linking to your website, there’s nothing for Google to follow and little reason for it to index your website. SEO professionals discovered many years ago that the more websites that link to you, the better it is for your site. It was also observed that the choice of words used for the link was important, so having ‘click here’ as your link would be as effective as having ‘SEO’ as your link, if you were an SEO company for example.
What this ‘startling’ discovery led to however was a wave of SEO professionals (not all of them ethical) garnering as many links for theirs, and their clients’, websites as possible. It didn’t matter where the links were from, what country they were from, what the quality of websites or even what the subject of websites. All links were good… at least that’s what they thought.
Google however didn’t get to where it is today by being fooled by cheap tricks such as mass link buying. If it did, then its results pages would resemble a who’s who of which companies had the biggest links budgets. Its results pages would be useless for the end user (much like the SERPs on Live.com).
Google isn’t that stupid and mass link buying tactics don’t work, at least not for long. Therefore if you’re looking at getting links for your website you should be very careful about where you get them from. There are many suppliers who will spend your money on as many links as possible, resulting in your website receiving lots on indexed back links that come packaged with negative SEO benefit.
Also remember that Google doesn’t like paid links at all. This isn’t to say that your website shouldn’t actively seek out links, nor does that it mean that you shouldn’t personally seek out links. No, if it weren’t for links, websites linking to other websites, there would be no ‘net’ in the Internet.
Quantity is what matters with sites that link to your website. It’s not even a case of one high quality, relevant website linking to you is worth a thousand low quality, irrelevant websites… it’s much, much more important than that. One high quality, relevant website linking to you could be the difference to your website ranking on the first page, or nowhere in the SERPs.
Equally, thousands of low quality, irrelevant sites linking to you could see your website disappear altogether.
When it comes to links it really is a case of handle with care as they can be explosive for your site, or explode in your face.
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