How Link Building Has Changed Over Last Decade?

No matter how many changes have taken place in search engine optimization over last 10 years, one thing that has remained an essential part of the process is link building. Though there have been changes in link building, its importance, and techniques, this has always held the same importance in effective SEO.

There have been times when link building was considered useless and more of a black-hat activity, but the experts in SEO have proved it that if used properly, this is a beneficial strategy.

It was once nothing more than a spamming activity for link pyramids, content spinning, and other such gimmicks, but over the past decade, link building has evolved as a high-quality search engine optimization technique used by almost all the leading brands engaged in online marketing.

Let’s have a look at how it has changed over last 10 years.

Harsher Penalties

Link schemes were bad, but there were rare chances of these getting penalized.

Over years, Google has made a lot of efforts to put a check on link spamming by introducing harsher penalties. Now the websites relying on link schemes are more prone to getting dropped from SERPs than ever.

READ ALSO: Is Link Building Dead In 2015?

Crappy Links are No More Beneficial

Gone are the days when you could expect results by just posting non-contextual links on any forum, blog post, articles or any other community blog. Not just Google, today site owners are also very careful with the quality of links on their website as they know it can get them penalized.

Guest Blogs are Like the Treasure for Off-Site Link Building Strategies

Guest blogs have more value than just SEO rankings. With more focus on high-quality content, the companies are focusing on getting it published on guest blogs to widen their reach by offering value to the audience a guest blogger has.

At present, guest blogs are one of the best strategies for off-site link building techniques.

Content Standards have Increased

This is not a simple process to convince any guest blogger to post your content. You need to ensure them about the superior content quality. Due to increased competition and stringent Google algorithms, bloggers pay more attention to the quality of the content.

This is really hard to make relations with reputed guest bloggers and editors without exceptional content quality.

READ ALSO: 3 Reasons why Link Building is beneficial for businesses

It’s Difficult to Build Good Links

Though link building has got easier over the years, but making good quality links is still very tough. You cannot expect to get good links by just spreading quality content.

To get high-quality inbound links on your unique, informative and good content, you need a rich audience base and high-authority domain.

This is really difficult for the startups and small scale businesses due to limited resources and time. You may have to rely on some already established name like guest blogger to get an audience base.

It’s Not Just About Rankings

Undoubtedly the major objective of search engine optimization is to get higher rankings, link building is no more just done to achieve this goal. The primary objective can be rankings, but there are various other benefits also like brand visibility, author recognition and referral traffic.

In today’s time link building is more about offering value to the customers than attracting search engine for better rankings. Make sure you provide unique, high-quality and well-researched content on your own website as well as on guest blogs to get more visibility and inbound links.