The Pros and Cons of Link Building

Joshua Palau does a great job exposing the advantages of link building for search engine optimization in his article entitled, The Schizophrenia of Link Building.

I enjoyed his simplistic explanation of this common SEO practice...

"In order for a site to rank well for a topic or specific keyword, it needs to have quality links pointing to it from other quality sites, preferably using the targeted keyword in the link. The concept is very much at the center of how Google ranks pages and finds grounding in the educational principle of authoritative references.

If an author publishes a book on quantum physics and cites several other physics books, people in the field will likely believe the cited books are experts on the subject matter and worth reading. This concept was transferred to the web and evolved further as social media exploded.

I'm a TV junkie. So when asked about the latest celebrity dalliance, my opinion may count for more than someone else's who can't tell the difference between Mary-Kate and Ashley. This idea holds sway in the world of link building as well. If I told you that The Superficial is a great site for celebrity gossip you would trust that site because it came from me.

For a time, all was good in the kingdom of search as the world of link karma worked in a very "wiki" way. Sites that had content about Caribbean vacations would link to Starwood's Caribbean hotels because it was in the best interest of their users. Links were swapped, given away and even paid for because there was no harm. For the most part, users got links to good partners and sites received a boost in Google.

Then, the concepts behind link development spawned several search result jokes like Miserable Failure, French Military Victories and others.

It stands to reason that as the Google team got wise to such Googlebombing, it recognized how easily the company could be manipulated through the use of links. People could buy enough links to gain high rankings as long as their site was somewhat on topic. The ripple effect on Google would be significant because the quality of its results would go down; users would visit less, and there would be less clicks on those paid listings."