Link Building – Dead or Alive?

Link building was an ever-loved source of income for SEO companies, but times have changed. Not that the construction of external backlinks is avoided, but it takes more time and effort now. And that is exactly the intention after the Google update Penguin.

Link building prey for trade

The keyword within the current link building is ‘natural backlinks.’ Opposite of ‘natural’ is ‘unnatural,’ and that calls for a brief historical overview.

It has always been the driving force of Google to quickly give the useful results of what is being asked for. These results become better if users express their appreciation for other websites by placing a link on their own website. In short: good content with good links. A wonderful idea and the link building phenomenon was born.

As with any beautiful phenomenon, this idea called “greediness in people”. Obtaining links to your own website could, for example, be obtained through link exchange or via paid placement. Consequences were websites with a separate page links (the older readers are digging in memory for now) and providers of 1000 links for demolition prices. The big problem was that people lost control over where their own website ended up.

Google mainly wanted to deal with link exchange, but that was not so simple.

Intermediate solution seemed to be ‘3 Way Linking’: A links to B, B links to C and C links back to A. But here too the lack of control broke up because A does not know anything about C before C links A, and if Once there is a link, Google also reads it.

Link building through content

We are now at Penguin 4.0.
One of the characteristics of Penguin is that Google can focus more on the pages themselves than on the entire website. This is good news. It requires the importance of internal links and therefore also better, relevant content. Fortunately, we all already have that (!).

If you include a link to other great content in that excellent content, Google values ​​it. Good websites get links to other good websites. Under a link, there is a bunch of good websites, and that increases the value (link juice).

This is link building in a natural way: good content with good links.

The own package on the left

It is a nice feeling when you see how many backlinks there are to your own website.
This can be done in many ways, free of charge and paid. For example, asking Google a link:loreleiweb.com is very funny, but 500,000 results is not a realistic representation. SEOkicks Backlink Checker is doing better, and there are a lot of counters. Seek, and you will find quickly.

What is Penguin doing now with those already existing links?

That is sometimes just swallowed, especially if those links have come about through the mentioned link exchange operation. This shows how important control over your own external backlinks is. Google luckily provides a tool with which inbound links can be removed.

Link building in WordPress

Of course, we want to know how that is with link building via WordPress plugins. If we ask ‘link building’ and ‘backlinks’ to WordPress.org, then the revenue is diverse. There are plugins for:

• link internally
• check for inbound links
• delete existing links
• linking in blogs

Regarding plugins for external linking, some are still under development.
An existing one is the British plugin Link to us. Their advertising cry is’ Need SEO Backlinks? Let your visitors link back to your site with this simple but effective widget. ‘ Here we give away the control again, and that is exactly what we do not want. Above the description of the plugin, however, “This plugin has not been updated for more than two years .”

Apparently, linking to us is not up to Penguin 4.0.