How Much Has Link Building Changed in Recent Years?

The core principles of building and maintaining links remain intact, but over the years, significant changes in the signals that determine the value of a link can be observed. The most recent of these major changes rolled out in the second quarter of 2012 when Google introduced it’s Penguin update. Since this algorithm change, few, but significant changes occurred, ushering in the age of user data-driven results and machine learning.

The old mindset that the more links your website has, the higher it will rank is no longer valid. Webmasters in the past may have seen success in acquiring as many links as they can; regardless of their quality; for the sake of a short-lived spike in rankings. Today, however, this short-term approach simply cannot fly with the new standards. Business owners and webmasters, along with SEO specialists, now know that it takes so much more than link quantity to merit link-building strength.

Good content marketing is the way to good quality links, which is why developing content assets that your target audience cares about should be a major priority. This will encourage them to share your content and link to it from somewhere credible; somewhere authoritative; somewhere relevant. Generating link-worthy content that your visitors care enough to share organically, and other bloggers/websites deem valuable is a more efficient way to build and acquire quality links than any other tactic.

Today’s link building strategies must be grounded on major goals such as: creating a large enough audience who will enable you to receive traffic to brand new content. And you can build strong relationships with credible, trustworthy, and relevant websites. Google and other search engines are condemning scalable and artificial link-building. If you are still stuck in your old ways, you are bound to lose not only the quality and value of your links, but also your rankings; and eventually, your traffic.