My Gosh, Link Building is Dead!

Sep 7, 2007 Michael Brito

Well, no it’s not but I made you click! So, I have several readers (not like thousands or anywhere close to that) that are somewhat new to SEO and to this notion of building links to a site in an effort to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Now, regardless of what some of the prominent SEO firms say, it’s really not that hard to do.

From my experience of working mostly as an in-house SEO and several consulting gigs throughout the years, targeted links should be the primary focus. In other words, you will get more bang for your buck if you can gain inbound links from content relevant sites. Now, I am not going to bore you like every other SEO blog with all the ways you can get links (i.e. DMOZ, article syndication etc.). However, what I have found is that just by using social media properties and participating in user-generated content, you will undoubtedly increase your chances to gain natural links.

For example, I am a frequent user of sites like mybloglog, twitter, newsvine (they also have the functionality of posting articles) and just recently shoutwire. I have developed several relationships with various community members and guess what…they also own/operate similar sites and/or blogs. Often times, I will find that they will link to a specific post on my blog or add me to their blog roll. And I usually reciprocate. Additionally, if you are making valuable contributions to the community, your content will appear in front of many eyeballs which will obviously drive traffic to your site; and increase the potential for links.

It’s not only about asking or even paying for someone to link to you. It’s about participation; which I believe is a fundamental characteristic of social media.

Technorati Tags: social media, link building, seo, in-house SEO


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  • I just visited NewsVine for the first time last night and I was wondering if you might have any idea how long it tends to take to get into the community proper and out of the sandbox community before I take the plunge.
  • Jason Yee
    regardless of what all the popular SEOs say...link building will never die. It's the methods that will change.
  • I agree Jason,

    there just simply isn't a metric that could supplant links as a means of evaluating a site's importance and relevance. It's a vote from a source external to your website and therefore (dspite all its obvious flaws), is the best means of gathering information on how to catalogue a site from independant sources. Link building, link farming, blogging and other strategies used obviously skew the metric, but search engines will no doubt change the way they deal with them, as they already are doing in some instances, and SEOs will change their strategies.
  • Yeah, link building will always be the way to tell a good site from a not so good site. If it's a horrible site, good ones won't link to it...it's that simple.
  • My thoughts exactly! There is no denying that the myriad of social networking sites available today are a must for any online entrepreneur looking to drive traffic and effectively promote their product or service.
    Thanks for the post.

    Kind regards,

    Buddy
  • Link exchange got into black days when people started to use very rude strategy: surf the net, find contact forms on the sites of potential link partners and send via these contact forms spam messages "I am webmaster... sites are relevant... let's swap links - it will help us both." These beggy emails terrorize all site owners and junk a very good idea of exchanging links.
  • If you want the ranking you've go to build the links...