Link building has been part of the internet since its birth. But is it still important or has it had its day?

As ever, there’s no easy answer to this question.

Links are definitely still important – without them, we wouldn’t find our way around the web and the search engines wouldn’t find new content.

You may be wondering about that second part of the statement. After all, the search engines regularly crawl round sites in search of new content. That’s true but they still rely on links to find any of that content that isn’t on pages they are already aware of. The links may be on pages they’re crawling again or in the site map.

But, of course, that’s not what we normally think of when we talk about link building.

Instead, we really mean backlink building.

Backlinks to your site can arrive naturally – other people like your content so much that they decide to link back to it – or artificially.

Natural links are encouraged by creating good content. But, since people have to find your good content in the first place, it’s a chicken and egg situation.

Including social media buttons so that people can Tweet about you and like you in places like Facebook and Google+ is a good idea – it can help leverage even meagre amounts of traffic over time.

Tweeting about your latest content can help so long as you have a decent number of followers on Twitter and don’t just Tweet promotional stuff all the time (otherwise you’ll bug your followers and lose their interest).

At some stage, you’ll start to think about building links.

But is link building still important?

Yes, but in a different way from a few years ago.

It used to be a case of “pile it high” and “the more links the merrier”.

And if you want short term success that can still be an option – part of Google’s algorithm takes account of fast moving stories and the biggest of these always attract a large number of links in a short space of time.

So, for a short amount of time, those links push the story to the top of the results.

Then the number of links drops to normal (zero or close to that) which indicates to Google that the story is no longer important and its algorithm downplays it.

That happens so often that it’s built in to the algorithm.

Which means that you can “trick” the algorithm into thinking your site is important by creating lots of links fast.

The precise links that count towards this varies – until a year or two ago, press releases worked nicely but then too many people started using them to try to influence the search results and their importance diminished.

So the mix involved in link building varies over time.

Nowadays, it’s best to include as diverse a range of links as possible.

They should be diverse in terms of anchor text; follow/nofollow attribute and the importance of the sites they come from.

Some people say that a link from a page that is relevant to your topic counts for more than one from an irrelevant page. Others disagree with that.

I don’t work for Google but my guess is that the first of those two statements is true with the caveat of “all other things being equal”. Which is rarely, if ever, the case. Certainly if I was involved in the algorithm decisions I’d weight a link from a relevant page higher – so long as I could figure out whether or not the page was relevant.

Note that I’ve said the relevance of the page, not the site.

But coming back to the question of whether or not link building is still important…

Done carefully, in a manual fashion, I’d say yes.

It’s tempting to buy a gazlillion backlinks from somewhere like Fiverr but these are highly automated links and are unlikely to count for anything nowadays, even in the kind of quantities some vendors are selling them in.

It’s far better, in my opinion, to work at your links regularly.

Mix in some or all of the following:

• Links from videos (YouTube, Vimeo, etc)
• Links from articles (EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, etc)
• Links from guest posts
• Links from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc
• Links from forum posting – signatures and profiles
• Directory links – local, national and international
• Relevant niche sites and blogs

And do it randomly.

Don’t be a robot on this and always get precisely two links at precisely the same time each and every day. That’s not natural!

The aim is to keep it as natural as possible.

So if you miss a couple of days and then make up for it (or don’t). that’s a lot more natural than mimicking a robot that would get exactly the same number of links, day in, day out.

The other thing to ignore is the “importance” of domain extensions.

This usually crops up if someone offering to do some link building for you says that .edu links or .gov links are worth more than .com links.

That’s not the case as far as I’m aware.

Sure, those links are rarer but then so are links from .tv or .gr domains. And no-one is claiming those are more valuable as a backlink.

The only logic for educational or government domain back links being more valuable is that they are limited to certain establishments or bodies being able to use them. But if you’ve ever bought such a package on sites like Fiverr, you’ll quickly realise that the links being sold are not hard to get and, as such, are highly unlikely to be worth paying extra for.

Keep at your link building.

You may like to keep a spreadsheet to keep track of where you’ve placed links.

Or you may prefer to leave things to their natural course.

If you’d like to know more about getting targetted traffic to your website, click here.

And feel free to leave a comment below with your thoughts on link building.