Linkbuilding – What is Linkbuilding?

These are the  actions carried out in order to obtain external links that point to our website.
Hyperlinks guide users from one web page to another, and search engine search engines also use them when browsing them and adding them to their search indexes.
External links to a website, with adequate anchor text, are a very important factor for  SEO  but, if done with practices considered inappropriate by search engine algorithms, it can lead to penalties in the positioning of a web page in the search engine algorithms.  search result pages or SERPs.

What is Linkjuice or “link juice”

 

Links serve search engines to discover new pages, but through them there is also a transfer of page authority, through which algorithms consider whether a page is relevant in a search with a specific keyword . Linkjuice also occurs within the same website, so an internal link strategy is key to transmit authority   

“Follow” and “nofollow” links

To prevent a transfer of authority from occurring through a link, it must carry the “nofollow” tag, which tells search engines that they should ignore that link.
According to Google, all unnatural (i.e. purchased) links should be labeled as “nofollow”.

Link building strategies

Some of the most popular strategies to get links are the following:

  • Linkable content:  Generating interesting and easily linkable content is one of the best ways to get links: ebooks, infographics, courses, etc. that provide added value to whoever links it.

  • Guest Posting:  Having guest authors on your blog, in exchange for being able to write a post on theirs, with a subsequent link or links, is another very popular strategy to obtain them.

  • Viral content: Generating content that achieves great popularity in a short time ensures a large number of links.

Good link building practices

Link building is an important factor for SEO, but it must be done following the recommendations of search engines and taking into account the possible penalties that may be suffered if search engines detect links obtained with illegal practices. External links should follow the following guidelines:

  • Organic growth:  The number of incoming links to our website must follow a constant and natural growth, since a very striking increase in external links can attract the attention of the algorithms and suffer a penalty from the search engines.

  • Domain diversity:  Receiving many links from the same domain may not be a good idea, and it is better for our external links to be spread across several different domains.

Bad link building practices

The following practices should be avoided when trying to get external links:

  • Purchased links:  According to Google, you cannot buy a link either in exchange for money or other things, and if it is an advertising link it should carry the “nofollow” label so as not to transfer authority.

  • Low-quality links:  A link that comes from a suspicious, penalized site or link farms can do more harm than good to the popularity of our website, so they should be avoided and, ultimately, disabled by using the “ disabow” in Search Console.

  • Site Wide Links:  Links located in the footer or sidebar of a site that are repeated on all its pages are also not a good idea and can lead our website to suffer a penalty in the search results.

What is Google Penguin?

Google Penguin is an update to Google’s search algorithm released on April 24, 2012, with the aim of avoiding spam through unnatural or poor quality links. Unlike Panda, which is responsible for evaluating the content of websites, Penguin analyzes the external links that a site receives and assesses whether its popularity has been achieved organically or through bad practices, drastically reducing its positioning. Among other things, Penguin values ​​the variety and diversity of links, or social media signals.