2013…The Year of Link Building Changes

Link building is getting more difficult each year.  We have been known to even rename the process, link in ways as safe as possible, find new ways that may be better than previously used, often struggle to adapt to changes, but what continues is, link building.

Clients are continuously demanding me to provide link building services, but I personally feel that there have been any changes or new methods in 2013. As far as I know link building is here to stay.

This is what I have noticed through out the years in changes to link building.

The Condensed Version of Google Updates

A few unconfirmed or non-animal-named updates that were released throughout the year.

• A phantom update  seen  in early May led  many sites to lose a large part of traffic
• Another one is domain crowding update, also in May, sought to assuage the trouble of having manifold results from the identical sites for a inquiry
• A payday loan update came in June, sought to curb spam in niches for instance loans and porn.
• Those that affected building links, our big fear would be the Penguin

Topics that were of major importance in link building in 2013, that were discussed throughout the year are: 

1. Disavowing The Links

Ought to disavow? Are you supposed to  worry trying to clean up or just disavow links? Would this disavowing links hurt you? Would it draw consideration to something and you’d remain keep quiet? Will you  disavow links if you haven’t been punished or misplaced any traffic and rankings?

2. Reconsideration Requests

You should know when you should do that, what should be done before doing it? Would that lead to unwanted inspection on your website if you got something to hide and really did not require to be doing that?

3. Clean Up Your Links

Do you think it’s the time to just disavow the link? Are you putting your efforts in the right direction? Is it right to pay a web master to eliminate a link? Is there anything that is harming your site by constantly building bad links on it and if it is so, what should be done in terms of clean up?

Here Is Some Industry Changes I’ve Seen This Year:

People are more concerned in building relationships rather than building links. This concept came into the limelight in 2013. Many of the link developers stopped naming them as link builders, but became outreach specialists, relationship managers, content creators, or anything that has not to do with link builders. The question is did they restrict doing things that resulted in building links? I doubt about that.  People were pretending to hide their actual goal and started talking about how building link should not be a goal, but what was found is, it remained a goal.

• Few webmasters got afraid to link out. Stories of unfair punished websites were flooded everywhere and so many of the webmasters sought to either unfollow all outbound links or not to link at all.

What I have observed is, the game is still the same even if it has become harder. People are still creating spammy links and work is still going on in some cases. With the help of few links you can improve rankings of your site and move it up.

What is gained from a link building agency is that, clients still demand for links. They are keen in buying them, they are still indulging in very risky strategies despite of knowing the chances of getting caught red handed. Just like webmasters, link builders can prove to be very quick witted.

This post was written by:

Mattan Danino

CEO – WebitMD Inc.

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