The Importance of Building Links - Played Out Link Building Strategies

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A major part of search engine optimization is link building.  Link building is the process of getting other web sites to place a link to your web site on their own web site.  Over the years there have been many linking strategies developed so that web sites would rank well in the search engines.  Many of these strategies, while still used by some SEOs, are just "played out."

The most played out linking strategy is automated reciprocal linking.  Reciprocal linking involves actively searching for related web sites, placing a link to a web site and then sending the web site owner a canned e-mail asking them to link back.  A web site owner who has a popular site is more than likely being inundated with link exchange requests.  Chances are your canned e-mail is being used by thousands of other web site owners looking for sites with which to exchange links.

Another reason a link swap is played out is because the process simply doesn't carry as much weight as it used to.  Search engines like Google and Yahoo! do not value links that are bartered for, and a link exchange is just that, an agreement to place a link on your site for something in return.

Another played out linking strategy is purchasing links from an automated system or link farm.  The fundamental problem with automated linking systems and link farms is that they are based on swapping links with another site; in other words, it's another bartered link.

Additionally, most of the automated systems available on the market only allow you one link per account.  This means that all of the text in the anchor tags of your link is the same.  For example, let's say my target keyword is "Quit smoking now."  If all of the links that point to my site look like this:

<a href= http://mysite.com> Quit smoking now></a>

Then I would have thousands of links to my site all with the same anchor text.  This does not look natural to the search engines.  Over time, these links will be de-valued and my rankings will drop.  As the search engine algorithm becomes more sophisticated the ability for them to detect unnatural linking strategies becomes better.

Next: Effective Linking Strategies >>
 

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