Link building is one of the SEO techniques to rank a site on Google and other search engines. Often underestimated, this activity is instead essential to ensure the authority of a page.
How does link building work? Google detects internal backlinks and those from other websites, assigning a higher score to pages with many links, especially if they come from websites considered authoritative in the relevant sector. A backlink is considered as a reference: if an authoritative site inserts a link to my page, it means that it has positively evaluated my work.
To be more effective, a backlink must comply with a precise syntax. First of all, it must not have the nofollow attribute, which is what blocks Google’s spiders. The words on which the link is inserted must be related to the topic of my page and the same goes for the title of the link. In addition, it would be a good idea to place the link on a site that deals with a similar topic to that of the landing page.
Over the years, the importance of backlinks has grown, also generating unfair activity that is now detected thanks to implementations of the algorithm of search engines such as Google Penguin or Google Hummingbird that aim to offer the best user experience.
How to do link building the right way? If we want to use link building to improve our ranking on Google, we will have to make sure that we are linked to by authoritative websites, blogs and forums, remembering that only links without nofollow are detected by Google. Links should be relevant and voluntarily provided by the author who finds our content interesting.
How not to do link building? If we don’t want to be considered black hats by Google and penalized, let’s avoid unfair techniques. We don’t link our pages to link farms, we are wary of sites that sell links, and we don’t build circuits for the sole purpose of linking sites to each other. Sooner or later, Google will discover all the black hats. Getting out of a penalty is a long and complicated process: it’s better to do link building honestly.
