Google is really picky when it comes to building links to your site. Actually, Google doesn’t want you building links to your site.
Why? Well, because when you build links to your site, you are manipulating the algorithm and when you manipulate the results of their algorithm, then they have to tweak it to ignore any advantages that come from that type of manipulation so as to keep search query results natural and relevant.
This is very important. Really, it is. We all use search engines to find information on subjects that are very important in our lives, information that greatly affects the decisions that we make with regard to ourselves and our families. For this reason, the information we find really needs to be relevant and not spammy in nature.
Therefore, if we, as a civilization are going to keep our information highway free of debris and drivable we seriously need to think about exercising “link responsibility” and make sure that our SEO house is in order before it is “condemned” by algorithm engineers.
Doing so is really pretty easy and much more effective than webmasters generally realize.
First of all, lets take a second to talk about several link building methods that are currently heavily used that I believe are soon to lose their relevance and ability to give you a good SERP ranking.
Profile Links. These have been wildly popular for some time now and there are countless websites that cater to webmasters in the form of building them an “about” page pointing to their website.
Many webmasters have claimed to get pretty decent results from this methodology, but I ask myself: “Does this add value to the web?” If my opinion is no, then I stay away from it as a link building technique. Why? Simply because of the fact that easy to get links that do not add value to the web will ultimately be abused as a source leading to their manual algorithmic devaluing and an ultimate drop in the SERPs. While profile linking may work now, it’s time is limited.
Automated Blog Comments. These are to be avoided for so many obvious reasons. You wouldn’t think that this would have to be said, but it still does.
First of all it leaves an annoyingly obvious footprint for both search engines and spam services to see. In many cases the IP address of the offending link planter gets banned, never to return. Additionally, your IP quickly receives the reputation of a valueless spammer who provides no real reason to visit your site.
There are other link building techniques to be avoided, actually too many to mention here which we will not elaborate on because the title of this article is actually: “How To Build Links That Google Actually Likes”.
There is one way that I have consistently found to be quit relevant in terms of building mysteriously valuable links in terms of SEO and that is through “value included article marketing”, meaning the syndication of non-self-serving, helpful, informative, enlightening, resourceful articles to article directories with a link pointing back to the original on my site using the keyword rich URL as the anchor text.
This is a technique actually encouraged by Google itself when syndication is part of an SEO plan.
Personally, I have found that it works quite well IF you are planning for the long haul. When search engines observe you providing consistent long term value that is easily measured across a large variety of websites, the bottom line will be that they will like you and promote you as a resource yourself.