Link Building Strategies 2020: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
Backlinks are essential for websites to rank well and there are dozens of ways to get backlinks or inbound links for your website. Some ways are pretty easy as well as quick, while some are pretty challenging and time-consuming.
Different people have diverse perceptions about link building, and many are unsure what makes a backlink good or poor. Internet is stuffed with various reviews, suggestions, tips, and guides about link building, but hardly any of them tells which strategies are worth for your business. How are you going to distinguish between the good link building strategy, the bad, and the ugly one?
In this article, we are going to tell you what link building strategies are worth in 2020 and what tactics have gone useless. So without wasting any more time, let’s dive in…
Link Building Techniques: What’s New in 2020’s Guidelines?
Google and other popular search engines are regularly updating their search ranking factors, policies, rules, and algorithms to offer top-notch search experience to their users. In 2020, the search engines are working harder than ever to kick out the websites from its results that use poor or bad link building methods. Hence, every online marketer and search engine optimization professional need to learn what link building methods does Google love and what it hates in 2020.
Backlinks Building Strategies Explained
The Good Links
Good or high-quality backlinks are likely to be made naturally. You can also call it Organic link building methods. It might take lots of effort and time but are highly efficient, and Google loves these links. At the same time, your competitor may not be able to earn these organic links as it can’t be built with artificial methods. Even a single organic link is much more valuable than other planned links.
- Editorial Links
When a blog writer, contributor, or a journalist is so impressed by your brand, services, or products that it adds a link of your website into its article or website, it is called an editorial link. These links are referred to as natural links by search engines. However, these links are far than challenging for startups or small brands.
Popular and trustworthy worldwide brands and companies often get these links as people refer to their products and services on their websites frequently. For example, a tech blogger embeds a link of a particular electronic device from Amazon while explaining it.
- Guest Posting
It is also one of the organic ways of building links and ranks just beneath editorial links when it is done naturally. It is different from the above method because, in this method, you create content for other similar sites, and then they link to your site. However, Google is taking low-quality guest blogging seriously in 2020, and those who does it only for getting backlinks are likely to be targeted by Google Bots. Google does not love the guest blogs only intended for earning links as it loves the natural links, not the artificial ones.
To make Google consider your guest blogging practices genuine, make sure to do this only for reaching a larger audience and brand awareness instead of getting links. The people who only want backlinks via guest posting are likely to post average quality content and hyperlinking an irrelevant keyword frequently. Make sure to keep your hyperlinking in the guest post to feel more natural and meaningful rather than just stuffing your domain name in any random term.
- Niche Directories
Most people think that directories are useless these days. It might be true to some extent, but they are not at least 100% dead until now. We still have some high-quality niche directories that can provide excellent backlinks for your site.
So searching for several genuine directories that are relevant to your niche can power up your domain ranking surpassingly since it is a much faster and easier method to build links. We are not talking about the traditional web directories, but the business or companies, or niche particular networking teams, and other corporations that have their own Members Directory. Only choose those directories that include genuine evaluation process and post regular content.
The Bad Backlinks
These links are of the worst quality and can be earned in tons of volume with ease. You can create huge volumes with almost 0 % money and little effort when compared with other professional link building strategies. These links have to be avoided at all costs if you want your site to live long and run without penalties. Google strictly keep such sites away from its organic results as much as possible.
These links are those created in exchange for little money or do-follow links, blog commenting or forums, general directories, private blog networks, and other methods. These are one of the traditional ways of building backlinks and no longer exist.
The Ugly Backlinks
Backlinks that can be generated effortlessly without requiring much time and effort are the ugly links. You can easily create these links in massive numbers even with fewer human resources, but they hardly affect your search engine ranking.
Investing time for these types of links is almost fruitless, wastage of effort, and time. You can’t expect much return on investment from these poor links. Besides their 0-1% effect on organic SEO, they can even make your site filled with bad or low-quality traffic, and in the end, your site may be panelized from Google.
Articles submission directories, spin content guest posting, backlinks from irrelevant sites, header/footers, and sidebar links are some examples of the ugly link building techniques. Never implement such strategies in your business.
Conclusion
Never follow the link building strategies that seem easy and explosive when compared with genuine methods as they can sting you in a long race. These poor links may appear to be helpful at the beginning but can leave you helpless once Google will penalize or completely block your site from its search engine. Go for the quality links instead of quantity links. Ten high-quality or genuine links are way better than 1000 poor quality links.