Is Link Building Important? Google & Bing Talk About Link Building

Here’s what the two major search engines, Google and Bing have to say about Link Building   

Background: What is Link Popurality?  

   

From Google’s WebMaster Central, including..  

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.  

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages” (from Ranking topic)

…The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?  

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.  


From Bing’s Webmaster Center, including  

.. the accumulation of valuable, relevant, inbound links from authority sites to your site is a sure-fire way to improve your site’s ranking with search engines.  

if you want to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). The rank of two sites on the same topic offering equally good, original content will be differentiated in the SERPs by the inbound links they get externally, and to a lesser extent, the outbound links they make to external sites.  

Think of links as a de facto endorsement. When you link to a site, you are endorsing that site. A site that links to your site is endorsing you. These links implicitly state that, “I, webmaster of my site, believe the value of the content at the site I am linking to will be useful to my customers.” That’s optimally why sites link out to one another, which is a good thing.  

Relevance  

Frankly, when seeking an endorsement with an external, inbound link, the theme of the site you want to link to yours should be relevant to your site’s theme (or at least relevant to the theme of the page you want linked to). Same goes for those external sites you link to. Relevance is key to lending credibility to both your site and the other site, regardless whether it is an outbound or inbound link.  

Instead of you thinking like a webmaster who’s trying hard to manipulate your search engine rank, just for a moment, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Will they really benefit from clicking on that outbound link? Will they learn something new that is relevant to the current page they are on? To   

Quantity vs. quality  

Instead of making the mistake of focusing on quantity, you’ll be far more successful if you focus instead on quality. A small number of highly relevant, inbound links from sites with solid reputations can do more for you than a ton of junk links. Attempting to boost the quantity of inbound links by artificial means, such as link exchanges, is old-school thinking. That’s bad  

Relevance is the word today, and that helps distinguish the quality of links. If you run a local restaurant and you get an inbound link from a site that sells Internet marketing services, do you really believe that will influence potential customers to dine at your restaurant? Probably not. But what if you got a link from a well-respected foodie blog or restaurant review columnist? Now that will likely make a lot of folks sit up and take notice. That’s really good! Search engines understand this and take this into account in their rankings  

    

For More Info  

Link Building Basics: What is Link Popularity? 

Offsite and reciprocal linking effects on search engine marketing. What we recommend regarding outbound links from a web site (offsite links) and the related area of reciprocal linking.  

12 Steps to Building Incoming Links. In the WordTracker blog Ken McGaffin outlines 12 principles to follow to show quality web sites that you are worthy of their link.  

Best Practices for Article Marketing. Why submitting articles to article submission sites is of little value unless they are high quality, useful articles.  How to find quality article submission sites.How to build & use an online media list.(A two part article)  

More blogging tips – 25 Link Building Tactics to Improve Blog Search Ratings, Lee Odden.   

    


  

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