9 Absolute Link Building Facts!

Link building is a vast topic. A newbie can be easily overwhelmed at how deep the topic of link building can go. But to simplify a lot of theory out there, I have compiled a list of 10 important facts about link building. This list will make sure that you at least get the basics straight:

1. No two links are equal: Every link is different. The power of a link depends on the source page PR, the number of inbound and outbound links on the source page, relevancy and thousands of other factors. There is virtually no way you can gauge the exact power of a link.

2. A link from a trusted website is always more useful: Links from higher PR websites are difficult to get, and for a good reason: They are more useful in ranking high. A low PR link is nowhere close to being as important as a high PR link. If you get a couple of links from PR 6-9 pages, you can easily dominate your competition.

3. Most links are not natural links: Even though everyone talks about putting up natural links, the links put up by SEO companies and self-promoters are not natural. They are put up for a purpose. A natural link is one where the other person links to your content voluntarily without any incentive. Clearly, over 95% of the links out there are not natural.

4. A NoFollow link is worthless from an SEO perspective: Links come with either a DoFollow tag or a NoFollow tag. If you have the latter attached to an inbound link, you can be confident that the link is worthless. NoFollow tags make sure that the link juice & PR do not flow to your website.

5. Links are the lifeblood of the web: Without links, there will be no way to gauge which website is more important and which one is crap. Links are used as votes by the search engines to assign importance to websites.

5. More links are not usually better: Search engines are now more reliant on link quality rather than not quantity. You can easily compete with other websites on the basis of link quality. I have seen websites with only 200 links ranking higher than websites with 2000 links, because they had good quality incoming links.

7. Links from article directories are not that useful: Article directories are normally overloaded with spam, duplicate content and links. For this reason, you need to get to get tons of article directory links to get a good amount of link juice flowing to your website.

8. Link building software can get you into trouble: There are many link building software out there which totally automate the process of building links. The problem with the software is that they are not that effective and might even get you penalized. Another disadvantage is that the software lures the user to build up too many links in a very short period of time, which raises red flags in the search engines.

9. Links are here to stay: There is virtually no other method to gauge a website`s importance other than using links as the ranking factor. Links are here to stay. Although SEO might change in the future, it is very difficult to see the web without links.