The Great Link Building Mystery Unplugged

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 9, 2008 in Link Theory

Links are not THAT important to SEO. If you find yourself agonizing over how to build links to your Web site, you’re not engaged in search engine optimization.

I’ve said that many times before. Some people are struggling with their search placements right now because they didn’t do a very good job of placing links. If a search engine algorithm update is going to hurt your rankings, the odds are pretty good that you achieved your rankings through links and that means you did it wrong.

Links are tools, not solutions.

Links are the building blocks of the Web, but they are not where you should be placing most of your effort in search engine optimization.

If links are the foundation of your search engine strategy, you don’t have a search engine strategy. The foundation of your search engine strategy should be the words you write, the copy you place on your pages, the purpose of your site, the goal of your business, the marketing plan you laid out to build visibility for your business.

You need links to be admitted to the elite club of the search engine database. Who gets in? Anyone with a valid link or two. You don’t need a thousand links. You just need a few good links.

If you’re competing in a highly competitive query space, your competitors are probably using links to build their search relevance. You may find yourself doing the same thing. Then again, why are you competing in a highly competitive search space. I can understand when a business earns income from other sources that it may feel compelled to challenge the online world. But if you hit the competitive SERPs because you thought other people were making money from them, you did it wrong.

Coming to the competition after the other players have already gotten started is a losing proposition. You need a competitive advantage to help you leap ahead of the competition because they are already ahead of you.

I’ve been approached more than once by people who want to optimize a site for a competitive query, and they had no content on their site. If you’re thinking, “All I need are links”, where do you expect those links to come from? People don’t normally link to empty Web sites.

Linking is part of every effective SEO campaign. There are no effective SEO campaigns that rely solely on linking.

Of course, many people with Web sites that are several years old may feel they already have all the content they need, therefore they need links. But why?

If you’re losing rankings after several years, it should only be because other people came along and provided much more compelling and relevant content than you. If there is any other reason for your lost rankings (such as my links no longer pass value) then you did it wrong.

If you’re thinking, “Build great content and people will link to you,” you’re still doing it wrong. Creating a dependence upon links only weakens your SEO strategy. You cannot guarantee that links will be constructed properly, that they will pass value, that they will always pass value, that they will be there as long as your site is there, etc. There is absolutely no compelling reason to base an SEO campaign on links.

We need links for three reasons: To be crawled/indexed, to be validated (earn trust), to compete in highly competitive queries.

But if you’re competing in a highly competitive query and you weren’t there first, you should have a much better quality site than the other guy. And you should be prepared to invest a lot of time and energy in surpassing the other guys’ links.

A good Web site only needs its own internal linkage to help most pages rank for something useful. A bad Web site relies on external links.

If you really want links, you don’t have far to look for potential linking sources:

  1. Your own Web sites
  2. Your family’s Web sites
  3. Your friends’ Web sites
  4. Community Web sites
  5. Business Directories
  6. Professional organization Web sites
  7. Business partner Web sites
  8. The usual plethora of self-promotional Web sites

Sit down and write up a list of people and organizations with whom you share some sort of connection. I was interviewed by the university I earned two degrees from last year and they gave me a link on their Web site. I didn’t even have to ask for the link.

So what if Yahoo! says the other guys all have 30,000 links. Most of them don’t pass value anyway.

Get links that create visibility and credibility for you. Get links that build traffic for you. Get links that show people you’re part of a community. Don’t worry about the anchor text.

2 Comments on The Great Link Building Mystery Unplugged

By eserrano on January 10, 2008 at 10:24 am

Michael-

Excellent write-up. Any advice on effective internal linking?

On a return flight to the US from London a couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a contributor to searchengineland.com. He was a speaker at the recent London SMX. Our conversation lead to multiple links to my site from his subsequent articles on the conference that he published on searchengineland. The links provided a great boost to my site that I’d otherwise not seen from other linking campaigns, not that I do many anyway.

By the way, I’ve been reading much over the past few months on the topic of SEO (as I’ve not practiced it in a couple of years) and must say that it’s great to read your alternative perspective to the “sell your soul for links” posts. Thanks for the words.

By Michael Martinez on January 10, 2008 at 3:14 pm

Try this query about internal linking from SEO Theory, although the most relevant results don’t come up first.

Welcome to SEO Theory.

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About the Author

Michael Martinez is the Director of Search Strategies for 1st Query, an Internet Marketing firm offering organic SEO and PPC services.

Optimizing through community activism What other people’s queries teach you about SEO