Over the past 18 months, Google has been clamping down heavily on aggressive and low quality link building. This was specifically targeted by its Penguin update, which mainly focused on poor quality link building. Following the update, Google released the disavow tool, which was a very clever method of allowing people to send the search engine their bad links so they can identify link networks and adapt their algorithms.
Most notably this year, it publically dropped Interflora’s rankings, following heavy overuse of advertorials in its link building strategy. This was followed by two warnings regarding advertorials and the updating of link schemes.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Google has again updated its link scheme adding the following types of link building:
- Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links
- Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank
- Links with optimised anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.
Large Scale Guest Posts
It should come as no surprise that Google added this to its link schemes. Put simply, if you are guest blogging only with the intent to build links on a large scale and are not focusing on quality content, Google may take action against you.
Advertorials
Google has highlighted the use of advertorials as a link building method many times this year, stating links on advertorial sites need to be no-followed. The no-follow link indicates to Google that the link is paid for and should not pass PageRank. Google also states advertorial content should be disclosed to users with the term ‘advertisement’ or ‘sponsored’.
Optimised anchor text in press releases
Google has said “links with optimised anchor text in press releases or articles distributed on other sites” are un-natural and violate their guidelines. Google’s stance is that press releases are essentially advertisements and therefore links should be no-followed. There is however still great value in press releases, the goal should be to use quality content to advertise a new service or product. If written well, press/journalists will pick this content up and write about it on their own sites, linking to your site without the no-follow attribute, these are the types of links which are valued the most
MEC opinion
In the past, link building was all about getting links with optimised anchor text and SEO used to utilise all available channels to achieve this. However, Google over the past couple of years has been shutting as many doors as possible for link building, making it difficult for SEOs to manipulate their link profile and still look natural.
At MEC we firmly believe the best way to achieve high quality, natural and relevant links is to create great content. SEOs should be working closely with their brands and other marketing channels such as social, PR, and ATL to create a solid content plan aimed at boosting the authority of the brand, and influencing the reader.
These days SEOs need to broaden their range of skills utilising new areas such as consumer insight, client research and work together with their brands to create compelling, thought provoking, sharable content which is targeted to the consumer. These ideas may take time to research and develop but ultimately they will generate lots of higher quality links and be harder for your competitors to replicate.