Truth About Link Building in 2014 & Beyond

Another episode of the Click Intelligence notebook with James Owen. In this episode James talks about the types of link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. techniques you should be using in 2014 and beyond.

Unsure how to implement some of the link building and brand promotion techniques James Owen is talking about? Why not drop him a email for a free consultation to discuss broken link building, infographic production/seeding and content marketing campaigns.

Reading In between the lines: Matt Cutts: “Stick A Fork In It, Guest Blogging Is Done”

So Matt Cutts Has come out again yesterday and attacked “Guest Blogging” as a link building technique. Over the past few months Matt Cutts has suggested that relying on guest blogging as the only form of link building isn’t the way to go.

Matt Cutts begins his post with a clear message “Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.
Matt Cutts then went on to share an example of a low quality guest blog solicitation he received that would violate Google’s quality guidelines, Cutts says guest blogging is dead as a link building tactic.

Postscript: In response to a couple hundred comments on his post, and perhaps to the discussion on social media, Cutts has added some extra information clarifying the intent of his post. He says he’s not referring to “high-quality multi-author blogs” and that he added “for SEO” to the title of his post:

“There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.”

Okay so if you read between the lines here Matt Cutts is referring to blogs that have been solely built for “SEO” Vs blogs that have been built by a user who cares about a subject.

So the conclusion is that low quality guest blogging from sites that have been built just for SEO is now not a good way of building links. However, if you have great content to share with users the tactic of high quality manual outreach is still a good link building technique “These are blogs with real users and social audience”. Furthermore, quality over quantity is the key to success.

That being said using only one link building technique to increase authority and creditability of your website isn’t the way to go. A clean, safe and national backlink profile has many diverse links using different link building techniques, for example brand citationsA citation is a mention of your company, product, or service in an online publication. Citations increase the ranking of your site on search engines, broken link building, reviews, infographics and resourceful content marketing to name a few.