What Is Link Building?

Date First Published: 14th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what link building is in this article.

Link building is the process of getting backlinks, also known as inbound links, to a webpage from other websites with the aim of boosting the search engine ranking of that page. Link building is an essential part of SEO because the number of external links pointing to a webpage is one of the main factors that search engines use to rank pages. They are essentially votes of external confidence to a page. Also, the quality of the external links matter. An external link from a very popular website can give a huge ranking boost, whilst an external link from a low-quality website will not give a huge boost.

Link Building Methods

Examples of link building methods are:

• Guest posting - This is the act of writing content for someone else’s website or blog. It is unlikely that a site owner would reject a well-written and free piece of content that can attract visitors to their website as long as it is related to the topic of their website. Guest posts can include backlinks to the guest’s website, boosting their search engine ranking. The backlink may also be placed in the ‘about the author’ section. In order to get SEO benefits from the guest post, make sure that the links are “dofollow” and are not marked with the “nofollow” attribute.
• Citations - If a webmaster allows someone else to use their text on their website, they can gain backlinks by asking them to link back when citing their source. This method requires content to be valuable enough for people to use and cite it on their websites. Linkbait content describes content that will receive a lot of backlinks.
• Reciprocal links - This is when someone links to someone else’s website and they link back to theirs. This is an agreement between two webmasters to manually place links, often filled with keyword-filled anchor text.
• Broken link building - This is the act of the owner of a site finding broken links on the World Wide Web and asking other site owners with that broken link to instead link back to their site if they have something similar to the broken resource.

Nofollow Links

Some types of links are nofollow, which means that they are marked with the “rel=nofollow” attribute. This instructs search engine bots to not crawl the URL or pass any authority to the page. These types of links will not have any SEO benefits. Sites, such as YouTube, Reddit, and Quora nofollow all external links, so even though these are high authority sites, if someone linked to their website on there, it would not boost their search engine ranking. By default, comments and forums on WordPress sites nofollow all external links, usually to prevent people from passing authority to spam or malicious sites, since it is possible for anyone to write a post at any time. For more information on nofollow links, see here.

White Hat and Black Hat Link Building

White hat link building is a type of link building that abides by the webmaster guidelines of search engines, such as Google and Bing and aims to naturally increase the number of backlinks to a website. This could be accomplished by publishing high-quality content on a regular basis that people will want to share will encourage other websites and users to link to and recommend it, creating natural external links to a website.

Although white hat link building takes time to achieve, white hat link building methods are widely used by website owners as these types of strategies are not only beneficial to the long-term development of a website, but also beneficial to the online environment.

On the other hand, black hat link building is a type of link building that aims to artificially increase the number of backlinks to a website in a way that violates the webmaster guidelines of search engines. Link schemes, also known as link farms, are a type of black hat link building that aims to manipulate the ranking of pages through artificial links.

Examples of link schemes are exchanging money, services, or products for links, using automated programs, services, or bots to generate links, forcing users to link to a website (e.g. not allowing them to view the content unless they link to their website), and excessive link exchanges solely designed to boost the ranking of a webpage (e.g. Link to me and I will link to you). Search engines have implemented procedures to penalise sites that unnaturally gain backlinks through link schemes. If they detect artificial links, they may disavow them, meaning that the value of those backlinks will no longer take effect when Google ranks those pages.

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