In the SEO industry, both in Korea and abroad, the very concept of “backlink building” has been corrupted. These days, the moment you hear “a company that builds backlinks for you,” suspicion kicks in. So many of the firms doing backlink building deliver their service through spam — or spam sites — that caution is warranted.
Backlinks — Controversial and Troublesome. So What Are They, and What Is Backlink Building?
A backlink is simply a hyperlink from another website that points to your website. Search engine bots use these links to judge how well-known and trustworthy a given site is in the web world. In other words, the more links a site receives from famous sites, the more the engine judges it to be a trustworthy site.
So backlinks act as one factor in search engine optimization. When you earn plenty of meaningful backlinks, you can reap the following positive effects.
- Greater authority: when other sites link to yours, it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. Backlinks from high-quality sites, in particular, carry more weight.
- More traffic: backlinks give visitors on other websites a path to reach your site. Those incoming visitors can become potential customers.
- Search engine indexing: backlinks help search engines find and index your site. That is, the more backlinks you have, the more likely search engines are to discover your site.
- Higher page rank: search engines like Google use backlinks as an important factor in determining page rank. Good-quality backlinks can lead to a higher page rank.
But not all backlinks are equally beneficial. High-quality backlinks earned naturally are the most advantageous, while artificial or low-quality backlinks can actually harm your site. So when you consider backlink building in your SEO strategy, you must pay attention to the quality and relevance of the links.
The Importance of Backlink Quantity Is Steadily Declining
In the past, it was common that the more backlinks you had, the higher your search engine ranking. Today, however, the quality of backlinks has become more important than the quantity. In other words, backlinks from relevant, authoritative sites carry greater value.
Do Spam-Style Backlinks Mean Anything?
In the past they could carry some meaning, but not anymore. As search engines have grown smarter, they can filter out spam-style backlinks. They now favor backlinks generated naturally and organically. Artificially created links or backlinks that look like spam can actually have a negative impact on your search engine ranking.
The Bottom Line? Don’t Use Artificial Backlink-Building Tactics
So when you build your backlink strategy, it’s important to focus on producing high-quality content, building links naturally, and connecting with relevant sites.
Artificial backlink-building tactics may yield a temporary bump in traffic, but they’re likely to be meaningless in the long run. Such tactics are, in our judgment, not a marketing strategy that invests in the future.
