The Lost Art of Link-Building
The world of SEO was rocked last month as what many are calling the ‘Farmer Update’ was rolled out. This alteration to Google’s algorithm allegedly came about after a growing disillusionment with SERPs which were increasingly displaying irrelevant results. This is likely to but the result of SEO engineers ‘gaming’ the system by inserting non-semantic links into spam content. Irrelevancy was not the only emerging feature of the Google SERPs, there has been a marked deterioration in the quality of content ranking high in the results.
Google , wanting to retain it’s already strong but potentially threatened position as the byword for search, changed the way it ranked content, with the first effects being felt on the 8th of February. This meant that optimizers who had taken short cuts in the past, namely content farms like Ezine to ‘mass produce’ links were hit hard, with many seeing drastic drops in positions. These farms host low quality, hollow content often stuffed with links, much of which is little use to anyone.
This is why I think the art of link building has been lost. Although the internet was relatively crude ten years ago, in the web 1.0 era, content, on the whole, didn’t have an ulterior motive. It was eagerly informative, sincere, perhaps not always compelling, but at least not stuffed with irrelevant links and shamelessly self serving. The rise of internet marketing has irrevocably changed the landscape of the internet however, tarnishing the web with promotions and useless, ugly content.
The Famer update will change all this however, SEO engineers will no longer be able to get away with spewing out reams of trashy content, instead they will need to revert to a more holistic, traditional way of building links, using quality sites to host ‘real’ content. This means that illiterate techies will no longer be able to game the system with poorly written grammatically incorrect copy, which can only be a good thing for the internet and humanity as a whole.
So where do we go from here? The simple fact is that Internet Marketers will have to focus on quality instead of quantity. No longer will ‘bang for buck’ take precedence over great, engaging content, no longer will programmers and web designers be able to get away with outsourcing content production to cheap agencies who churn our drivel. The lost art of link-building needs to be rediscovered.
Joe is a blogger and link building working for a company that make and sell wine glasses and champagne flutes
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9 Responses to “The Lost Art of Link-Building”
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i hope you’re right. i work as a writer and take my craft seriously but its demotivating to know someone is being paid 10 times less and achieving similar rankings for junk content thats poorly written.
itll be tough for google to check for written quality algorithmically – lets hope that it works
I told people to don;t get so crazy over this..yes some got affected..but if you do what you have to do..then good things will continue to happen
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
I think it can only be a good thing, where is the benefit for the users of having 30versions of the same article. From a Google user point of view anything that helps you find the best info quicker has got to be good.
For me, it was never a lost art. While on some of my sites I was just as frustrated over Google’s inability to determine original quality content over those who scraped my articles, I never resorted to tactics that I know would be a temporary fix or algo dependent.
While some don’t have the patience to look at the long term benefits (or skill building) of writing quality original content on a consistent basis, for those who do — it does and will continue to pay off.
SEO is becoming more and more about actual marketing than optimizing, in the last 5 years too many manual link building techniques were invented and Google is little by little blocking all of them. Now it is all about branding and getting “real” backlinks, the downside is that most people now understand the value of links and are all looking for something in exchange even if you provided something great (unless you are recognized brand) and there is no such thing as a free lunch!
Totally agree with Samuel. To be honest I believe it’s a blessing for people trying to perform linkbuilding based on quality exchange instead of building fast links without depth. Nevertheless I wonder how Google incorporates that in it’s algorithm.
The SEO world is about adaptation if you can’t adapt you need to find a new career.
I agree that it will take a lot more marketing than in previous days to help rank a site but again we’re going to need to adapt or get out of the way.
I completely agree! Link building is not as it used to be, should definitely be based on quality content.
Spamming is a very common occurance these days but unfortunately it will never go away
This step by Google was a nice one as it helps in quality link building. Some of the content we get to read are nothing but a big joke filled with a lot of links to other sites. It was high time this came to a stop and I appreciate what Google did.