Linkophobia: Fear of Link-Building

Though Google has warned people against link-building, it's a helpful practice that many people fail to differentiate from link-scheming.

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June 01, 2015 Categories

The link-building debate never seems to end. A small part of me hopes that my organic search competitors buy into the “link-building is dead” hype, but of course, anyone who ignores link-building in 2015 does so at their own peril.

Google spokespeople are masters at the art of fear, uncertainty and doubt. The search giant’s webmaster trends analyst John Mueller is no exception.

“We do use links as a part of our algorithms, but we use lots and lots of other factors, as well,” Mueller said during a Google+ hangout a few months back. So only focusing on links is probably going to cause more problems for your website than it actually helps.”

The takeaway for many observers is to avoid link-building. But over the years, I have learned how to properly parse these messages out. Sure, Google has “lots and lots of factors” built into its algorithm, but they are weighted very differently. In fact, only two factors have an additional and independent algorithm dedicated to them, one of those being links (Penguin).

The query posed to Mueller at 55:40 in the Google+ hangout was, “Is link-building in any way good for webmasters?” The short answer is an unequivocal yes.

Why the Mixed Message?

Mueller heads up Google’s Webmaster Central Help Forum, which is dedicated to crawling, indexing, and ranking. I took a lot of heat in the comments of this post from the mods in that forum after chastising them for giving out erroneous advice, specifically “Building followed links is against guidelines.” (It’s not).

I think the moderators do their best to help an endless stream of webmasters get their bearings straight. I don’t think anyone is intentionally trying to mislead webmasters. That said, many of the people seeking help in the forum are not seasoned SEOs and don’t understand the nuance between link-building and link-scheming. Coming from that frame of reference, the mods often respond to link building queries with a stock link-scheming answer: just don’t do it.

Back to that “Nuance” Thing

In the world of SEO, there are really only two kinds of links: those that conform to Google Webmaster Guidelines and links that don’t.

According to Google, the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

When Mueller says link-building is problematic, he’s refering to some common link-building schemes:

Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of Google guidelines. Here are a few common examples:

Will Backlinks Ever Lose Their Importance?

Though Matt Cutts said that “backlinks still have many many years left in them,” I suspect their weight in the algorithm will diminish over time as technology like Knowledge Based Trust evolves. Google’s ranking algorithm may utilize “lots and lots” of factors, but the right combination of website architecture and optimization, web content and backlinks still rules the SERPs.

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