What are the ethical guidelines for link building?

When another website links to your website, they are giving their stamp of approval to your content and your brand. If the site is established and seen an an authoritative brand, it will boost your websites authority as well.

The more links you acquire from outside sources, the more search engines will see your website as a valuable source of information, an authority in your industry, providing relevant information to search queries. Quality links boost search visibility by up to five hundred percent.

White Hat vs Black Hat Link Building Practices

Link building does play a vital role in your SEO success. With website owners trying to push themselves to the top of rankings, it's not uncommon for unethical marketing practices to be used in order to generate more links, but this can cause serious damage to your reputation in the long run.

Black hat techniques should be avoided at all costs. Before we deliver into the ethical (white hat) guidelines for link building, you need to know what you should be avoiding:

• Buying links – danger of buying spam links, which results in a penalty from Google
• Private blog networks – these groups agree to link to each other, this can result in a penalty, as they are often seen as spam
• Unnatural link profiles – Google does look for patterns when analysing your website for authenticity. Unnatural patterns signal unethical procedures

Ethical Guidelines for Link Building

There are some ethical (white hat) guidelines to follow to create a strong and powerful link building strategy to help you achieve results:

Target High Authority Websites

Your link building strategy should focus on generating links that come from high authority websites. Yes, all backlinks are beneficial, but those that come from high authority websites, have the most impact.

How do you do this? You can link to the high authority sites hoping they reciprocate with links back to your website, or you can ask if you can do a guest blog on their site.

Strategically Use NoFollow Links

NoFollow links are powerful tools. These are links to your site that Google does not include in your site authority. This helps you eliminate links that are low quality or are not beneficial to your strategy.

NoFollow links helps you avoid Google penalties. Social media links are often NoFollow, as they allow you to link often to your website, without impacting your brand authority.

Create High Quality and Shareable Content

The best way to acquire links from high authority websites is to create high quality content that is worth sharing. Consider publishing unique ideas, original research, and shareable snippets, making it more appealing for others to link to your content or cite your data.

Remember, when you publish high quality, relevant, and unique content, you don't only increase your chances of acquiring a link from an authoritative website, but you also increase your chances of improving your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Do You Want Quality Backlinks to Drive Consistent Traffic?

Backlinks are an important part of any successful SEO strategy. At Genie Crawl, we create value packed content, and we can help you with your back linking strategy, helping to drive consistent traffic to your website.