What’s The State Of Link Building For SEO In 2015 & Beyond?

The rules regarding link building are seemingly always changing, so columnist Jayson DeMers lays out thoughts about what's safe, what isn't, and how you can hedge your bets.

In a recent Google+ live hangout, Google’s webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, answered a common question: “Is link building in any way good?”
His answer was somewhat surprising.
“In general, I’d try to avoid that,” he said, indicating that link building, long believed to be an essential process in SEO, is no longer advisable.
Mueller elaborated on his answer, saying that Google does take links into consideration as part of its ranking algorithm, but that building links directly isn’t the right way to go about it. He stated that your goal should be to make sure your content “stands on its own” and easy for your users to share on their own blogs and websites.
He also downplayed the importance of links, insisting that the ranking algorithm takes many factors into consideration, and building links might ultimately do more harm than good for your site.

Links Doing More Harm Than Good?

The short version of Mueller’s response is only somewhat surprising. Google, as a whole, has long viewed link building as a form of soft link manipulation.
Google’s job is to find the most relevant pages on the web for a user query and rank them based on quality and authority. Any inorganically gained signals of quality/authority (including links) could interfere with the accuracy of those rankings. For Mueller to dismiss link building is in line with that position.
Google has addressed this via Google Penguin, an update to its ranking algorithm which discounts what it considers to be spammy or low-quality links. Acquiring too many links, or too many of the same kind of link, or links on irrelevant or low-quality sources, can all potentially lead to an algorithmic or manual penalty — so it’s no wonder why Mueller says that link building can do more harm than good!
However, the fact that link building can be dangerous doesn’t mean it always is. If you approach link building carefully, with an understanding of the factors that will lead you to success instead of penalty, you should be able to avoid any resulting unpleasantness.
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