WHAT IS LINK BUILDING?
Link building can briefly be explained as the possession of back links from external websites to your own website or webpage. It is one of the proven as well as equally challenging SEO skill to have.
Even if you have just started SEO, one of the first SEO strategy you might have heard of is the gravity of building links. Although Link building is practically an unavoidable trend of every successful SEO strategy, but it does not actually mean that every link you build is equally significant or that the strategies to gain backlinks have the same effect every time.
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Link building began to dominate as a strategy in the late 90s, in the search engine market. Larry Page, the founder of the Google coined “Page Rank” to evaluate a page’s quality, which was directly proportional to the number of links pointing to the page.
Thereafter, Page Rank became the ranking signal and started being the ranking algorithm, as it determined the relevance of a page in its niche.
The practice of link building soon went awry as SEOs soon discovered how to manipulate Page Rank and search results for chosen keywords. It soon got contaminated with mass spamming, purchasing of links, online directory website submissions, building bad links, mass commenting on sites and using computerized link bait.
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As the practice became evident, Google started looking for ways to find websites that have been manipulating SERPs. Regular algorithm updates were released that specifically targeted at filtering out websites that didn’t deserve the attained (higher) rank. These algorithm updates enforced harsher penalties on website owners who sustained in the old, unethical means of link building.
The major Google algorithm update to penalize unethical link building or spamming link building was released on April 24, 2012, named Penguin.
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